Stalin

5 STALIN AT WAR

The 22 June 1941 surprise attack came with plenty of warning. The previous evening Moscow’s military leadership received a report: a sergeant in the German army had crossed the border with the news that an invasion would begin the following morning.¹ Stalin was immediately informed, and the military leaders and Politburo gathered in his office to decide how to respond. People’s Commissar for Defense Semen Timoshenko and Army Chief of Staff Georgy Zhukov, according to the latter’s memoirs, asked for a directive allowing them to bring troops to a state of combat readiness.² Stalin was doubtful: “Could it be that the German generals sent us this defector to provoke a clash?” After hearing out his military chiefs, he concluded, “It would be premature to issue such an order. The matter might still be resolved peacefully. We should issue a brief order indicating that an invasion could start with provocative actions by German units. To avoid complicating matters, forces in border districts should not give in to any provocations.”³ The order reached troops shortly after midnight.

Stalin and the Politburo continued to discuss the alarming news until they finally parted ways, exhausted, around three o’clock in the morning. It was not long before Zhukov telephoned Stalin to report that German troops had launched an invasion. After briefly trying to refuse the general’s demand that the vozhd be summoned to the phone, his chief bodyguard finally went to wake him:

After about three minutes, I. V. Stalin came to the phone.

I informed him of the situation and asked for permission to commence an armed response. I. V. Stalin was silent. All I heard was his heavy breathing.

“Did you understand what I said?”

Again silence.

“Will there be orders?” I persisted.⁴

Zhukov’s memoirs seem to suggest that Stalin withheld permission to respond to the attack and simply ordered Zhukov and Timoshenko to the Kremlin. But in 1956 Zhukov offered an important detail about this conversation that was never included in his memoirs. During the telephone call, he said, Stalin issued an order to the troops: “This is a provocation by the German military. Do not open fire to avoid unleashing wider action.”⁵ There is no reason to disbelieve this account.

According to Zhukov, he and Timoshenko arrived at Stalin’s office at 4:30 a.m. to find the Politburo already there. This timing contradicts the log of visitors to Stalin’s office, which states that Timoshenko and Zhukov’s first visit on 22 June occurred at 5:45.⁶ A simple explanation could be that the 4:30 meeting took place not in Stalin’s office but in his Kremlin apartment. In any event, after being updated by his military chiefs, Stalin again expressed doubts: “Couldn’t this just be a provocation by German generals? … Hitler surely doesn’t know about this.” He sent Molotov to meet with Germany’s ambassador, Friedrich von der Schulenburg.⁷ As Zhukov describes it, he and Timoshenko asked Stalin to order a counterstrike, but Stalin told them to wait until Molotov returned.

The idea that the attacks were a conspiracy by German generals and were unknown to Hitler fit perfectly with Stalin’s thinking. Further evidence that the Soviet leaders harbored serious illusions about Hitler can be found in Molotov’s behavior during his meeting with Schulenburg, which began at 5:30 that morning. Obeying instructions sent by his government, Schulenburg, clearly upset, read Molotov the following brief notification: “In view of the intolerable threat to Germany’s eastern border posed by the massive concentration and readying of all the armed forces of the Red Army, the German government feels compelled to take military countermeasures.” Molotov’s reaction suggests that he did not understand what was actually happening. He began to dispute that Soviet forces were concentrated along the border and concluded with the almost desperate question: “Why did Germany sign a non-aggression pact only to break it so easily?”⁸ He tried to convince Schulenburg that the USSR was innocent in this matter and that it was Germany that was being treacherous, although he must have understood that even if the German ambassador believed him, nothing could be done. Schulenberg was just the messenger.

This meeting took place right in the Kremlin, so by 5:45 Molotov was already back in Stalin’s office, along with Beria, Lev Mekhlis, Timoshenko, and Zhukov.⁹ As Zhukov describes it, upon hearing from Molotov that Germany had declared war, Stalin “silently dropped into his chair and became immersed in thought. A long and painful pause ensued.” Stalin agreed to issue a directive ordering the destruction of the invading enemy and added, “So long as our troops, with the exception of aviation, do not violate the German border anywhere for now.”¹⁰ This order was issued to the troops at 7:15 a.m., almost four hours after the invasion began.¹¹ It showed that the top leadership still did not understand what was happening. Stalin did not sign the order. It went out over the signatures of Timoshenko, Malenkov, and Zhukov.

In the hours that followed, Stalin conferred with his fellow leaders on several questions. Among the most pressing was how Soviet citizens would be informed that their country was at war. It was not just a matter of an official statement but of how the war was to be presented, what political slogans would be put into play, and what objectives were to be pursued. Stalin’s comrades felt strongly that he should be the one to speak to the country, but he refused. The job fell to Molotov. Of course Stalin understood the political drawbacks of this decision, but he simply did not know what to say. The situation was fraught with uncertainty. Molotov’s speech announced that the country was at war, emphasized that Germany was the aggressor, and expressed confidence that the Soviet Union would prevail. He ended with the words, “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.” Throughout this horrific war, these watchwords were emblazoned on posters and banners and repeated over the airwaves.

The archives contain a version of the speech written and edited in Molotov’s hand.¹² The speech he actually delivered was somewhat different from this initial draft and added references to Stalin. It started with the introductory statement, “The Soviet government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have asked me to make the following announcement.” A paragraph was added toward the end calling on the people to “rally their ranks” around the party, the government, and “our great leader Comrade Stalin.” These references to Stalin were undoubtedly designed to preclude any doubts and rumors that might have arisen from his silence.

Molotov’s speech exposes a central political concern worrying Stalin during the war’s early hours. The brief remarks repeatedly emphasized the idea that the German aggression was completely unprovoked and that the USSR had meticulously adhered to the non-aggression pact. As the speech put it, “The German government was not once given grounds for complaining to the USSR that it was not fulfilling the agreement.” Molotov emphasized that Germany “is the invading side” and even called the German fascists “traitors.” Implicit in this word choice is the idea that there was an understanding between the two countries that could be betrayed.

The English historian John Erickson has suggested that Molotov’s speech exposed a sense of unease and even humiliation on the part of the Soviet leadership.¹³ It was as if Molotov were taking the German explanation for the invasion at face value and defending the Soviet Union against charges of aggressive intent. Was this insistence on Soviet adherence to the pact intended for Hitler in the faint hope that the invasion had indeed been launched by rogue generals? Or was the idea of Soviet blamelessness meant to influence public opinion in the West, in whose eyes it was suddenly important to seem a victim, rather than a partner, of Nazism? Or was the speech meant purely for the domestic audience in an effort to fan indignation toward a treacherous enemy?

Five minutes after noon, Molotov left Stalin for twenty minutes, during which his voice was broadcast over the radio while Soviet officials streamed in and out of Stalin’s office. A general army mobilization was announced. The situation remained ambiguous. Stalin decided to send high-ranking emissaries to the front: Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, and Kulik.¹⁴ The use of plenipotentiaries to represent him remained Stalin’s preferred method of overseeing the war throughout its duration.

At 9:15 p.m., another directive went out to Soviet forces, again over the signatures of Timoshenko, Malenkov, and Zhukov.¹⁵ The results of the first day of fighting were sugarcoated. While recognizing that the German forces had achieved “minor successes” in a number of areas, the directive claimed that in most border sectors “attacks were repelled with heavy enemy casualties.” Having painted this optimistic picture, the directive went on to spell out the goal: deal a counterblow and destroy the enemy. In his memoirs, Zhukov noted his disapproval of the directive’s wording and his feeling that it did not reflect the true state of affairs.¹⁶

In truth, Stalin did not have accurate information about the first day of combat. Communication with frontline forces had broken down, and commanders at all levels were afraid to deliver bad news. Stalin himself had a hand in creating a distorted picture. On 23 June the first Red Army Main Command’s combat overview was published in newspapers. The vozhd labored over the wording of this summary himself. “After fierce battles,” the overview read, “the enemy was beaten back and suffered great losses.” Supposedly there were only two points at which the Germans were able to penetrate the border by 10–15 kilometers.¹⁷ In reality, the first day of fighting was catastrophic. According to official Soviet sources, on 22 June the Red Army lost 1,200 airplanes, many of which were destroyed while still sitting on airfields. German figures record more than 1,800 Soviet airplanes lost, of which approximately 1,500 were destroyed on the ground. In one day the Germans advanced 60–80 kilometers into the Baltic states, 40–60 kilometers into Belarus, and 10–20 kilometers into Ukraine.¹⁸

Despite lacking accurate information and his understandable desire to hope for the best, Stalin must have realized the seriousness of the situation. According to eyewitnesses, he was stunned by the outbreak of war. As Zhukov describes it, “During the first day he was not able to really take himself in hand and get a firm grip on events. The shock to I. V. Stalin caused by the enemy invasion was so strong that his voice even became softer and his instructions on organizing the military effort were not always appropriate to the situation.”¹⁹ Chadaev later recalled, “Early on the morning of 22 June I caught sight of Stalin in the corridor. He had arrived at work after a brief sleep. He looked tired, worn out, and sad. His pockmarked face was sunken. You could see he was depressed.”²⁰

Stalin’s indecisiveness during the war’s first hours and his refusal to make a radio address on 22 June clearly show that he was not himself. His indecisiveness continued the following day, when it came time to set up a command headquarters. He refused to formally take charge of General Command Headquarters, and Defense Commissar Timoshenko took over that responsibility. Officially, Stalin’s membership in the Command Headquarters was on a par with those of Molotov, Voroshilov, Semen Budenny,²¹ Zhukov, and Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov.²² A number of other Politburo members and military leaders were given the status of advisers to Command Headquarters.²³ This system was extremely inefficient. Though officially in charge of the war effort, Timoshenko in fact had little authority among his colleagues. According to Kuznetsov, the members of Command Headquarters and the top leaders “had no intention of subordinating themselves to the people’s commissar for defense. They demanded reports and information from him, and even made him account for his actions.”²⁴ Timoshenko was certainly not able to go over Stalin’s head. The chain of command became long and tangled, and the system whereby decisions were made and implemented was highly disorganized.

Stalin’s prewar strategy had failed. He had not managed to avoid war, and furthermore, it had gotten off to a worse start than anyone might have imagined. In addition to the military catastrophe, he had suffered a devastating blow to his self-esteem. Nobody could openly criticize him for his miscalculations, but he must have known that not only his colleagues in the leadership but also tens of millions of Soviet citizens were reproaching him in their thoughts.

 THE STATE DEFENSE COMMITTEE

Stalin’s actions during the war’s first days were frenetic, confused, and reactive. Even though he did not grasp the situation and was not qualified to manage armies, he tried to do something simply because it was impossible to do nothing. He tried desperately (and incompetently) to strike back at the Germans. Many, if not most, of these efforts only made matters worse.

Stalin clearly understood the dangers facing his country. There is convincing evidence that during the war’s very first days he tried to barter away Western portions of the USSR in exchange for a truce. Beria was assigned to arrange a meeting between his representative and the Bulgarian ambassador, whose country was allied with the Nazis. The Bulgarian ambassador was asked to determine what conditions might be acceptable for a peace with Berlin. What lands was Germany claiming?²⁵ Just how this initiative ended is unknown. Probably the Bulgarian ambassador was reluctant to act as an intermediary. But the attempt itself speaks volumes. Whether Stalin was truly prepared to give up Soviet lands or was just hoping to break the momentum of Germany’s offensive, he clearly felt less than confident about the Red Army’s defensive capabilities.

This negotiation attempt was not the only sign of Stalin’s pessimism. In parallel with a general mobilization and the preparation of new defensive lines in the interior, he ordered a massive evacuation campaign during the war’s earliest days. Not only were people and material resources moved away from the front line, but a secret evacuation of the capital got under way, even though the Germans were nowhere near. On 27 June the Politburo approved an order to urgently (within three days) remove from Moscow the government’s precious metal and gem reserves, the Soviet Diamond Fund, and valuables held in the Kremlin armory. On 28 June it was decided that currency held in Moscow’s Gosbank and Gosznak depositories should be immediately relocated, and on 29 June, that the commissariat apparats and other top government offices should be moved to the rear. On 2 July the Politburo resolved to move Lenin’s sarcophagus from his tomb in Red Square to Siberia, and on 5 July, to move government and Central Committee archives.²⁶

An official summoned to Stalin’s office on 26 June later recalled the following: “Stalin did not look his usual self. He didn’t just look tired. He had the appearance of someone who had endured a profoundly upsetting experience. Until I met with him, I had a feeling based on various pieces of circumstantial evidence that we were taking a heavy beating along the borders. Maybe defeat was looming. After I saw Stalin, I understood that the worst had already happened.”²⁷ The next few days brought no relief. Stalin was increasingly aware of the futility of his orders and how difficult it was to manage the army.

Just a week after the war began, alarming news reached Moscow about the grave situation along the Western Front and that Minsk, the capital of Belarus, had already fallen into enemy hands. Communication with the troops had largely broken down. A tense pause settled in at the Kremlin. On 29 June, for the first time since the war began, no meetings were scheduled in Stalin’s Kremlin office. According to Mikoyan, that evening Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, and he gathered at Stalin’s, probably at his Kremlin apartment or his dacha. Stalin telephoned Timoshenko, but the defense commissar did not seem to know anything.²⁸ The military leaders were not in control of the situation. Alarmed, Stalin, in violation of long-standing practice, proposed to the Politburo members that they all go to the defense commissariat.²⁹ Here, finding further confirmation that the catastrophe had become gigantic, he showered the generals with rebukes and accusations. Unable to withstand the tension, Zhukov, head of Command Headquarters, broke into tears and ran to a neighboring room. Molotov went to comfort him. This scene evidently had a sobering effect on Stalin. He understood that putting pressure on his military leadership would not help. According to Mikoyan, as he and Molotov were leaving the commissariat, Stalin said, “Lenin left us a great legacy. We, his heirs, have pissed it all away.”³⁰ Crude language was not unusual for Stalin, but in this case it revealed an extreme state of inner turmoil. After leaving the commissariat, Stalin apparently went to his dacha.

The following day, 30 June, Stalin did not show up at his Kremlin office or anywhere else in Moscow. Given the growing crisis, this withdrawal from his duties was truly reckless. The huge machine of government had been specially designed so that it could not run without him; inevitably, it started to break down. Something had to be done, and Molotov took the initiative. He was the most senior member of the informal hierarchy within the Politburo. According to various eyewitnesses, after losing track of Stalin, Molotov began calling him at the dacha.³¹ When he was unable to get a response—or, more likely, after bearing the brunt of Stalin’s dark mood—he concluded that Stalin was truly struggling. According to Mikoyan, Molotov said that “Stalin is so exhausted that he doesn’t care about anything; he’s lost all initiative and is in a bad way.”³² This account was indirectly confirmed many years later by Molotov himself in interviews conducted by the writer Feliks Chuev: “He didn’t show himself for two or three days; he was at the dacha. He was certainly suffering and a little depressed.”³³ Molotov’s memory seems to have failed him on certain details: Stalin did not seclude himself at the dacha for even two full days, let alone three, but given the catastrophic circumstances, even a brief absence by the country’s leader must have seemed an eternity.

Alarmed, Molotov called a meeting with Beria, Malenkov, and Voroshilov. There was no talk of officially removing Stalin from power or even taking over his duties. Instead the group tried to figure out how to lure Stalin out of his dacha and make him do his job. This was a delicate task. One simply did not show up at Stalin’s dacha without an invitation, and under the circumstances they could only imagine how he might react to an un-sanctioned visit. Furthermore, it would not be easy explaining their reason for coming to see him. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell Stalin that his breakdown was placing the entire country in jeopardy. But these men were not neophytes when it came to political maneuvering, and they devised a brilliant plan. They decided to go together (certainly nobody wanted to go alone!) and present Stalin with a proposal for creating a supreme authority to oversee the war effort: the State Defense Committee, to be headed by Stalin himself. In addition, the committee would include the four men who had come up with the plan. Molotov would serve as first deputy to the committee chairman.

The creation of the State Defense Committee solved multiple problems at once. Now Stalin’s fellow leaders could visit him at his dacha without implicitly reproaching him for not showing up at the Kremlin. That the committee would be headed by Stalin demonstrated his continued leadership and the Politburo’s firm support, while the fact that it was a small committee of his most faithful comrades allowed them to privately help him make decisions as he recovered his mental balance. Finally, the four men together interacting with Stalin at this delicate time helped protect each of them from the full force of Stalin’s outbursts.

Once Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov, and Beria had agreed on the idea of the committee, Mikoyan and Voznesensky were called to Molotov’s office. They were two members of the leadership group that the four men had decided not to include in the committee, but it was important that they also come to the dacha as a demonstration of unity.

Mikoyan left behind an account of what happened when the delegation arrived at Stalin’s dacha late in the day on 30 June. The vozhd was sitting in an easy chair in the small dining room. He looked at his unexpected visitors inquisitively and asked why they had come. As Mikoyan describes it, “He looked calm, but somehow strange.” After hearing Beria, the chosen spokesman for the delegation, present the proposal to create a State Defense Committee, Stalin raised only one objection: he wanted Mikoyan and Voznesensky included as well. Beria was ready with the argument against expanding the membership: someone had to lead the Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin relented.³⁴

Mikoyan’s memoirs were edited by his son Sergo, who took a number of liberties with his father’s original text, which is preserved in the archives.³⁵ In editing his father’s account of this incident, Sergo clearly tried to create the impression that Stalin was frightened by his comrades’ visit, inserting embellishments such as “Upon seeing us, he [Stalin] seemed to cower in his chair” and “I [Mikoyan] had no doubt: he had decided that we were there to arrest him.”³⁶

Was Stalin really frightened? How should we interpret this meeting? Unquestionably, it was an exceptional moment in the history of his dictatorship. However deferential their demeanor, Stalin’s associates had violated his supreme authority in at least five ways. (1) They had come unbidden to the dacha, (2) having worked out an enormously important initiative behind his back, and (3) they urged that their proposal be adopted in the form they had agreed on among themselves. (4) They had formalized Molotov’s role as second-in-command in the government despite the fact that he was out of favor with the vozhd, and (5) they had decided to exclude Voznesensky from the committee, even though just that May, when Stalin had taken over the chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars, he had chosen Voznesensky over Molotov to serve as his first deputy. In essence, Stalin’s closest colleagues were letting him know that in the face of an existential threat, the post-Terror leadership had to be consolidated and that he had better abandon any thought of further shake-ups at the top. This was a unique episode; in his time in power, Stalin saw nothing like it before or after. It signaled a temporary change in the nature of the dictatorship and the emergence of a wartime political compromise, a rebalancing of power within the Politburo somewhere between the flexibility Stalin had demonstrated in the early 1930s, when he was first consolidating his dictatorship, and the tyranny he was exercising when the war broke out. This arrangement endured almost until the war’s end.

The day after the meeting at the dacha, the establishment of the State Defense Committee was announced in newspapers. The fact that the committee’s membership was limited to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov, and Malenkov did not mean that the rest of the Politburo’s top leadership had lost its influence. Mikoyan and Voznesensky had important jobs keeping the economy running. Zhdanov was focused on the defense of Leningrad. Given the critical nature of wartime supply and evacuation, Kaganovich’s responsibilities as railway commissar were pivotal. In February 1942, Mikoyan, Voznesensky, and Kaganovich also joined the committee.³⁷

The establishment of the State Defense Committee was the first in a series of organizational changes that eventually placed supreme leadership in the Soviet war effort in Stalin’s hands. On 10 July General Command Headquarters, which had been headed by Defense Commissar Timoshenko, was replaced with a Supreme Command Headquarters, headed by Stalin. On 19 July the Politburo passed a resolution making Stalin people’s commissar for defense and, on 8 August, supreme commander.³⁸ The customary order was restored. Stalin was once again the sole leader of both the people and the army, decisive and confident of victory. An important milestone in “Stalin’s return” was his famous radio address on 3 July.

Whereas Molotov had gone to the Central Telegraph Building, next door to the Kremlin, to make his nationally broadcast speech of 22 June, Stalin demanded that radio facilities be set up in the Kremlin itself. The telegraph service’s already overwhelmed technical staff had no choice but to comply. Cables were extended to the Council of People’s Commissars building. Stalin read his address sitting at a little table with microphones and a bottle of Borzhomi mineral water.³⁹ From the very start it was clear that the address would not conform to his usual style. “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and navy! It is to you, my friends, that I speak!”⁴⁰ The speech, different from any other in his career, was long talked about and remembered. Glued to their radios or studying his words in the newspaper, people sought an answer to the most pressing questions: What did the future hold? When would the war be over? Stalin offered little cause for comfort. While greatly exaggerating German losses (“The enemy’s best divisions and the best units of its aviation have been smashed”), he was forced to acknowledge that “This is a matter of … the life and death of the Soviet state, the life and death of the peoples of the USSR.” Ominously, he called on the people to recognize “the full depth of danger that threatens our country,” to organize a partisan struggle in German-occupied territories, to create militia detachments, and to remove or destroy all material resources from territories under threat from the enemy. He used two difficult-to-translate words in characterizing the war: vsenarodny (of all the peoples) and otechestvenny (domestic or “of the fatherland,” but often translated as “patriotic” in the context of World War II). Anyone listening could draw only one conclusion: the war would be long and hard.

The people and especially the army deserved some explanation for what had gone wrong. They deserved scapegoats, and the search did not take long. The breakdown of Soviet defenses was attributed to missteps under the leadership of General Dmitry Pavlov, commander of the Western Front. He and many of his subordinates were tried and shot. The orders, signed by Stalin, were widely circulated within the army.⁴¹

 THE BLUNDERER IN CHIEF

According to Soviet General Staff statistics, between the start of the war and 1 January 1942, 4.5 million members of the Red Army and Navy were killed, wounded, or captured. Of this total, 2.3 million were listed as missing in action or taken prisoner.⁴² These estimates were probably low. Nevertheless, they show that much of the army that was thrust into battle on 22 June 1941, including a large number of newly formed units, was completely wiped out. The causes of this catastrophe need further study. Clearly they included insufficient war readiness, the massive casualties resulting from the enemy’s use of surprise, and the military and organizational advantages of the Wehrmacht. Despite countless examples of heroism and steadfastness, the Red Army was demoralized. Another important factor was incompetence on the part of the military and political leadership.

Lacking a firm grasp of the situation, Moscow was often too slow in its decision making, and many of its decisions were bad. The links in the chain of command, the General Staff especially, were not fully functional, and it took a long time to establish reliable communication with the forces in the field. “Even the Chinese and Persian armies,” Stalin scolded his subordinates, “understand the importance of communication when it comes to managing an army. Are we really worse than the Persians and the Chinese? How can you manage units without communications? … We can’t stand for this absurdity, this disgrace, any longer.”⁴³ During the early stages of the war, Stalin spent a great deal of time in a special room set up next to his Kremlin office conducting conferences via telegraph. This was a cumbersome means of communication, the main beneficiaries of which are the historians who today have access to tapes of the conversations. The army and the rear were largely managed using plenipotentiary “helpers.” These plenipotentiaries gathered information for Stalin and, with varying degrees of success, helped him deal with the never-ending bottlenecks plaguing transport, industry, and the overall war effort. This system, apparently unavoidable during this time of defeat and disorganization, was extremely inefficient.

Stalin, who had no experience commanding a modern army, did the best he could, relying largely on common sense rather than military science. On 27 August 1941 he sent the Leningrad leadership the following advice on organizing the city’s defenses: “Position a KV tank an average of every kilometer, in some places every 2 kilometers and in some every 500 meters, depending on the terrain. Behind these tanks or between them position other less powerful tanks and armored vehicles. Behind this line of tanks, in back of it, place heavier artillery. Infantry divisions will be immediately behind the tanks, using the tanks not only as a strike force, but also as a shield.”⁴⁴ To achieve this plan, Stalin was prepared to allocate 100–120 KV tanks, the newest and best heavy tanks in the Soviet arsenal, a mighty force in the right hands.

Stalin’s involvement in tactical actions, sometimes even at the platoon level, shows just how disorganized the military command was.⁴⁵ The first months of the war offered many painful lessons in the futility of uncoordinated counterattacks. Poorly planned, they often led to huge losses and achieved little. The Red Army’s leaders had scant knowledge of how to thwart an enemy advance or minimize casualties through the use of tactical retreats to positions prepared in advance. Stalin insisted on holding every inch of ground, no matter the cost. Retreat was not allowed until it was too late. The result was the encirclement of Soviet armies and their gradual destruction, one unit at a time.

Seeing battlefield failures left and right often heightened Stalin’s tendency to suspect treachery. Playing up to his suspicions, on 19 August 1941 Georgy Zhukov, then commanding the Reserve Front, sent Stalin the following report: “I believe that the enemy knows our entire defensive system very well, all the operational-strategic alignments of our forces, and knows what capabilities we have at hand. It seems that the enemy has its own people among our very senior officials with immediate knowledge of the overall situation.”⁴⁶ Ten days later, Stalin himself wrote to Molotov, who was then in Leningrad: “Does it seem to you that someone is intentionally paving the way for the Germans?”⁴⁷ This paranoia most likely had no serious consequences. Stalin, well aware of how dangerous it would be to start a witch hunt among Soviet generals in the midst of war, limited himself to accusations of cowardice. Few generals were arrested. More often they were deprived of their command or demoted and reassigned.

Intangibles such as patriotic readiness for self-sacrifice and determination to defend the motherland could partly compensate for a shortage of weaponry, battlefield experience, and tactical skill. Heroism and self-sacrifice by Soviet soldiers existed side by side with the demoralization brought on by the overwhelming force of the German assault, and Stalin received abundant evidence of both.⁴⁸ He believed in the importance of intangibles and attributed the failures of the Red Army to panic, the wholesale surrender of Soviet units, mass desertions, and the absence of a firm command. With shrinking faith in the army’s ability to consolidate its own ranks, when it came time to ensure that his commanders absorbed his own ideas about leadership and discipline, he resorted to tried-and-true methods. In July 1941 he resurrected the institution of the military commissar, loyal and eagle-eyed party representatives who would be assigned to work side by side with every commander at every level.⁴⁹ The commissars were given vast powers, to be exercised largely through “special” (secret police) departments within the army. According to official statistics, between the outbreak of war and 10 October 1941, 10,201 members of the Red Army were shot, 3,321 of them in front of their units.⁵⁰ Even these numbers hardly tell the full story of repression at and around the front lines.

To ensure that the troops fought as hard as they could, Stalin made it not only shameful but also illegal to be taken prisoner. The provisions making capture by the enemy a crime were contained in the notorious Order No. 270, issued by Supreme Command Headquarters on 16 August 1941. Judging by its style, the order was mostly (if not solely) written by Stalin. It required that those taken prisoner be killed “by any means, either from the ground or from the air.” The families of commanders who joined the ranks of “malicious deserters” were to be arrested. Families of soldiers who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner were deprived of their government pensions. The order was read out loud in every unit of the army.⁵¹ Treating capture as treasonous doomed former Soviet prisoners of war to discrimination long after the war concluded.

Using a combination of threats and promises of reinforcements, Stalin tried to instill in his military the will to be unyielding. On 11 July 1941, when the Germans had reached the outskirts of Kiev, Stalin sent Ukrainian party secretary Khrushchev a telegram that read: “I warn you that if you take even one step toward pulling your troops back to the left bank of the Dnieper and fail to defend the fortified districts on the right bank of the Dnieper, you will all face brutal retribution as cowards and deserters.”⁵² On 16 July he signed a State Defense Committee order to defend Smolensk to the last. Any thought of surrendering the city was “criminal, bordering on outright treason against the Motherland.”⁵³ Throughout the Battle of Smolensk, which lasted until September, the surrounded Red Army put up a dogged fight, delaying the German advance across the Central Front to Moscow. Hitler’s decision to move a sizable portion of his forces from the Central Front to Ukraine and Leningrad also helped slow the Nazi advance toward the capital. Throughout July and August Stalin continued to hope that Soviet forces would hold the line. Beyond it stood their three major capitals: Leningrad to the north, Moscow in the center, and Kiev to the south. Time was working against the Germans. Fall was coming, with its slushy roads, and the first frosts would not be far behind.

Demonstrating that the Red Army could put up a good fight was important for Stalin’s negotiations with his Western allies, Great Britain and the United States. Right after the German invasion, the leaders of these countries expressed full support for the Soviet people in their fight against the Nazis. Then began the complicated process of working out relations and holding talks about what form support would take. President Roosevelt sent his adviser, Harry Hopkins, to Moscow to obtain firsthand information. Stalin gave Hopkins an exceptionally warm welcome and tried to demonstrate decisiveness and confidence of victory. When their talks were interrupted by an air raid, the Soviet leader brought Hopkins in his own car to the bomb shelter at metro station Kirovskaia, where they were met by bodyguards and Internal Affairs Commissar Beria. One Soviet official left a description of the scene:

[Beria] took Stalin by the arm and tried to bring him down below, making some remark about danger. Stalin responded curtly and rudely, which is how he always spoke when he was irritated: “Get away from me, coward!” … Stalin stood in the middle of the dark courtyard and looked into the black sky at the German plane in the searchlight’s cross beams. Hopkins stood next to him, also watching. Then something happened that did not happen very often during night raids. The German Junker started to fall uncontrollably from the sky—it must have been hit. And just then the anti-aircraft artillery hit a second plane. Stalin said, and the interpreter told Hopkins:

“That’s what will happen to everyone who comes to us with a sword. And anyone who comes in the name of the good will be welcomed as a dear guest.”

He took the American by the arm and led him below.⁵⁴

In such demonstrations of steadfastness, together with the fierce fight put up by the Red Army, the Western allies saw something for which they were ardently hoping: Hitler’s blitzkrieg was being impeded. They could and should help the Russians. On 29 September through 1 October 1941, a conference of the three powers—the USSR, Great Britain, and the United States—was held in Moscow. Britain’s minister of supply, Lord Beaver-brook, led the British delegation, and Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the USSR, acted as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. On the Soviet side, negotiations were conducted by Stalin and Molotov. The Moscow Conference concluded with important specific agreements on assisting the Soviet war effort. The scope of assistance gradually grew. Western tanks and planes supplied through Lend-Lease made a significant contribution along the Soviet-German front. By war’s end, the Red Army was mostly driving American-made trucks. Lend-Lease also played a crucial role in supplying communications equipment, locomotives, railcars, and food to the Soviet Union. “If not for Lend-Lease, victory would have been greatly hindered,” Stalin told Roosevelt during their meeting in Crimea in February 1945.⁵⁵

The USSR’s new allies were clearly worried about the grim situation along the Soviet-German front. Not long before the Moscow Conference, disaster had struck the Southwestern Front, where a ferocious battle was being waged over Kiev. According to Zhukov, in late July he had informed Stalin of the difficult situation and proposed abandoning Kiev and focusing on fortifying the eastern bank of the Dnieper to prevent the Germans from breaking through the Southwestern Front’s right flank. Stalin responded with a gruff refusal, removed Zhukov as chief of the General Staff, and sent him to the Western Front.⁵⁶ The situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate. In early August the Sixth and Twelfth Armies—approximately 130,000 men—found themselves completely encircled by the Germans outside Uman.⁵⁷ On 8 August, after an advance by German troops, Stalin summoned the commander of the Southwestern Front, General Mikhail Kirponos, to confer with him via telegraph. He began the meeting in his usual manipulative manner, attributing to Kirponos intentions he had not openly expressed but that might be expected. “We have received information that the front has decided to surrender Kiev to the enemy with a light heart supposedly due to a shortage of units capable of holding Kiev. Is that true?” Kirponos assured Stalin: “You have been misinformed. The Front’s Military Council and I are taking every measure to prevent Kiev from surrendering under any circumstances.”⁵⁸ Stalin ordered him to stand firm and promised help in a few weeks.

It was obvious that the Soviet armies in the vicinity of Kiev were in danger of being encircled. In early September, the Southwestern Command, with the support of the General Staff in Moscow, proposed that forces be urgently pulled back. Stalin categorically refused. “Just the mention of the harsh necessity of relinquishing Kiev was enough to throw Stalin into a rage and cause him to momentarily lose his composure,” Aleksandr Vasilevsky wrote in his memoirs.⁵⁹ On 14–15 September, the Germans closed the ring, encircling some 452,700 Soviet troops east of Kiev,⁶⁰ the worst defeat of the war thus far. On 20 September, Kirponos and the rest of the Southwestern Command were killed in combat. The opportunity to surrender Kiev but preserve the army had been lost. The destruction of this huge force further strengthened the Germans’ strategic advantage.

Historians of every stripe, even those favorably disposed toward Stalin, place most of the blame for this catastrophe on his shoulders. Zhukov claims that Stalin implicitly acknowledged his own guilt. When putting Zhukov in charge of the Leningrad Front in September 1941, Stalin brought up the general’s warning about the threat to the Southwestern Front and said, “Your report to me back then was accurate, but I did not understand it quite correctly.”⁶¹

Defeat in Ukraine heightened the danger to Leningrad. By 8 September the city was completely surrounded. The following day the Germans launched a new offensive that took the front line to its doorstep. On 11 September Zhukov replaced Voroshilov as commander of the Leningrad Front.⁶² As Zhukov later told the writer Konstantin Simonov, Stalin considered the fall of Leningrad inevitable.⁶³ On 13 September the vozhd received the commissar of the navy, Nikolai Kuznetsov, in his Kremlin office, where they discussed scuttling the ships docked in Leningrad if the city was taken. That very day Stalin approved a plan to destroy the fleet.⁶⁴ Over the next two weeks, fighting in the Leningrad suburbs became particularly brutal. As the Germans fiercely battled toward the city, Soviet soldiers, in a show of mass heroism, fought tooth and nail to repel their attacks. By the end of September the advance came to a halt. The Leningrad Blockade, one of the most horrific chapters in World War II—and one of the most astounding testaments to the fortitude of the Soviet people—began. Over the course of the blockade, hundreds of thousands of civilians died of hunger or German shelling.

 INSIDE BESIEGED MOSCOW

Hitler’s hopes of taking Moscow before winter were revived by the destruction of a huge Soviet force in Ukraine, and he reassigned a sizable part of the German Army to the Moscow offensive. On 7 October most of the Red Army’s Western and Reserve Fronts were encircled in the vicinity of Vyazma, and on 9 October the Bryansk Front was also surrounded. The road to Moscow had been cleared. The fighter pilot Aleksandr Golovanov describes how he was summoned to Stalin’s office around this time. He found the vozhd alone, sitting silently in his chair with some untouched food before him.

I had never seen Stalin like this. The silence was oppressive.

“A great misfortune, a great sorrow has befallen us,” I finally heard Stalin’s quiet but distinct voice say. “The German has broken through our defenses outside Vyazma.…”

After a pause, either asking me or talking to himself, Stalin said just as quietly:

“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?! …”

He then raised his head and looked at me. Never before or after have I seen a human face express such horrible emotional anguish. We had met and spoken just two days before, but in those two days he had grown extremely haggard.⁶⁵

According to Zhukov, Stalin was suffering from influenza at the time, but staying in bed was not an option. He continued to work, overseeing defensive preparations and the redeployment of all possible reserves to the outskirts of Moscow. As part of this effort, Zhukov was called from the Leningrad Front and put in command of the defense of Moscow. On 8 October Stalin signed a State Defense Committee order to prepare to destroy 1,119 plants and factories in the city and oblast of Moscow.⁶⁶ On 14 October the Germans captured Rzhev and Kalinin. They were just kilometers from Moscow.

As Mikoyan described it, at nine in the morning on 15 October, members of the top Soviet leadership gathered (Mikoyan mentions Molotov, Malenkov, Voznesensky, Shcherbakov, and Kaganovich). Stalin informed the group that the Germans might soon breach Moscow’s defenses and proposed evacuating foreign diplomatic missions and government offices. According to Mikoyan, Stalin did not want Moscow to be surrendered, even if that meant fighting within the city until reserves capable of expelling the Germans arrived. He himself would remain in the capital as long as possible. At the conclusion of discussions, Stalin signed a State Defense Committee order dated 15 October,⁶⁷ stating that “Com. Stalin will be evacuated tomorrow or later, depending on the circumstances.”⁶⁸ Provisions were made. According to Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who was among a small group of General Staff members who remained with Stalin, planes were readied for a last-minute evacuation.⁶⁹

The decision to evacuate Moscow prompted a brief and frantic effort to destroy or pack up files, followed by a mass exodus, primarily by party and government officials, of which there was no shortage in the capital. Even after the evacuation, “utter chaos reigned” in the Central Committee building: “The locks on many desks and the desks themselves were forced open, and forms and every sort of correspondence were scattered all over the place, including classified papers.… Top secret documents that had been brought to the boiler room to be burned were left in piles, unburned.”⁷⁰ In the confusion, many officials abandoned the offices and enterprises with which they had been entrusted in order to save themselves, their families, and their property. A line of official vehicles snaked out of the city. There were many cases of theft of government property and valuables. According to official statistics, on 16 and 17 October more than a thousand of Moscow’s Communist Party members destroyed their membership documents.⁷¹ The flight of government and party officials in combination with rampant rumors provoked a general panic that grew into unrest. According to documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts, this unrest lasted for several days and fell into three main categories. First was the looting of stores and warehouses, especially those stocked with liquor, often accompanied by orgies of drunkenness. Second were attacks, often involving theft, on cars leaving Moscow filled with evacuees and their property. Third were spontaneous protests at factories and plants, including defense production facilities, by workers who had not been paid their promised wages and were upset by rumors that their places of employment were about to be destroyed. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, in many cases workers prevented the removal of equipment and demanded that the factories be cleared of the explosives that had been put in place to destroy them.⁷²

Most of the top leadership did not leave Moscow on 15 October, as initially planned, and on the following day Stalin summoned a number of his associates to his apartment. Aviation industry commissar Aleksei Shakhurin, who was the first to arrive, describes this meeting in his memoirs. The Kremlin, he writes, looked deserted. The anteroom into Stalin’s apartment was open, and he found the vozhd smoking and silently pacing the dining room. There were signs of evacuation preparations, such as empty bookshelves. Stalin was wearing his usual jacket and pants, which were tucked into boots whose creases were riddled with holes. Noticing Shakhurin’s surprise on seeing such boots, Stalin explained that his other footwear had already been removed. Soon Molotov, Malenkov, Shcherbakov, and the others arrived. Stalin did not invite anyone to sit down. Pacing back and forth he asked everyone who arrived the same question: “How are things in Moscow?” Shakhurin reported that at one factory not all the workers had received their pay, that the streetcars and metro were not running, that bakeries and other stores were closed, and that instances of looting had been observed. Stalin responded with the following orders: fly in money using airplanes and fix the situation with public transportation and stores. He tried to calm himself and his comrades: “Well, it’s not too bad. I thought it would be worse.”⁷³ Over the next few days the situation in Moscow really did stabilize, largely because the mass detention and arrest of “suspicious elements” began after a state of siege was declared on 20 October.⁷⁴

Stalin’s comment that he had expected worse disorder in Moscow is consistent with his way of thinking. He was undoubtedly worried about the possibility of disturbances. The danger that conflict with a foreign enemy could be used to start a civil war—a formula used by the Bolsheviks in 1917—greatly affected Stalin’s political decision making in the late 1930s. The catastrophic start of the war could only have revived such fears. Yet anti-government and defeatist tendencies did not reach a critical level in the Soviet rear, in large part because of the secret police system put in place before the war. After 22 June 1941 this system was not relaxed; it became, if anything, more ruthless. Nevertheless it would be wrong to attribute political stability solely to repression. A blend of patriotism, growing hatred of the Nazis, a sense of duty, and a tradition of subservience led people to unite in the name of victory. The few large-scale disturbances about which historians have learned more from recently opened archives were mainly caused by the government’s panicked actions and a sense of defenselessness on the part of the population.

While Moscow offers some of the most dramatic examples of unrest, there were others. One well-documented case is the disorder that broke out in Ivanovo Oblast, northeast of Moscow. As the Germans approached, plans were being made to evacuate local textile mills. Rumors spread that the mills would be blown up, that food supplies were being trucked out, and that party and government officials were fleeing the area. Textile workers, fearing that they would be left to starvation and slaughter, erupted in spontaneous uprisings on 18–20 October. They tried to prevent the removal of equipment and beat some plant managers and party activists. Cries could be heard from the crowds: “They’ll take our equipment and leave us without work”; “All the big shots have fled the city and we’ve been left on our own”; “Makes no difference to us if we work for Hitler or Stalin.”⁷⁵ A combination of persuasion and arrests eventually restored calm. Furthermore, the situation at the front was improving, and it was no longer necessary to evacuate Ivanovo’s textile plants.

By late October, Soviet troops had halted the enemy advance in the Central Direction. In addition to determined fighting by the Red Army, which suffered huge losses, the exhaustion of German troops and the mud and slush of autumn helped bog down the invasion. Urgent measures were now needed to prevent renewed Wehrmacht attacks on Moscow. Stalin was very involved in improving the capital’s defenses, forming new fighting units, and overseeing the production of military hardware, especially tanks and aircraft. In many cases he turned his Kremlin office into a sort of master control center for dealing with logistical questions and overseeing cooperation among enterprises.

He also remained personally involved in the minute planning of combat operations. As in previous months, he closely followed the situation at the front, demanded thorough accounts of operations, and issued detailed orders in a broad array of areas. He was clearly eager to go on the offensive, whether or not the time or resources were available, in the hope that unexpected attacks would put pressure on an enemy that had spread itself thin across a huge front. His commanders did not always agree. In November Zhukov, now commanding the Western Front, objected to one such plan. Stalin demanded that counterstrikes immediately be launched in the areas of Volokolamsk and Serpukhov to disrupt German preparations for offensive action. Zhukov tried to explain that he simply lacked the forces to prepare both a defense and an attack. Stalin brought the argument to a close: “Consider the question of a counterstrike to be settled. Submit your plan this evening.” He then immediately called a member of the Western Front’s military council, Bulganin, and threatened: “You and Zhukov have gotten pretty full of yourselves. But even you can be called to account!”⁷⁶ The hastily organized offensives achieved little. Zhukov, who was trying to maintain a reserve force capable of dealing with a new German offensive, was probably right.

Stalin was much more effective in the area of propaganda. Taking advantage of the relative tranquility at the front in early November, he ordered that the usual celebration be held to honor the anniversary of the October Revolution. He understood that carrying on with this annual event in the besieged capital would have a tremendous propaganda impact. On the eve of the anniversary, 6 November, a huge celebratory gathering was held at the Maiakovskaia metro station. A train parked at the station was set up with a cloakroom and tables of food for party and military leaders. Speeches in honor of the revolution’s anniversary were followed by a concert, but the centerpiece of the event was Stalin’s address to the country, only his second public appearance since the war had begun. Clearly he was expected to provide some sort of explanation for the German forces’ ability to take so much Soviet territory and to offer some idea of what lay ahead. When would the war end? This was the question on the mind of every Soviet citizen. The vozhd admitted that the danger hanging over the country “has not only not receded but has intensified.” Overall, however, he was optimistic. Citing huge (and fictitious) German casualty statistics, he pronounced that Germany’s human reserves “are already drying up,” while the Soviet Union’s reserves were “only now being fully deployed.”⁷⁷

The following day, the anniversary itself was marked with a military parade through Red Square. This was a risky undertaking since a few days earlier, on 29 October, German planes had dropped a large bomb right on the Kremlin. A total of 146 people were injured and 41 were killed.⁷⁸ The Luftwaffe could certainly strike again. In anticipation of this possibility, a parallel parade was held in Kuibyshev (today’s Samara), the city chosen as the reserve capital should Moscow fall. In case of an attack during the Moscow parade, radio coverage of the celebration would switch to Kuibyshev. No such attack took place.⁷⁹

Stalin addressed the parading troops with a short speech delivered from atop Lenin’s Mausoleum. He recalled the glorious victories of prerevolutionary commanders and of the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Speaking of the coming German defeat, he was so bold as to speculate on the timing: “In just a few months, just a half year, perhaps a year, Hitler’s Germany will collapse under the weight of its own crimes.”⁸⁰ This assurance seems to reflect his understanding of the military situation, and it soon led him to demand an offensive on all fronts.

The celebrations in Moscow—especially Stalin’s speeches—were part of a major propaganda campaign through every possible medium. The military parade on Red Square was captured on film, but for some reason Stalin’s speech was not. It was decided to stage the speech in an improvised studio. A mockup of Lenin’s tomb was built in one of the halls of the Great Kremlin Palace, and Stalin repeated his speech for the cameras on 15 November.⁸¹ In December, movie theaters began showing The Parade of Our Troops on Moscow’s Red Square on 7 November 1941, including the reenactment of Stalin’s speech. Over seven days, beginning December 4, two hundred thousand viewers watched the film in Moscow alone. Hundreds of copies were sent to towns across the country.⁸²

On the same day Stalin reenacted his speech for the cameras, after lengthy preparations the still overwhelming forces of the Wehrmacht launched a new attempt to take Moscow. The advance covered significant ground and in some areas managed to reach the boundaries of the Soviet capital. Nevertheless, the Red Army, bolstered by a constant stream of reinforcements, was able to prevail. Just when the Germans had used up their last reserves and had come to a halt, the Red Army, almost without pause, launched a surprise counteroffensive. By January 1942 the enemy had been driven back 100–250 kilometers from Moscow. Finally there was true cause for celebration.

 THE DEFEATS OF 1942

The offensive by Soviet troops outside Moscow, together with successes on other fronts, inspired hope throughout the entire anti-Nazi world but also exposed the Red Army’s weakness and the enduring advantage of the Wehrmacht. Soviet troops demonstrated a strong will to fight but could not achieve some important objectives the Soviet leadership placed before them. Meanwhile, the Germans dug in and prepared their own counteroffensive.

On 10 January 1942, Red Army units received a letter critiquing past operations and looking ahead to upcoming ones. The tone and style of the letter suggest that much of it was written by Stalin. It was generally critical of the way in which German defenses had been breached during the December counteroffensive. The widely dispersed actions by the Red Army, which was stretched thin along the entire front, were characterized as incorrect. “The offensive can achieve the necessary effect,” it read, “only if we create a force capable of overwhelming the enemy in one sector of the front.” A second major failing was the poor use of artillery. “We often throw the infantry into an offensive against the enemy’s defensive line without artillery, without any artillery support, and then complain that the infantry is not advancing against a well-defended and dug-in enemy.… This is an offense, not an offensive—an offense against the Motherland, against the troops forced to endure senseless casualties.”⁸³ The Supreme Command demanded regular artillery support for attacking units, not just during the preparatory stages of an offensive. Here too the main emphasis was on concentrating artillery where the thrust of the attack would be focused.

These were sensible and important observations on the perils of frontal attacks, which entail large casualties, and the need to concentrate forces and maneuver skillfully. But in planning the winter campaign of 1942, Stalin ignored his own warnings and insisted on attacking on all fronts at once. He wanted the swift, victorious conclusion to the war that he had promised during his 7 November 1941 address. This idea was also expressed in secret documents. Stalin’s basic assumption, apparently based on the intelligence reports he was receiving, was that Germany had used up its reserves. In his 6 November 1941 speech he claimed that the Germans had lost 4.5 million men during four months of war, and the subsequent reports he received tended to support these fantastic numbers. For example, German casualties as of 1 March 1942 were estimated at 6.5 million.⁸⁴ These figures, five or six times higher than the actual ones, were probably the result of the usual Soviet system of distortion, in which the vozhd was told what he wanted to hear.

The plan for the summer campaign, approved in March 1942, provided for a shift to strategic defense and a buildup of reserves for the next offensive. Stalin wound up issuing orders that conflicted with this decision and led to the staging of offensive operations in multiple sectors. “After reviewing the plan of action adopted for the summer of 1942, I must say that its weakest aspect is the decision to conduct defensive and offensive actions at the same time,” Marshal Vasilevsky wrote several decades later.⁸⁵ This opinion also prevails in scholarly literature on the subject.

During the summer of 1942, offensives were planned for Crimea, the Central Direction, and around Kharkov and Leningrad. Stalin was heavily involved in the planning of these operations. In matters of staffing, where he was, as usual, worried about selecting leaders capable of acting decisively, his personnel choices again reveal his shortcomings as supreme commander. He sent Lev Mekhlis, the head of the Red Army’s Main Political Directorate, to represent Moscow in Crimea. Mekhlis, who had served as Stalin’s secretary, was fanatically loyal to the vozhd, energetic, decisive, and ruthless, but he was completely ignorant of military science.

Voroshilov was assigned to the Volkhovsky Front, outside Leningrad, despite having been earlier dismissed from the Leningrad Front for incompetence. His special relationship with the vozhd allowed him to turn down this assignment, infuriating Stalin. On 1 April 1942 the Politburo adopted a decision, dictated by Stalin, subjecting Voroshilov to savage criticism. The disclosure of his reason for turning down this command was obviously meant to embarrass him. The former defense commissar was quoted as saying that “The Volkhovsky Front is a difficult front” and that he did not want to fail at the job. The Politburo resolved to “(1) Recognize that Com. Voroshilov did not prove himself in the work assigned him at the front. (2) Send Com. Voroshilov to perform military work away from the front lines.”⁸⁶ This was an empty gesture: Voroshilov was not banished from Stalin’s inner circle. Nevertheless, the resolution, which became known to a wide circle of top officials, may have been a warning to others.

The Southwestern Command was not a particular source of Stalin’s complaints. Aware of his inclinations, the front commander, Timoshenko, and military council member, Khrushchev, proposed an offensive to retake Kharkov. After confronting objections from the General Staff, Stalin decided to maneuver. He approved the Ukrainian operation but pronounced it an internal matter for the front’s commanders. This decision did not change anything, but it relieved Stalin of some responsibility for how it turned out.

The poorly conceived plans for the offensive led to more heavy losses and damaged the overall strategic situation. The first disturbing sign was defeat in Crimea. The German counteroffensive, launched on 8 May 1942, crushed Soviet troops in twelve days and sealed the fate of the Crimean city of Sevastopol, which had been under siege for eight months. Large-scale heroism was not enough to prevent catastrophe. The city fell in July after the Germans brought in significant forces from other fronts. According to the Sovnarkom’s chief of administration, Chadaev, Mekhlis tried to make his excuses to Stalin in person, waiting outside the vozhd’s office. Chadaev described what happened when Stalin appeared in the doorway: “Mekhlis jumped up from his seat: ‘Hello, Comrade Stalin! Permit me to report.’ Stalin paused for a moment, looked Mekhlis up and down, and with a voice filled with emotion pronounced: ‘Damn you!’ He then headed straight into his office and slammed the door. Mekhlis slowly lowered his arms to his sides and turned toward the window in distress.”⁸⁷

The following day, 4 June 1942, Stalin signed a Supreme Command directive to the military councils of all fronts and armies on the reasons for defeat in Crimea. The style of the directive, which pointed out that the Crimean forces had been crushed despite having a significant numerical advantage, suggested he had a hand in composing it. The commanders in Crimea, including Mekhlis, were accused of incompetence and inability, removed from their positions, and stripped of their rank.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, Mekhlis did not fall out of favor with Stalin and continued to be given important posts. Zhukov later speculated that Stalin was relatively lenient in punishing those who had directed the Crimean catastrophe “because he was aware of his own personal responsibility for it.”⁸⁹

The effort to retake the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov was also planned with Stalin’s full support. The attack began on 12 May and at first seemed to promise success. A few days in, however, everything changed. The Germans, who were thought to be focused on capturing Moscow, were in fact planning a decisive offensive in the south. Timoshenko’s poorly conceived plans for Kharkov only made their task easier. Despite warnings that the huge Soviet force now risked encirclement, Stalin refused to halt the attack on Kharkov in order to deal with this threat. By the time he decided to suspend the offensive, it was too late.⁹⁰ According to General Staff statistics, 277,000 Red Army troops were lost—killed, wounded, or captured—in the Second Battle of Kharkov.⁹¹ The Germans had again been handed a strategic advantage. Hitler’s forces were now able to move quickly toward the Caucasus and the Volga.

Stalin placed the blame for this defeat squarely at the feet of his commanders, although they were not castigated as harshly as those involved in the Crimean debacle.⁹² A few months later, on 24 September 1942, Georgy Malenkov, who had been sent to represent Headquarters at the Stalingrad Front (constituted primarily from the forces of the Southwestern Front), wrote to Stalin: “While we’re on the subject of Timoshenko.… Now that I’ve been able to see how he’s been working here, I can say that Timoshenko looks like a good-for-nothing, indifferent to the fate of the Soviet government and the fate of our motherland.”⁹³ Given Malenkov’s usual caution, we can assume that he was expressing an opinion with which he knew the vozhd would agree. As with Mekhlis, however, Stalin kept Timoshenko within his inner circle but used him for less critical assignments.

Accusing generals of mistakes and a lack of decisiveness was a leitmotif of Stalin’s directives throughout 1942. The generals themselves took a different view. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, for example, wrote in his memoirs that the defeats during the summer of 1942 stemmed from the fact that Headquarters kept repeating the mistakes of the early stages of the war. Commands from the top “did not correspond to the situation” and “only played into the hands of the enemy.” Instead of gradually pulling troops back to lines prepared in advance (in the summer of 1942, the River Don), Headquarters kept demanding counterattacks. Troops hurriedly moved toward the Germans “with no time to concentrate, on the fly, went into battle disorganized against an enemy that under these circumstances enjoyed a huge numerical and qualitative advantage.… This was all done in a manner that had nothing to do with the military science we were taught in the colleges and academies, during war games and maneuvers, and it went against all the experience we acquired during the two previous wars.”⁹⁴

Refusing to recognize any fault on the part of the Supreme Command, Stalin continued to attribute failure solely to the cowardice, treachery, or, at best, incompetence of his subordinates. The ultimate expression of this logic was the notorious Order No. 227, issued on 28 July 1942, just when the German advance in the south seemed unstoppable. Stalin, who undoubtedly wrote the order himself, was exceptionally harsh: “Panic-mongers and cowards must be exterminated on the spot.” Commanders “who retreat from battle positions without an order from above [are] traitors against the Motherland.” He demanded that commanders be put on trial, starting with army commanders who sanctioned unauthorized retreat. The order provided for the creation of penalty battalions and companies, the ranks of which would be filled by people arrested for violating the Stalinist code of conduct, to be used as cannon fodder at the start of attacks. Anti-retreat units became a regular part of the army and were tasked with “shooting on the spot panic-mongers and cowards in the case of panic and disorderly retreat by division units.”⁹⁵ These units were not disbanded until October 1944.

The fight against “panic-mongers,” “cowards,” and “saboteurs” was a centerpiece of Stalin’s military policy during the summer of 1942, and fear and panic were indeed a problem. Given the hardships of battle and the long string of defeats, troop morale was inevitably low. But as during the Terror, Stalin’s tendency to see saboteurs and wreckers as the root of all failures had no basis in reality. The mental state of Soviet soldiers in the face of the well-organized might of the German Army was just one of many threads in the tangled web of reasons for Red Army retreats. Often orders were disobeyed because they were poorly conceived or simply not realizable. Draconian measures at the front did not guarantee victory. A few weeks after Order No. 227 was issued, the Germans reached the outskirts of Stalingrad.

Beside cowardice and treason, another explanation for Soviet defeats that featured prominently in Stalin’s mind was that Hitler was not distracted by a second front in Western Europe. Within the top leadership, the Nazi leader’s ability to concentrate his forces on the Soviet front due to inaction by the Allies was a frequent source of anger and frustration. After heavy pressure from Stalin, during a visit by Molotov to Great Britain and the United States in May and June of 1942, Churchill and especially Roosevelt expressed their intention to open up a second front that autumn. These vague promises began to look increasingly chimerical as the situation worsened on all fronts. To soften the blow of his failure to open a European front, Churchill went to see Stalin in Moscow.⁹⁶ On 12 August 1942 the two men had their first face-to-face meeting. Stalin found himself in a weakened position due to the numerous defeats suffered by the Soviet side. Meanwhile, the Allies’ losses in North Africa and the Mediterranean gave them an excuse for delaying a French landing.

Stalin did not hide his irritation at Churchill’s explanation. The atmosphere during the first hours of negotiations was extremely tense. The Soviet leader, abandoning diplomacy, disparaged the Allies’ wavering and advised them not to fear the Germans. Churchill was just as blunt. He reminded Stalin that Great Britain had been battling the Nazis for a full year, an unmistakable reference to the fact that Britain was already at war with Hitler while Stalin was helping him carve up Poland. With these reproaches out of the way, the allies, who greatly needed one another, settled down to serious discussion. Having given a great deal of thought to his negotiation strategy, Churchill delivered his good news: a landing of American and British forces was planned for the northern coast of French Africa that fall. Stalin took this opportunity for conciliation. He praised the new plan, and subsequent talks went more smoothly. Stalin made the friendly gesture of inviting Churchill to his Kremlin apartment for his last night in Moscow, 15 August, where the evening passed convivially.

The conclusions to be drawn from Churchill’s visit were clear. The USSR would be able to count on its allies mostly for material assistance. Stalin told Churchill that his country particularly needed trucks and aluminum. For now, the Germans could continue fighting on the Eastern Front without worrying about a serious challenge from the West, and the Red Army would continue to suffer defeat and failure. In the south the Germans had entered Stalingrad, had captured the important Don and Kuban agricultural regions, and were drawing near to the petroleum deposits of the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia. According to official Soviet statistics, from January through October 1942 alone, 5.5 million Red Army soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured.⁹⁷ Gradually, however, the formation of new armies and the heroism of the defenders of Stalingrad and the Caucasus allowed the front to stabilize. Hitler’s shortage of manpower, as he simultaneously pursued several difficult objectives, also helped shift the momentum. In the ruins of Stalingrad, Soviet troops fought German divisions in pitched battle. By all appearances, this was a replay of late 1941. The battered German armies could advance no farther. Having inflicted huge losses, the Red Army now had an opportunity to seize the initiative. The question was how and when to strike back.

 STALINGRAD AND KURSK

The counterstrike came outside Stalingrad. This famous Soviet victory was the culmination of heroic efforts and huge sacrifices by the entire country. It showed that Stalin, too, had finally learned from past defeats. The well-prepared Soviet offensive outside Stalin’s namesake city began on 19 November 1942. A few days later, Germany’s 330,000-man force in Stalingrad, led by General (soon to be Field Marshal) Friedrich Paulus, was surrounded. After thwarting German attempts to break through the encirclement, on 2 February 1943 Soviet forces finally compelled the enemy to capitulate. The protracted battle cost the Germans hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers. More than 90,000 were taken prisoner, including Paulus himself. The victory marked a major turning point in the war.

Despite this impressive triumph, Stalin continued to act with caution. In planning the new campaign, the Soviet Supreme Command tried not to spread its forces too thinly. The main counterstrike was focused on the Southwestern Direction, where the enemy had already suffered huge losses and was largely disorganized. Hoping to repeat the success of Stalingrad, in January 1943 Stalin ordered the encirclement of the German forces retreating from the North Caucasus. Elsewhere, counteroffensives in the Voronezh and Kharkov Directions made promising beginnings. And on 18 January 1943, at the northern end of the vast Soviet-German Front, the Leningrad Blockade was finally broken and the city again became accessible to Central Russia via land. The liberation of the country’s long-suffering historic capital had enormous symbolic and emotional significance.

Amid the rejoicing, Stalin’s comrades were eager to crown him with victor’s laurels. On 19 January 1943, during a visit to the Voronezh Front, the chief of the General Staff, Vasilevsky, joined the front’s leaders in addressing a coded message to Molotov, Beria, and Malenkov. They proposed that following the “unparalleled successes of our troops at the front,” Stalin deserved the title “generalissimo of the Soviet Union.” The telegram described Stalin as the “organizer of our victories, a genius and great commander.” The members of the top leadership, who may very well have inspired this initiative in the first place, greeted the proposal with enthusiasm. On 23 January Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan signed a motion to that effect and placed it before the Politburo. Nevertheless, it wound up being filed away.⁹⁸ Stalin must have felt that his elevation to the rank of generalissimo was premature. Despite hopeful signs, many hard battles lay ahead. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet families were still receiving the dreaded notifications that a loved one had been killed in action. Stalin eventually got the title of generalissimo, but later, after final victory in 1945. For now he settled for the gold-embroidered shoulder boards of a marshal. The resolution elevating him to that rank was published on 7 March 1943. Before Stalin, in January and February respectively, Zhukov and Vasilevsky were also given this honor.

The rank of marshal was more than sufficient for now. Events at the front soon showed that the Red Army was not safe from further defeats. Significant victories came in the form of the liberation of the North Caucasus and Stavropol and Krasnodar Krais. On the other hand, the Red Army could not carry out its plan to encircle German units in these areas. The enemy managed to maintain its numbers and retreat to the Donets Basin, the lower reaches of the Kuban, and the Taman Peninsula. Soviet forces were successful during early 1943 along the Voronezh, Bryansk, and Southwestern Fronts. Voronezh was liberated in January, and Kursk, Belgorod, and Kharkov in February. But soon the momentum shifted back to the Germans. One reason for this shift was some bad decisions by the Soviet Supreme Command. The Soviet armies were attacking along a broad front, but the enemy, which had stealthily concentrated its forces at strategic points, counterattacked. In March it again occupied Kharkov and Belgorod. The Red Army achieved only modest results in its Western Direction offensive, and its efforts in February and March along the Northwestern Front were not effective.

In April through June 1943, a strategic lull set in as the two sides prepared their summer campaigns. As the Soviet military leaders’ memoirs make clear, nobody doubted that the Germans would strike first at the Kursk salient. By attacking the flanks, the Wehrmacht could encircle and destroy the large number of Soviet forces within the salient and recapture the strategic initiative. The Germans knew that unless they could eliminate the Kursk salient, they would face serious danger. Yet there was some question as to whether the Germans would attack at all. Deciding against an anticipatory offensive, Stalin agreed to meet the enemy from a well-prepared defensive posture, in the hope that it would allow the Red Army to crush the German forces and transition to an offensive posture from a much stronger position.

The decision to focus on defense shows that Stalin was learning from past mistakes. Whereas earlier he had preferred large-scale lightning attacks before the enemy had time to regroup, he now understood the need to wait, plan, and prepare. Restraint was not easy for him. Twice in May, intelligence suggested that the Germans were about to strike. Soviet forces were put on high alert, but each time proved to be a false alarm. According to General Vasilevsky, in both cases Stalin favored a preemptive attack. “It took quite an effort by us, by Zhukov, me, and Antonov,⁹⁹ to convince him not to do that,” Vasilevsky wrote.¹⁰⁰ June came, and the Germans still did not attack. Stalin was uneasy and again began pondering a first strike. This time, too, he listened to his generals, who convinced him that it would be advantageous to wait out the enemy.

The generals were right. The Battle of Kursk began on 5 July 1943 and continued until 23 August. Huge forces, a total of 4 million troops, were arrayed on both sides. This was a major tank battle, and the Soviet side had twice as many as the Germans. The Nazi leaders still hoped that superior organization and up-to-date weaponry—especially the Tiger and Panther tanks—could earn them another victory. It might have turned out that way had they not also faced superior numbers and a more mature and better-prepared force. After wearing down the enemy through a week of fierce fighting from a defensive posture, the Red Army struck back.

At the height of the counteroffensive, in early August 1943, Stalin visited the front for the first and last time. During the early morning hours of 2 August he boarded a special train disguised to look like a freight carrier that stopped close to his dacha. The part of the front closest to Moscow, the Rzhev-Vyazma salient, the site of preparations for an offensive operation, was chosen for the visit. After arriving at the closest train station, Stalin and his entourage continued by automobile. He spent 3 and 4 August visiting the command posts of each front and meeting with the leaders planning offensives. Here he learned that Soviet troops had retaken Orel and Belgorod. Stalin telephoned Moscow and ordered an artillery salute in honor of this victory. The visitors returned to the train for dinner, and on the evening of 5 August it left for Moscow. Stalin returned to his Kremlin office.¹⁰¹

Stalin did not like to travel even in peacetime and left Moscow only for vacations. Officially, he was inspecting preparations for the Smolensk offensive operation. In fact, there was no military necessity for this, and his visit did nothing to prevent the operation’s failure. The real reason for the trip lay in what we now call “optics.” The leader of a country at war has to show solidarity with his army and a willingness to share in its hardships. During the first stage of the war, when Moscow itself was on the front line and Stalin’s presence in the besieged capital was of tremendous political significance, solidarity could be demonstrated by his staying in place. Stalin must have understood that even after the tide of war began to turn, such demonstrations were important to sustain his reputation as an involved and compassionate leader.

Stalin managed to transform his sole visit to the front lines into a matter of routine. During the summer of 1943 he conducted a heated correspondence with Roosevelt and Churchill. In response to the Allies’ refusal to open a second front in northern France in 1943, Stalin refused to participate in summits and grew dilatory in his correspondence. His explanation was that he was too busy rallying the troops. In early August he wrote to his coalition partners: “I have just returned from the front.… I have had to make more frequent visits to the troops than usual.” “I have been compelled to personally spend more time in various sectors of the front and put the interests of the front before all else.”¹⁰²

After returning from the Western Front, Stalin again had to turn his attention to developments in the south, where the Kursk offensive was still raging. The Battle of Kursk put an end to any chance for a German victory, but most of the Nazi forces escaped encirclement and withdrew to prepared defensive lines. Building on Soviet successes, the Supreme Command organized offensives in Ukraine, Crimea, and the Central Direction. The German forces switched to a defensive posture, launching only intermittent counterattacks. The most important developments were taking place at the southern end of the Soviet-German Front. In September the Red Army managed to capture the German bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper. At the same time, Hitler’s forces were pushed out of the economically important Donets Basin and, to the south, Novorossiisk and the Taman Peninsula. In the predawn hours of 6 November the Red Army liberated the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. By the autumn of 1943, Hitler’s forces had been rendered incapable of large-scale offensives. The Red Army advanced six hundred kilometers to the south and three hundred to the west, but these impressive victories came at the expense of heavy losses inflicted by a still capable enemy. Furthermore, many of the objectives assigned by Headquarters were not met. Soviet forces had made little progress in the Western and Northwestern Directions. The attempt to liberate Crimea had failed, and fierce counterattacks by the Wehrmacht made it impossible to build on the ousting of the Nazis from eastern Ukraine. The Germans were managing to evade a decisive blow. The successful approach used in Stalingrad, of encircling and liquidating enemy army groups, could not be repeated. The bloody war would not end any time soon.

British and American forces also made progress in 1943. Large deployments of German troops were defeated in North Africa and Sicily, and the southern portion of the Italian peninsula was occupied, bringing down Mussolini’s regime and taking Italy out of the war. The Allies were also achieving success against Japan, and Germany’s submarine fleet suffered significant losses in the Atlantic, making shipments of supplies and troops from the United States less dangerous. Allied bombing of Germany was causing increasing devastation. The British and Americans no longer worried that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of war, and such a realization relieved some of the pressure for major sacrifices by the Western allies. Moreover, the idea of an advance through the Balkans was beginning to look like a viable alternative to the opening of a second front in northern France. Churchill favored the Balkan approach, but Roosevelt, based on American interests, maintained his previous commitment to a landing on the French coast.

For Stalin, the opening of a second front remained a top priority in relations with his allies. While he of course wanted to relieve the suffering of his battered and exhausted country, he also saw such an opening as a matter of political prestige and a sign of his standing within the Big Three. Not surprisingly, on hearing in June 1943 that Churchill and Roosevelt were planning to postpone the opening of a front in northern France until the next year, his response was icy. “I must inform you,” he wrote his partners on 24 June, “that this is a matter not just of disappointing the Soviet government but of preserving its trust in its allies, trust that has been put to serious tests.”¹⁰³ In August, the Soviet ambassador, who enjoyed good relations with the British establishment, was pointedly recalled from London. But the allies could not afford total alienation, and none wanted to go anywhere near the point of breaking off relations. This was evident in the decision that soon followed, after contentious negotiation, to hold the first face-to-face meeting of the Big Three. In November 1943 the allies gathered in Tehran, the site proposed by Stalin. This concession by Roosevelt and Churchill at least took some of the sting out of their decision to delay an invasion.

This trip, Stalin’s first outside the Soviet Union since coming to power, did not take him far from the Soviet border. After traveling to Baku by train, he took a short flight to the Iranian capital. As far as we know, this was Stalin’s first and last flight in an airplane, and he appears to have been anxious about it. According to the memoirs of General Sergei Shtemenko, who accompanied Stalin on the trip, a problem developed at the airport in Baku. Stalin refused to fly in a plane piloted by a high-ranking member of Soviet aviation, General Golovanov (mentioned above), and preferred to be flown by a less eminent pilot. “General-colonels rarely fly airplanes; we’d be better off flying with a colonel,” he is quoted as saying.¹⁰⁴ Golovanov categorically denies this account, but he does say that while still in Moscow, Stalin wanted to discuss plans for the flight in detail. Among his instructions, he ordered Golovanov to check the reliability of the pilot.¹⁰⁵ Stalin apparently had a difficult time during the flight. While meeting with UK Ambassador Archibald Kerr and U.S. Ambassador Harriman in September 1944, he told them that his ears hurt for two weeks afterward.¹⁰⁶

The Tehran Conference got under way on 28 November 1943. This was Stalin’s third meeting with Churchill and his first with Roosevelt. Face-to-face contact with Roosevelt was particularly important. Stalin knew that the American and British leaders did not see eye to eye on everything, and one point of difference was the opening of a second front in northern France. Roosevelt and Stalin, each for his own reason, both advocated this second front. Stalin had two powerful cards in his pocket: the Red Army’s victories and a promise to take up arms against Japan after Hitler’s defeat. Beside a desire for good long-term relations with the USSR and its help against Japan, Roosevelt was also motivated by his reluctance to have Red Army troops moving deep into Western Europe. The result was a promise in Tehran that the United States and Great Britain would open a second front in the north of France in May 1944. Discussions also covered future Soviet efforts against Japan, the creation of a postwar international security system, the borders of a postwar Poland, and other issues. Stalin had every reason to come away pleased.

 VICTORY AND VENGEANCE

The Allied successes in 1943 left no doubt that Germany would ultimately lose the war, but when? How many lives would be sacrificed before that happened? Having learned a bitter lesson, Stalin no longer tried to assign a timetable to the fall of the Reich. The Germans put up a desperate fight. Holed up in defensive positions, they launched only occasional counterattacks. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed forward, sometimes quickening the pace, sometimes slowing it. Both sides endured heavy casualties.

During the first five months of 1944 the Red Army achieved impressive victories at both ends of the huge Soviet-German Front, in Ukraine and outside Leningrad. Its forces, fighting fiercely, advanced hundreds of kilometers, in places even going beyond the Soviet border into Romania. But in the center of the Eastern Front, the Germans were unassailable. For the Red Army, the campaign of the summer of 1944 was dedicated to destroying the enemy forces at the front’s center. The well and stealthily prepared operation in Belarus was one of the most significant of the entire war. It led to the destruction of a huge Wehrmacht force.

Celebrating his triumph, Stalin ordered up an impressive propaganda spectacle. For several hours, beginning on the morning of 17 July, a column of more than fifty-seven thousand German prisoners of war, with generals and officers at the head of the line, was paraded through central Moscow. That evening they were loaded onto trains and sent to camps. Crowds of Muscovites lined the streets to observe this extraordinary event. “As the column of prisoners of war passed by,” Beria reported to Stalin, “the population behaved in an organized manner.” He described for the vozhd the shouts that could be heard: “Numerous enthusiastic exclamations and salutes in honor of the Red Army and our Supreme Commander-in-Chief,” as well as “anti-fascist cries of ‘Death to Hitler,’ ‘Death to fascism,’ ‘Let the scoundrels die,’” etc. After the columns had passed, crews of water trucks were brought in to pointedly wash the streets clean.¹⁰⁷ On 16 August a similar spectacle took place in Kiev.¹⁰⁸

This demeaning procession of German prisoners symbolized the impending collapse of Nazism. On 6 June 1944, British, American, and other Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. Overwhelmed by the Red Army in 1944, Germany’s allies Romania and Finland laid down their arms. Red Army troops liberated all Soviet territory, expelled Hitler’s forces from a significant portion of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and moved toward the borders of Germany itself.

These decisive victories were primarily the result of the Soviet Union’s military and economic superiority, attained through the entire country’s sacrifices and exertion. By June 1944 the Soviet armed forces exceeded 11 million people. Red Army assets included field forces numbering 6.6 million, approximately 100,000 mortars and artillery, 8,000 tanks and self-propelled artillery, and 13,000 combat aircraft. In terms of personnel, the ratio of forces along the Soviet-German Front was 1.5:1 in favor of the Red Army; for mortars and artillery, 1.7:1; and for combat aircraft, 4.2:1. The two sides were approximately equally matched in tanks.¹⁰⁹ Furthermore, the Soviet side had significant reserves, while the capacity of the Reich and its allies was shrinking by the day. The Red Army and its commanders, led by Stalin, were growing increasingly confident, bolstered by the wealth of their resources and the experience acquired through years of catastrophe and, finally, victory.

For Stalin, managing the army and continuing to increase its might remained a high priority. Furthermore, liberated areas of the country lay in ruins and desperately needed to be rebuilt. The Nazis had exterminated millions of Soviet civilians, especially Jews. Many towns and villages were completely depopulated.¹¹⁰ A 1 July 1944 letter to Stalin from the head of Belarus offers a glimpse of the state of territories that had been under German occupation: “There are 800 people left in Vitebsk; before the war there were 211,000.… Zhlobin has been completely destroyed. There is a small number of wooden buildings and the frames of three stone ones. There is no population in the city.”¹¹¹

In addition to repairing physical destruction, the liberation of Soviet territories confronted the leadership with new political problems. For varying durations—from a few weeks to three years—tens of millions of people had lived under Nazi occupation. Many had either been forced to collaborate or had done so out of conviction. Many others had fled to serve with pro-Soviet partisans or had done what they could to help them. Most had simply tried to survive in the new order. Stalin felt no responsibility for the suffering of Soviet citizens who, in Soviet bureaucratic language, “resided in occupied territory.” Like soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans, anyone who lived in captured territory was classified as “suspicious.” As part of their reintegration into the USSR, liberated areas had to be cleansed of the taint of occupation, and the means of accomplishing this was mass repression. The crime being prosecuted now was abetting the enemy. Stalin was adamant: no mercy could be shown. On 28 December 1943, Beria submitted a memorandum to him about the discovery in Ukraine of so-called “Volksdeutsche”—people with German roots. This population, Beria claimed, were privileged supporters of the Nazis during the occupation. Stalin gave the order: “Arrest them all and keep them in a special camp under special observation and use them for work.”¹¹²

As the war wound down, a new principle shaped Stalinist repression: collective responsibility for collaboration with the occupiers. This principle was expressed in the wholesale internal deportation of a number of Soviet ethnic groups. During late 1943 and the first half of 1944, several peoples were forcibly relocated: Kalmyks, certain North Caucasian ethnic groups (Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, Balkars), and Crimean Tatars, as well as all the Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians living in Crimea. Stalin’s decision to exile these groups was partially motivated by real evidence of collaboration and noncompliance with government mobilization efforts during the war, mainly evasion of recruitment into the army.¹¹³ But the principle of collective responsibility and punishment had a broader significance. Even before the war, the government had had difficulty integrating many of these peoples into Soviet society. The war only confirmed that this task had never been completed. Moving them to remote areas of the USSR, in Stalin’s mind, was a way of solving this problem once and for all. But the job had to be done right. Entire peoples, bound by common ancestry and heritage, had to be relocated. If anyone was left behind to keep the ancestral hearth burning, many others would try to escape exile and return home. In the case of Crimean Tatars, Stalin was probably also worried about their proximity to Turkey, which he regarded as a potentially hostile force. As the ethnic deportations continued in mid-1944, the border regions of Georgia were also targeted. They were purged of Turks, Kurds, and a few other ethnic minorities viewed by the Soviet authorities as fertile ground for Turkish influence and espionage. These expulsions were essentially a continuation of Stalin’s long-standing prewar policy of preventative ethnic purging. But the war drove the sweeping nature of the deportations and the decisiveness with which they were carried out. Much of the inhumanity of war stems from the inhuman acts it is used to justify.

The ethnic deportations of 1943–1944 swept up more than a million people. Such a massive endeavor required large numbers of troops and state security personnel. Stalin had the final word in deciding the fates of entire peoples. He was kept constantly informed on the progress of the deportations, and these reports are now available to historians in what is known as “Stalin’s special file” among NKVD materials.¹¹⁴ Because of the number of deportees involved (approximately one-half million), the relocation of Chechens and Ingush was particularly complicated and difficult. Beria went personally to the North Caucasus to oversee the effort. On 17 February 1944 he wired Stalin to report that the preliminary stage of the operation had been completed.¹¹⁵ His telegram made it clear that what the Soviet leadership feared most was “incidents”—resistance by the deportees. For this reason, the authorities relied on the element of surprise. Troops assembled under the pretext of training exercises arrested the most active members of the community as a precaution. Stalin, who followed the operation closely, apparently advised Beria not to rely solely on the “chekist and troop operations” but to also try to undermine solidarity among the deportees. In a 22 February telegram, Beria reported to Stalin that he had carried out his “instructions.” He had summoned top Chechen and Ingush officials and demanded that they help assure that the deportation was carried out without “excesses.” To promote calm, Beria informed Stalin, he solicited the help of religious leaders and other local authorities. In exchange, these officials and elders were promised certain privileges in their place of exile, including increased rations and the right to bring property with them. “I believe that the operation to evict the Chechens and Ingush will be carried out successfully,” he reported.¹¹⁶ The following day, 23 February, he proudly described the beginning of the operation, adding: “There were six attempts to resist by individuals that were suppressed through arrest or use of arms.”¹¹⁷ Stalin could rest assured that the task was in good hands.

Like many of Stalin’s political tools, reprisals against real and imagined collaborators were a double-edged sword. After the exceptional violence of war, attempts to instill a desire for vengeance against collaborators weakened the army’s morale and spawned brutality and abuses. Many incidents served to illustrate the danger of spontaneous eruptions when millions of young men are thrown into a brutal war. Heroism and self-sacrifice coexisted alongside the basest human behaviors and duty, compassion, and decency alongside criminality and rancor. All sorts of people were in the army, including criminals who had been released from the camps early to fight. Documents from 1944 show that Stalin was repeatedly informed of crimes against civilians by soldiers in liberated areas. In late July, Beria wrote him about the arrest of a group of soldiers and junior officers in a tank repair unit in Moldavia after they had gone on a drunken rampage of robbery and rape against the local population.¹¹⁸ A similar report from Beria in late September informed Stalin of a rape by members of the Red Army in Crimea. This report also recounted instances of robbery and armed encounters with the local police.¹¹⁹ Summaries of crimes committed by members of the military in September, October, and December also contained descriptions of robberies, rapes, and even murders, both far from the front and close to the fighting.¹²⁰ All were committed against Soviet citizens on Soviet territory.

The situation was much worse when the army entered foreign territory, especially Germany. Feelings of vengeance toward Germans, carefully cultivated by Soviet military propaganda, were not the only reasons for a host of crimes—robbery, murder, and rape—by Soviet soldiers and officers against German civilians. Atrocities by the Nazis within the Soviet Union, the exceptional brutality of the war, the ignorance and criminal pasts of some members of the Red Army, and the weakening of discipline under combat conditions all contributed to, but did not excuse, the firestorm of violence.¹²¹ Stalin was informed of his army’s behavior. On 17 March 1945, Beria sent him and Molotov a report on the rapes of German women and their subsequent suicides in eastern Prussia.¹²² With the opening of archives from this period, the number of known incidents of this sort will only grow. The history of a dispute with the Yugoslav leadership offers evidence of Stalin’s attitude toward such behavior by his military. In late 1944, when the Red Army reached Yugoslav territory and liberated the country together with Yugoslav units, alarming accounts of crimes by members of the Soviet armed forces began to appear. According to the prominent Yugoslav Communist politician and writer Milovan Djilas, there were more than a hundred cases where women were raped and murdered and more than a thousand robberies. The Yugoslav leadership appealed to the Red Army command but was curtly rebuffed. The Yugoslavs were accused of slander. When the matter reached Stalin, he supported his military men and made crude political accusations against the Yugoslavs. Later, when he decided that the conflict needed to be quelled, he had a conciliatory discussion with Djilas during a dinner at his dacha in April 1945:

Imagine a man who has fought his way from Stalingrad to Belgrade—thousands of kilometers across his desolated land, seeing the death of his comrades and the people closest to him! Can such a man really react normally? And what’s so terrible if he misbehaves with a woman a bit after such horrors? You imagined the Red Army to be ideal. It isn’t ideal and wouldn’t be ideal even without a certain percentage of criminal elements—we opened up the prisons and took everyone into the army.… You have to understand war. And the Red Army isn’t ideal. The important thing was for it to beat the Germans—and it’s beating them well. Everything else is secondary.¹²³

If this was Stalin’s attitude toward crimes committed on the territory of an allied state, where the government was controlled by Communists loyal to Moscow, it is hardly surprising that he had no desire to take serious measures to prevent abuses in Germany. Stalin’s calculations were obvious. All he cared about was the army’s military success. If it could be rewarded for its efforts at the expense of the enemy’s civilian population, that was fine with him. Nor was he especially worried about reproaches by his Western allies. Remarks made to him by President Roosevelt on 4 February 1945, before the Yalta Conference got under way, probably did not evade his attention: “Roosevelt states that now that he has seen the senseless destruction perpetrated by the Germans in Crimea, he would like to destroy twice as many Germans as have been destroyed so far. We definitely have to destroy 50,000 German-Prussian officers. He, Roosevelt, remembers how Marshal Stalin proposed a toast in Tehran to the annihilation of 50,000 German-Prussian officers. This was a very good toast.”¹²⁴

At some point, however, Stalin had to make a choice. “Misbehaving with women,” which he considered a reward for military success, was clearly turning into a problem. Crimes perpetrated by the Soviet military were beginning to serve Nazi propaganda purposes and were feeding German opposition to the Red Army that was not being expressed against the Western Allies. On the eve of a decisive battle for Berlin, Stalin sent the army a clear political signal. On 14 April 1945, Pravda published a scathing critique of a work by the well-known Soviet writer and commentator Ilya Erenburg, hailed for his many furious calls for the killing of Germans. Suddenly these calls, which had been perfectly in harmony with Soviet propaganda, were deemed inappropriate. Pravda explained at length that there is no such thing as a united Germany, that not all Germans behave the same, and that many of them—more and more with time—were turning away from Nazism and even fighting it. Judging by the article’s style, it had been touched by Stalin’s pen, and certain fragments were probably its product.

Political posturing and even the introduction of punishment for crimes by Soviet soldiers improved the situation only slightly. Violence toward civilians within the Soviet zone of occupation continued even after the fighting ended. In the summer of 1945, alarmed by the scale of violence, the supreme commander of the occupying Soviet force, Marshal Zhukov, issued orders demanding an end to “plunder, violence, and abuses in regard to the local population.” After these demands had little effect, in early September Zhukov issued a more radical order. Remarking that the “criminality of military service members has significantly grown,” he ordered that soldiers be confined to their barracks and obliged officers to move in with their subordinates to maintain order. Stalin, on learning of this order, demanded that it be rescinded. One argument against it was that “If this order falls in the hands of the leaders of foreign armies, they will not fail to label the Red Army an army of looters.” In place of Zhukov’s strict measures, Stalin proposed more vigorous political work, with the troops bringing guilty officers before so-called officer honor courts. The excesses in Germany continued.¹²⁵

 TWEAKING THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

On 31 July 1943, Stalin signed a directive addressed to the commanders of the Southern Front that stated, among other things, the following: “I believe it is shameful for Front commanders to allow, through negligence and poor organization, our four infantry regiments to be surrounded by enemy forces. In the third year of war one would think you would have learned how to correctly lead troops.”¹²⁶ This comment reflects how Stalin felt about his two-year experience at the helm of a country at war. His commanders, he believed, were long overdue in mastering skills that had been lacking or poorly developed when the war first broke out. Probably the supreme commander did not feel this assessment fully applied to himself, but his behavior suggests that he knew there were shortcomings in his leadership during the early stages of the war and he was making an effort to correct them. In style and substance, the military “reforms” he put in place reflected his preferred approach to any problem. Whether he was industrializing a backward country or waging war, his experiments in leadership had many innocent victims.

One reason for the Germans’ early success against Soviet defenses was the low level of competence up and down the Soviet chain of command. Lacking trust in his generals (sometimes with good reason), Stalin managed using the techniques with which he was most familiar: strong-armed police measures that instilled fear. Commanders were forced to work under the watchful eye of political commissars and NKVD “special departments.” Disorganization and panic were addressed through executions in front of the ranks, penalty battalions, and anti-retreat units. Stalin’s parallel army of discipline-keepers rushed from crisis to crisis, both at the front and in the rear. As defensive lines collapsed, the enemy advanced, and Stalin lost faith in his commanders, he developed an array of strategies that wound up depriving commanders of flexibility and often increased Red Army casualties.

These heavy-handed and repressive measures probably do not indicate a conscious choice so much as Stalin’s desperation. As strong as his tendency toward violence was, he was certainly aware of the danger inherent in applying it to his own military during a war. He must have grasped that sending troops into battle with guns at their backs was not the ideal way to instill a fighting spirit. He also must have known that on the battlefield it was particularly important to have a single decision maker able to exercise judgment without a political commissar looking over his shoulder. The catastrophes of 1941–1942 clearly showed that unsophisticated and rushed maneuvers combined with pressure from political commissars were not the road to success. Fundamental changes were needed in the way the war was being managed. But when could he introduce these changes? Obviously not while the Red Army was fighting with desperate intensity to hold back the German advance. An opportunity may have presented itself in early 1942, after the Red Army’s first victories. But Stalin’s impatience and his wager on a quick victory only led to further defeat. The lull that set in during the fall of 1942 was used for other purposes, as can be seen in the careful preparations to encircle the Germans in Stalingrad. On the eve of that victory, Stalin finally turned his attention to introducing fundamental changes.

On 9 October 1942, the Politburo passed a resolution to establish full edinonachalie—an ideological buzzword used during forced industrialization to signify a single responsible decision maker—and abolish the institution of the military commissar within the Red Army.¹²⁷ Former commissars would now become deputy commanders. A directive signed by Stalin that same day granted officers additional privileges and assigned orderlies to the commanders of all army units, all the way down to the platoon level. The duties of these orderlies included “serving the personal everyday needs of commanding officers and carrying out their assignments.”¹²⁸ In January 1943, shoulder boards, which in 1917 had been abolished as a symbol of the tsarist army, were introduced to Red Army uniforms. The title of marshal was given to some senior commanders. The introduction of edinonachalie, along with privileges, medals, and promotions, was intended to empower the Red Army’s senior officers. The realities of war forced Stalin to show more trust in his military.

After the war’s chaotic first stage, there was a change in Stalin’s interactions with top military command structures, especially the General Staff. “I have to admit,” Vasilevsky later stated, “that at the beginning of the war the General Staff was thrown into a state of disarray and, strictly speaking, you could not say that it was operating normally.… At the beginning of the war Stalin disbanded the General Staff.”¹²⁹ This disarray meant that a great many decisions were made by Stalin alone, without input from the General Staff. As Vasilevsky described it, things began to change only in September 1942.¹³⁰ By fall 1943 a regular schedule was established for consultation between Stalin and the General Staff. At the start of his workday, around ten or eleven in the morning, he heard by telephone the General Staff’s first report on the situation at the fronts. Around four or five in the afternoon he heard a report on how things had gone during the first half of the day. Close to midnight, the heads of the General Staff came to him personally with a summary of the day’s events. During these meetings, which took place either at Stalin’s Kremlin office or his dacha, the group would study the situation at the fronts on maps, and directives were adopted to be sent to the field. Other decisions were made as well. Politburo members often took part in these meetings, as did the heads of various military or civilian bodies. In some cases, the heads of the General Staff visited Stalin several times in a day.¹³¹ The regularity of these meetings led to better management of the war.

In addition, Stalin had many meetings with other military and civilian leaders. Front commanders were not usually expected to report in person on their assessments and plans, but they were often summoned to Moscow for brief face-to-face meetings. Although Stalin always had the last word, many of these meetings featured a genuine discussion of problems and even debates over large and small questions. A number of memoirs report that as the situation at the fronts improved, meetings grew more businesslike, and the atmosphere became more relaxed and informal. Stalin paced the room as he listened to reports. By remaining on his feet, he lessened the hierarchical divide between him and his military subordinates, who also stood. The vozhd smoked a great deal, but others could also smoke without asking permission. Boxes of papirosas (filterless Russian cigarettes) lay on the table. Members of the top Soviet leadership sat around the table and kept silent until Stalin asked them a question.¹³² Less inclined to dictate his own terms or interfere in operational decisions, Stalin became noticeably more respectful toward the military leaders as the war continued.

During the second phase of the war, Stalin was not inclined to be hasty in making decisions and usually listened to reports, including upsetting ones, without any sign of irritability, without interrupting, just smoking, pacing, sitting down from time to time, and listening.¹³³

Less and less often he imposed his own solutions to individual questions on Front commanders—attack this way and not that way. Earlier he would impose his way, tell them in what direction and in which specific sector it would be more advantageous to attack or to concentrate forces.… By the end of the war there wasn’t a hint of this.¹³⁴

Stalin’s new demeanor was largely a result of his growth as a military leader. As the war progressed, he acquired a huge store of both negative and positive experience. “After the Battle of Stalingrad and especially Kursk,” Marshal Vasilevsky wrote, “he rose to the height of strategic leadership. Now Stalin was thinking in terms of modern warfare and grasped all the issues involved in preparing and conducting operations.” This view of Stalin’s new sophistication was shared by many of the military leaders who worked with him during the war.¹³⁵

Stalin’s focus on the day-to-day details of operations at the fronts allowed him little time to deal with other matters, particularly the economy. Many spheres of socioeconomic life were removed from the dictator’s harsh control as the lines of division among government institutions underwent a spontaneous wartime revision. Under the military dictatorship, at the top of the pyramid was, as always, Stalin, who made decisions either solely or during meetings held either in his Kremlin office or at his dacha. The participants in these meetings included military leaders and the vozhd’s closest comrades. The meetings did not fit into any of the orderly categories of government. Depending on their content, decisions made at these meetings, or solely by Stalin, were drawn up and circulated to those charged with carrying them out in the name of one of the top governmental bodies—the Politburo, the Council of People’s Commissars, the State Defense Committee, or the Supreme Command. Meanwhile, many questions having to do with the day-to-day running of the country, including the wartime economy, were being decided without Stalin’s direct involvement. Molotov, for example, was in charge of the SNK (the Council of People’s Commissars) and regularly presided over the decision-making bodies that basically oversaw all aspects of government not directly tied to military operations.¹³⁶ In December 1942 a new body was established to oversee the work by industry and the transportation sector to meet the needs of the front: the State Defense Committee’s Operational Bureau.¹³⁷ Led at first by Molotov, as the war wound down, it was taken over by Beria.¹³⁸ Members of the Politburo and the State Defense Committee also served on these critical managerial bodies, where they had the authority to resolve important issues quickly. Not all of the resolutions produced by these bodies went to Stalin for approval.

In addition to their duties serving on these top government bodies, each of Stalin’s associates had his own individual “portfolio.” As the war persisted, this system of putting members of the leadership in charge of particular areas became embedded. For example, in February 1942, the following purviews were assigned to members of the State Defense Committee: Molotov was placed in charge of the production of tanks, Malenkov of aviation, Beria of armaments, Voznesensky of ammunition, and Mikoyan of supplying the army with food and uniforms.¹³⁹ These portfolios could change over time. Whatever assignments were given to these top leaders, under the pressures of war and by sheer necessity they operated with significant administrative latitude. What mattered were results. If they met their production targets, they were successful. This system worked, and Stalin had neither the time nor the desire to change it.

The increased autonomy enjoyed by Stalin’s associates inevitably spilled over into the political sphere and affected their interactions with the vozhd. As Mikoyan attests, “During the war there was a certain solidarity among our leadership.… Stalin, who understood that during this difficult time an all-out effort was required, fostered an atmosphere of trust, and every member of the Politburo carried a tremendous load.”¹⁴⁰ This understanding, of course, did not mean that Stalin’s dictatorial dominance over the Politburo was replaced by oligarchic rule. Stalin set the rules of collective leadership. As the situation stabilized at the front and victory over the enemy approached, there were signs that he intended to do away with the slight liberalizations that circumstances had forced upon him. For Mikoyan, the first such sign was a slap on the wrist he received from the vozhd. On 17 September 1944 he sent Stalin a draft resolution on advancing grain to a number of oblasts.¹⁴¹ Although the proposal was rather moderate and did not give the oblasts everything they were asking for, Stalin made a display of his anger, writing onto Mikoyan’s resolution: “I vote against. Mikoyan is behaving in an anti-state manner and is being led around by the oblast committees and is corrupting them. He has completely corrupted Andreev.¹⁴² The procurement commissariat should be taken away from Mikoyan and given to Malenkov, for example.”¹⁴³ The Politburo did so the following day.¹⁴⁴

Another sign of coming changes at the top was a shake-up within the military leadership undertaken by Stalin in late 1944. In November the Politburo appointed Nikolai Bulganin to serve as Stalin’s deputy at the defense commissariat and made him a member of the State Defense Committee.¹⁴⁵ Bulganin was also given important powers in interacting with the army.¹⁴⁶ His expertise lay in civilian affairs, but during the war he served on the councils of a number of fronts, thus acquiring some military experience and even the rank of general. His assignment to the defense commissariat, and the broad powers he was given, could only mean that Stalin was creating a new counterweight to the military, in particular to the deputy defense commissar and deputy supreme commander, Marshal Zhukov. Evidence can be seen in the demonstrative dressing-down given to Zhukov just two weeks after Bulganin’s appointment. In December 1944 Stalin accused Zhukov of exceeding his authority in approving artillery field manuals and issued him a reprimand. The order criticizing Zhukov was circulated to all top military leaders.¹⁴⁷

As painful as this lashing out must have been for Stalin’s subordinates, his attacks did little to roil the upper echelons of power or change his relative moderation in dealing with the members of the Politburo or the military leadership. Lower down the hierarchy, however, there was no sense of liberalization. The war lent a certain legitimacy to Stalin’s brutality, especially given the extreme ruthlessness of the enemy. The intensity of state violence during the war years was comparable to that of the Terror. In addition to the general hardships of war, the front suffered (as noted) from executions, anti-retreat units, and penalty battalions, while members of the civilian population suffered arrest, execution, mass deportations, mobilization, and the mass starvation that resulted from forced grain requisitions by the state and the collapse of agriculture in some of the Soviet Union’s most productive areas. While the context of these hardships differed from those experienced in the late 1930s, to those enduring them they must have felt very much the same. As they mounted, just as he had done toward the conclusion of the Terror, Stalin made certain concessions to the populace that cost him little but brought certain tactical advantages.

The best known concession was a reconciliation with religious institutions and the faithful, most important the country’s Orthodox majority. This departure from the anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, from the destruction of churches and the mass executions of clergy members and believers, in favor of the opening of cathedrals and relative freedom of religion, was part of an overall adjustment in official ideology. Russian patriotism was being encouraged before the war, and a revival of images of the heroic past, many placed on a par with the legacy of Bolshevism and the revolution, became more pronounced during the war years.¹⁴⁸ Under Stalin’s orders, portraits of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century generals Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov were placed alongside the photograph of Lenin that hung in his office. To medals based on the symbolism of the revolution were added those commemorating Suvorov, Kutuzov, Prince Aleksandr Nevsky, and Admiral Pavel Nakhimov. At the front, those who had fought in World War I were allowed to wear their tsarist medals along with their Soviet ones.

The new attitude toward religion received a stunning stamp of approval in September 1943, when a previously unimaginable meeting between Stalin and the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church was publicly announced. Three metropolitans were brought to Stalin’s Kremlin office during the night of 4–5 September. They talked with the unusually amiable vozhd for one hour and twenty minutes.¹⁴⁹ After an eighteen-year prohibition, they were granted permission to appoint a patriarch for the Russian Orthodox Church and were even offered the option of using airplanes to bring bishops to Moscow so as to accelerate the selection. Stalin consented to the opening of courses in theology to prepare priests and even proposed organizing theological seminaries and academies. He also supported requests to open new churches and free arrested priests, and he proposed that church leaders improve priests’ material well-being by setting up special food stores and assigning them cars. He gave the future patriarch the gift of a three-story house with a garden in the center of Moscow, formerly the home of the German ambassador, including all its furnishings. After discussing a few more items, Stalin escorted the metropolitans to the door of his office.¹⁵⁰ The next day, the meeting with church leaders and the upcoming election of a new patriarch were reported in newspapers.

Historians have made a rather thorough study of the reasons for Stalin’s about-face on religion. Of course the former seminary graduate with the unfinished theological education had no intention of returning to the bosom of the church or asking forgiveness for his sins. Needing to strengthen relations with his allies, he had to respond to the concerns of Western public opinion and influential church circles about the plight of believers in the USSR. Furthermore, the liberation of occupied Soviet territories raised the practical question of what to do about the many churches the Germans had built there. The usual Bolshevik approach of shutting them down was impossible. He needed a reconciliation with the church. Religion had to be put under tight control but not destroyed. Far from the bottom of the list of reasons for this change was Stalin’s awareness of the role religion played in uniting the country, in earning the emotional support of the masses, who had endured terrible trials. Soviet values, force-fed into the minds of millions, could not satisfy the spiritual needs of a huge and ancient people. The goal of achieving a universal vision of the path forward turned out to be unattainable. Stalin’s grasp of this reality brought him one step closer to victory.

 THE STAGES OF VICTORY: CRIMEA, BERLIN, POTSDAM, MANCHURIA

The entry of the huge Red Army into Germany was a long-awaited and joyous occasion for the Soviet people and the vozhd. The enemy would be finished off in its own den. The time for retribution had come. Such natural and inevitable feelings inspired heroism and self-sacrifice during the war’s final battles, when every Soviet soldier could taste victory and was eager for the final assault. Stalin had every reason to be proud of his army.

One of the Red Army’s most successful operations came in January and February 1945. Taking just three weeks to advance five hundred kilometers from the Vistula to the Oder, the Soviet forces shattered critical Nazi lines of defense. Bridgeheads were created for an offensive against Berlin itself, but several months of bloody battles still lay ahead. The German forces defending their country put up a stubborn resistance and even launched counteroffensives, forcing the Red Army to take heavy casualties. Knowing this, Stalin did not hurry to enter Berlin in February. It would take several weeks to eliminate the threat of German counterattacks against the exposed flanks of the advancing Soviet fronts and to bring in reinforcements. Hard-earned experience had taught him prudence.

The victories of early 1945 had put the Soviet side in a favorable position to negotiate with the Allies on the postwar future. Negotiations first became a practical necessity in late 1944, when the Red Army was advancing through the Balkans and the Western Allies entered France and Italy. In October 1944, Churchill again flew to Moscow to meet with Stalin. The British prime minister raised the question of spheres of influence in Europe, the Balkans in particular. Stalin is unlikely to have been put off by this political cynicism. He agreed that “England should have the right to a decisive voice in Greece,”¹⁵¹ and he was also willing to apportion a Western “share” of influence in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. The presence of the Red Army in these countries (unlike in Greece) had brought them under Soviet control. For Stalin, this control was decisive. The question of Poland, high on the list of diplomatic issues Churchill brought to Moscow, was much more contentious. By the time of Churchill’s visit in late 1944, the USSR had broken off relations with the official Polish government, which had spent the war in exile in Britain, and was promoting a Communist alternative. Britain and the United States did what they could to prevent this outcome. On 1 August 1944, as the Red Army approached, the Polish government in exile organized an uprising in Warsaw with the goal of seizing power in the capital before the arrival of Soviet forces and the pro-Soviet government they were bringing with them. The Red Army, for a variety of reasons, stopped its advance, and the Nazis drowned the uprising in blood. This tragic episode became a source of sharp division between Stalin and his allies, who charged him with intentionally holding back aid to the uprising. This charge was largely just, but Stalin, guided by his own reality, had no intention of relenting. The London Poles had not launched the uprising to help him, so why should he help them?

Burdened by different problems but still united by their common foe, the Big Three met outside the Crimean resort city of Yalta in February 1945. This stunningly beautiful corner of the Soviet Union had only recently been liberated from Nazi occupation and lay in ruins. Sparing no effort or expense, in record time the Soviet authorities created a haven amid the destruction, including residences for the three leaders and their large retinues. Particular attention was paid to security. Camouflage covering was set up to protect against enemy air raids and sturdy shelters were built. Crimea, recently roiled by mass arrests and deportations, was subjected to yet another round of purges. “Suspicious elements” were rounded up and taken into custody. A whole army of security personnel was brought to the area. Stalin alone was protected by a force of one hundred operatives and five hundred NKVD troops, plus his usual bodyguards.¹⁵²

With victory around the corner, the Yalta Conference would have to address a wide range of urgent questions on which the fate of the world hung. At stake were the future of Germany, a redrawing of the map of Europe, and the worldwide balance of power. Generally speaking, the participants’ goals were simple. Although their motives and priorities differed, each of the parties wanted to leave Yalta with as many items on his diplomatic wish list as he could. But as long as the war continued, the Allies had to depend on one another and adjust their aspirations to military and political realities. They compromised on many issues. The zones of occupation in Germany were settled. The guiding principles on which a united nations organization would be founded were outlined. The idea was discussed of the Soviet Union annexing new territories at Poland’s expense (western Ukraine and Belarus), for which Poland would be compensated with German lands to its west. In exchange for a promise to enter into the war with Japan, Stalin extracted an agreement from the Allies that Soviet borders would be shifted outward to encompass new territory in the Far East and that the country’s interests in northern China would be recognized.

But as the contours of a new world took shape, so did the battle lines of the Cold War. It was not possible to reach a real compromise in regard to Poland. Stalin was determined to put this country under the control of his handpicked government, even if that involved making a few concessions on paper. Another contentious issue was the question of reparations from Germany, a point of particular interest for Stalin.

Perhaps even more indicative of the gulf dividing the Allies was the attitude of Soviet state security personnel in Crimea. The hordes of Westerners who descended on Soviet territory were treated as an enemy penetration. The ships used to bring the Allies’ supplies for the conference were surrounded by round-the-clock patrols. Their crews, when given shore leave, were kept under tight NKVD control. “The entire agent apparatus has been instructed and directed to uncover the nature of ties between foreigners and the port’s military personnel and civilians. Female agents who will come into close contact with foreigners have been given particularly careful instructions,” read one report to the NKVD leadership.¹⁵³ One can only imagine what these instructions were.

With every passing week, Stalin’s mistrust of the Western Allies grew, strongly influencing Soviet military plans. Wehrmacht units clearly preferred to surrender in the West, while in the East they fought to the bitter end. Stalin had every reason to fear the possibility, if not of a separate peace, at least that the Allies might make certain separate agreements with the Germans. During the final months of the war, everyone understood what the advances of Allied armies meant for postwar Europe’s political landscape. Negotiations in March 1945 in Bern between U.S. intelligence agents and representatives of the Nazis to discuss Germany’s capitulation in Italy only heightened Stalin’s suspicion.

Had it not unfolded amid other conflicts between the Soviet leadership and the Western Allies, especially in regard to Poland, the Bern incident might not have provoked open confrontation. After lengthy wrangling, on 3 April 1945 Stalin sent Roosevelt a sharply worded letter in which he questioned whether it would be possible to “preserve and strengthen trust between our countries.” Now that the archives have been opened, we can see that this letter, unlike many others that went out over his signature, was written entirely by Stalin himself and that he revised it to achieve a sterner tone.¹⁵⁴ Despite the growing friction, Roosevelt, who was committed to cooperating with Stalin, responded with restraint. A letter received by Stalin on 13 April 1945 sought to assure him that “minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.”¹⁵⁵ This letter was one of Roosevelt’s final political acts and is part of his testament in regard to relations with the Soviet Union. By the time Stalin received it, Roosevelt was already dead. Stalin appears to have been genuinely saddened by this loss. Nevertheless, he was soon distracted by new and urgent matters.

Worried about his fellow Allies’ rapid advance, Stalin decided to speed up the Soviet takeover of the German capital as much as possible. The attack on Berlin began on 16 April 1945, one month earlier than the date Stalin had given his allies.¹⁵⁶ Despite the Soviet forces’ overwhelming advantage in manpower and hardware, this key battle was not easy. Out of more than 2 million soldiers of the Red Army and Polish Second Army who took part in the Berlin operation, more than 360,000 were killed, wounded, or went missing in action.¹⁵⁷ German units put up a determined fight in defense of their capital.

The politically motivated decision to push forward the operation created great hurdles for the Red Army. Although delaying the offensive slightly would have made little difference to its outcome, Stalin required the front commanders to rush the advance of their forces at any cost. This accelerated pace, given the need to break through well-defended enemy positions, meant heavier casualties. The record speed of the operation and the concentration of a huge force directed against Berlin necessitated constant adjustments to the overall plan and field directives. According to the head of the General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate, General Sergei Shtemenko, Supreme Command Headquarters was in a state of turmoil throughout the Berlin operation. The General Staff leadership was summoned to Command Headquarters several times a day, sometimes at odd hours; many instructions were drafted under extreme time pressure; and the lightning speed of events made organized operations difficult.¹⁵⁸ But no matter how hurriedly things were done at Headquarters, some historians believe that Stalin could not possibly “react to the changing situation in time.”¹⁵⁹ It is unclear whether this lag in the flow of information to and from Headquarters had any real consequences. The performance of the Soviet Supreme Command and Stalin in the Berlin operation has received little scholarly scrutiny.

But no matter how many obstacles were thrown in the Red Army’s path, they were not enough to save the Nazis. On 25 April, Soviet units coming from one direction met U.S. forces coming from the other on the Elbe River. The victors’ absolute numerical superiority and high morale sealed the fate of the Third Reich. Early in the morning on 1 May, Stalin learned through an urgent telephone message from Marshal Zhukov that Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker the day before.¹⁶⁰ On 2 May, the Berlin garrison capitulated. During the night of 8–9 May, the final surrender was formulated and signed by Germany. On 24 June, Moscow held a long-awaited and impressive victory parade. Then, on 27 June, Stalin was awarded the title of generalissimo.

Now the leader of a major world power, in July 1945 Stalin set out for a vanquished Berlin for yet another Big Three conference. No firsthand accounts of Stalin’s last trip outside the Soviet Union have been preserved. What did he see through the windows of his train? With whom did he meet or spend time during this journey? Undoubtedly he knew the upcoming meeting with his fellow leaders would not be an easy one. With victory, the disagreements among the Allies had only grown more contentious. The Soviet dictator would have his first meeting with the new American president, Harry Truman, among whose advisers advocates of a hard line toward the USSR were gaining ascendancy. The Western Allies were displeased by the sovietization of Romania and Bulgaria, to say nothing of unresolved arguments about the Polish government. Stalin did not trust the Americans and British. This mistrust was fanned when Truman privately informed him of American atom bomb tests. The principles of German demilitarization, de-Nazification, and democratization were unanimously approved, but the Allies argued bitterly about everything else. The search for compromises and mutual concessions was spurred by fears that the war-weary world could be plunged into a new confrontation, by Soviet hopes for economic cooperation with the West, and by Western hopes that the USSR would enter the war against Japan. In the end, Stalin managed to finalize an agreement allowing Poland to expand its territory at the expense of Germany and the Soviet Union to incorporate the Konigsberg area. He did not, however, get his way on reparations or on the creation of Soviet bases on the Turkish Straits and the Mediterranean.

Having achieved what he could in Europe, Stalin turned his attention to acquiring Japanese lands and gaining footholds in northern China. In Yalta he had agreed to join the war against Japan two or three months after Germany surrendered. Knowing how eager the United States was for Soviet help, he had been able to extract very advantageous terms. The “status quo” was preserved in the Mongolian People’s Republic, keeping it under de facto Soviet control. The USSR regained the southern portion of Sakhalin, which Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and a commercial port and military base in northern China, along with the railroad line leading to it. Of fundamental significance to the USSR was the Allies’ agreement to recognize Soviet sovereignty over the strategically important Kuril Islands.

These agreements all remained in force up to the Berlin Conference, but now, for the first time in history, the nuclear factor came into play. The fact that the Americans had an atom bomb gave them much greater leverage. For one thing, fear of this powerful new technology could lead Japan to surrender even before the Soviet Union entered the war. Stalin preferred not to take the risk. He applied the same strategy in the Far East that he had used in Europe, where actual military possession of territory was more meaningful than agreements at the bargaining table. After the United States used its atom bombs against Japan, Stalin ordered the Red Army to launch an urgent offensive, giving his forces a deadline of 9 August 1945 to turn the Yalta concessions into a reality on the ground. The Soviet numerical advantage coupled with high morale and a seasoned fighting force brought about a quick victory. Even after Japan’s capitulation, Soviet forces continued to advance until all territories granted to the USSR at Yalta had been occupied. Then Stalin tried to take a little extra. In the Far East this meant pretentions to jointly occupy Japan proper and share in governing the country using a model similar to the one being applied in Germany. This effort was probably more a test of the new American president’s will than an actual demand, but it was accompanied by military preparations. After being decisively rebuffed by the Americans, Stalin quickly backed off, but not without some resentment. Disputes over Japan remained an irritant in Soviet-American relations for months. Japan itself did not recognize the Soviet capture of the Kuril Islands as legitimate.

For the millions of Soviet people who survived the horrors of war, the disputes and ambitions of politicians were peripheral. The country, finally at peace, could look to the future with hope.