Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941

6 Stalin’s Response to “Barbarossa”—I

Stalin said, “Everything Lenin created we have lost.” After this for a long time Stalin actually did not direct military operations and ceased doing anything at all. He resumed active leadership only after some members of the Politburo visited him and told him that it was necessary to take certain steps immediately in order to improve the situation at the front. Therefore, the threatening danger which hung over our Fatherland in the first period of the war was largely due to the faulty methods of directing the nation and the party by Stalin himself.... Even after the war began, the nervousness and hysteria which Stalin demonstrated, while interfering with actual military operations, caused our Army serious damage. Stalin was very far from understanding the real situation developing at the front.

—Nikita Khrushchev

No, Stalin saw through it all. Stalin trusted Hitler?? He didn’t trust his own people! . . . Hitler fooled Stalin? As a result of such deception Hitler had to poison himself, and Stalin became the head of half the world! . . . No one could have been ready for the hour of the attack, even God himself! ... In essence, we were largely ready for war.

—V. M. Molotov

June 22, 1941—Russia’s “December 7”—is a day that for Russians will forever live in infamy. Sixty years ago the Nazi armies, following Generals Mannstein’s and Guderian’s battle-tested blitzkrieg tactics and strategy applied so successfully against Poland in autumn 1939 and the Western Allies in 1940, juggernauted into the Soviet Union in massive strength before the first light of dawn. Within hours they had advanced 30, 40, and 50 miles in various sectors along Russia’s western frontier. How could it have happened that over 160 Soviet divisions—infantry, cavalry, tank, and motorized infantry divisions deployed for weeks along the USSR’s over 2,000-mile western border—could be caught totally unaware by a huge invasion force of ten Wehrmacht armies embracing over 150 divisions?

On June 13, 1941, just nine days before the invasion, Soviet agent Richard Sorge, who was having an intimate affair with the wife of a top Japanese official through whom he gleaned top-secret information, informed the Kremlin that a German attack would be launched on June 22. Sorge said to the NKVD in Moscow: “I repeat, 10 armies combined in 150 divisions will launch an offensive across a broad front.” Yet Stalin chose not to believe these and other such reports, some of which also reached him from official circles in London and Washington. The Soviets were even getting information virtually from inside the German General Staff. In it they had a spy codenamed “Starshina,” who dispatched highly sensitive information about German war plans. Moreover, with the Enigma Machine and Ultra deciphering messages from the German High Command, the British at Bletchley Hall were able to read Wehrmacht General Staff communications traffic. They knew all about Operation Barbarossa. Yet Stalin reputedly thought that the British and Americans were only trying to embroil the Soviets in a war with Nazi Germany. His own agents, he wished to believe, were being duped or were simply imagining things. On one occasion when a highly placed Soviet spy in Germany reported on preparations for Operation Barbarossa, Stalin uttered, “Tell him to go **** his mother.”

OBVIOUS SIGNS

Under Stalin’s very nose some obvious things indeed were happening. For instance, through June 1941 crates of German diplomatic staff members’ personal belongings, including their pet hounds, were observed being readied for air shipment out of the Soviet Union.¹ This, too, was mentioned in Soviet intelligence reports passed to the top Soviet leadership.²

Stalin apparently contented himself with what appeared to him to be the general Soviet military advantage over any prospective enemy, in the west or the east—that mighty Soviet “deterrent” as it existed, at any rate, on paper. Above all, the Soviet leader continued to nurse the idea that Germany would not and could not prepare such an attack any time before 1942. And even then, was Hitler so “mad” that he thought he could take on a laterally extended country of eleven time zones, a military potentially capable of mobilizing upward of 10,000,000 soldiers, and an economy capable of converting rapidly to a war footing? Here Stalin had obviously exaggerated the effectiveness of German military intelligence, which in retrospect appears to have been grossly delinquent. (So in many respects was Soviet military intelligence.)

Indeed, on the eve of the Nazi attack in mid-1941, Soviet Russia’s military might did look impressive. According to statistics published in Russia in 1995, the Soviets had six million soldiers under arms (not including a backup reserve of millions of conscripts of all ages), with an estimated actual or potential 300 divisions of armed men with 120,000 artillery pieces and mines, 23,300 tanks, and 22,400 aircraft. Its planes outnumbered the Germans’ two to one—that is, 10,000–11,000 Soviet military aircraft to 5,000 total of the Luftwaffe, about half of which were deployed on the Eastern Front on the eve of the war.

True, some but by no means all this equipment was obsolete. In particular Red Army tanks were in some cases world class. However, the new weapons actually deployed in the units—the heavy KV and medium T-34 tanks, for instance—were in insufficient numbers. There seems to have been a total of only 500 of these impressive tanks to spread among the many divisions deployed along the western frontier in summer 1941. Where the Germans were unlucky enough to confront the T-34, they found that their main anti-tank gun, the 37-milimeter model, was so ineffective against the Russian monsters that disgusted German infantrymen referred to it as an “army-door knocker.”³

Other new equipment likewise was spread thinly and in some cases illogically, so that many units were left with arms of at least decade-old vintage. ⁴ There were late versions and upgrades of tanks and planes—all part of Stalin’s long-term plans for waging war—that had not yet been deployed to the forces at the front or were sparsely deployed where they were available. In spring, these forces had been augmented by an additional deployment of 800,000 Red Army troops brought up from rear positions. About two-thirds of this imposing force were positioned in several military districts (Kiev, Carpathian, etc.) directly abutting—dangerously, that is—the western frontier directly opposite the Wehrmacht formations.

On their part, for Operation Barbarossa the Germans had assembled on their Eastern Front an order of battle that included nineteen German Panzer and fifteen motorized infantry divisions and some 3,350 tanks, 7,230 artillery pieces, and 2,770 combat aircraft. On the first day alone of the invasion, with such forces the Germans had destroyed 1,200 Soviet aircraft, 800 of which were destroyed on the ground.

By the end of the first month of the war, of the 170 Soviet divisions by then deployed on the Western Front, twenty-eight were destroyed, and seventy more had lost half of their complement of soldiers and equipment. Considerable damage, nonetheless, was done to the Wehrmacht by the outclassed, yet brave Red Army soldiers—but not enough to blunt the attack overall. The war did not begin gradually to turn decisively in the Soviet favor until after the successful defeat of the German assault on Moscow in December 1941–January 1942. Some observers in the West single out, indeed, the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943 as the turning point in the war. But the earlier date is more accurate, a fact acknowledged, for instance, in the diary of German Army Chief of the General Staff General Franz Halder. He expresses such pessimism even as the Wehrmacht’s attack on Moscow was under way in autumn 1941.

In the following four months since June 1941, the Germans had occupied more than 500,000 square miles of territory with a population of 74.5 million. By December 1941, the number of those killed or taken captive was a total of seven million Soviet soldiers, of which four million were POWs; desertions on the Soviet side numbered upward of one million men. Total losses in equipment on the Soviet side during the six-month period were staggering: 22,000 tanks and upward of 25,000 aircraft were destroyed.

STALIN’S BEHAVIOR: CONVENTIONAL VERSION

According to the conventional version of the catastrophic events of that early Sunday morning, the zero hour itself of Operation Barbarossa had caught Stalin asleep in his dacha just outside Moscow. Stalin had returned to his “nearby,” as it was known, weekend retreat at Kuntsevo after an unusually tense, late-night session of Politburo in the Kremlin. The discussions that took place that fateful Saturday night, June 21–22, remain secret, although impending war was surely the main item on the agenda.

It was around 3 A.M., June 22, when Stalin, it is said, was awakened by his bodyguard, Lieutenant-General Nikolai Vlasik (Stalin’s “Bormann”), to answer an urgent telephone call. On the “Vertushka” (official phone line) at the other end was his right-hand man, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev. It was he who broke to him the incredible news of extended armed conflict along the Russian western frontier.

Minutes later Zhukov, then chief of the General Staff, telephoned Stalin. According to Zhukov Stalin became nearly speechless as Zhukov related briefly what was happening—to the best of his knowledge under prevailing conditions of primitive communications—on Russia’s exploding Western Front. Then Stalin, breathing heavily, continues this version of the story, immediately got on the phone to summon the Politburo to meet with him in an immediate, emergency session in the Kremlin.

Vlasik drove him at top speed to the Kremlin in Moscow in the Leader’s black, Packard-like ZIL limousine with its bulletproof windows. They sped along the widened highway specially used for official vehicles (and, as planned in the 1930s, made broad enough, it was rumored, to accommodate Soviet tanks). As he raced toward Moscow, writes the late Stalin biographer, ex-Soviet General Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin gazed out of the limousine windows “at the empty streets unaware that German aircraft were already on their way to bomb Soviet towns and aerodromes.”

When he arrived at the Kremlin and was driven through the Borovitsky Gate, General Volkogonov relates, Stalin went up to his office by the entrance reserved for him alone. Silent and somewhat cautiously, the members of the Politburo filed into Stalin’s tall-ceilinged, wood-paneled office. They were followed by Timoshenko and Zhukov. Without a word of greeting, Stalin said to no one in particular, “Get the German consul on the phone.”

Molotov left the room. A tense silence descended. When the taciturn commissar of foreign affairs returned, Molotov felt all eyes were fixed on him. He went to his place at the table. With his speech impediment, he stammered out: “The Ambassador [Schulenburg] reported that the German government has declared war on us.” He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand: “The formal reason is a standard one: [reading] ‘Nationalist Germany had decided to forestall an attack by the Russians.’” (Ironically, this was the same pretext used by the Soviets when they attacked Finland, also on a Sunday, in December 1939.)

“Stalin sat down and looked at Molotov with angry eyes,” Volkogonov continues, “as if he were remembering his [Stalin’s] confident prediction six months earlier that Hitler would ‘never wage war on two fronts’” and that the USSR had plenty of time to strengthen its western defenses. Then some of the general officers were asked to report what they knew about the invasion. They did not have much to report; communications were inadequate, to say the least. But what they did report stunned everyone, above all Stalin. Volkogonov continues:

Stalin had never had so great a shock in his life. His confusion was obvious, as was his anger at having been so misled, and his fear before the unknown. The Politburo members remained with him in his office all day [on June 22], waiting for news from the border. They left the room only to make a phone call, have a cup of tea, or stretch their legs. They said little, hoping that the failures were only temporary. No one doubted that Hitler would receive a resounding rebuff.

Eventually, as more grim news poured in, Stalin certainly did begin to “understand.” The first, cautious order sent to the commanders along the western border and to the Baltic fleet already engaging the enemy—Directive No. 1—was itself tragically flawed. Still laboring under the idea that the Germans were not truly unleashing a war in the full, strategic sense along the whole western frontier, Stalin directed: “Undertake no actions that could cause political complications [with Germany].” Moreover, Stalin apparently thought that the conflict, already under way, could be settled peacefully. It was in any case, he thought, a limited one allowing Germany only to gain some momentary advantage.⁵

In spring 2000, on the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet capture of Berlin, Generals Kvashnin and Gareyev commented on these events as follows in an article published in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta’s weekly supplement, Independent Military Review: “[This directive (of June 22, 1941)] disoriented the troops. If in actual fact the Supreme Commander himself did not know whether the country was in war or not, how would a regiment commander be able to conduct operations if he did not know what political consequences would follow?” This is a valid point. Then began a period in which, for almost two weeks, Stalin kept himself out of view, or so the story goes. Yet, as we will see, the visitors’ log to Stalin’s office, which was recently released from the archives, shows the leader at work there day after day following June 22. He gave no radio addresses; he submitted to no newsreel appearances; he did not rally his people, although the Politburo, some claim, timidly suggested that he do so. There were no authoritative declarations to the people from the “Leader and Genius of All the Peoples” as to what had happened or what the Soviet leadership was going to do to stem the tide of invasion.

On its part, the Politburo, it is said, hoped Stalin would immediately address the population. Instead, according to the conventional version, Stalin was “too stunned”—or was he protecting his exalted image?—to go before the public himself. Instead, he gave Vice Premier Vyacheslav Molotov the thankless task of publicly explaining the disaster and of spurring the people into retaliation.

Only on July 3 did Stalin emerge to give a radio address about the ongoing war. In this speech, the Soviet dictator addressed the whole Soviet people with an opening that unprecedentedly contained the phrase “brothers and sisters.” Apparently, during the days of being out of the public eye, Stalin pondered as to the best way to rally the people. Addressing them simply as “citizens” or “comrades” was not the way, although “comrades” did remain in part of the opening. Adding the religious sounding brat’ya i sestry—“brothers and sisters”—was a harbinger of further concessions to the citizens’ religiosity that was to come (among them, the ringing of church bells, the refurbishing of the Orthodox Patriarchate, the reopening of some churches, and so on).

Indeed, here the Soviet leader showed that he was not lacking in flexibility and political acumen. In a sense, his partly nonideological form of address to his people at this crucial time provides a microcosmic sample of Stalin’s overall “tactical” elasticity of a type in which he could put aside ideology in favor of higher priorities. Stalin was capable of such “ideological suspensions” when the dire need to do so arose—as it indeed did on several occasions during his quarter-century reign.

By November 1941 Stalin was ready to give a newsreel appearance—reviewing a military parade, as was his custom, from atop the Lenin Mausoleum. The occasion was the celebration of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, accompanied by a military parade in Red Square, November 7, 1941. On that same day the Red Army was battling the German Army less than 50 miles to the west and south of the Soviet capital. Under such dangerous circumstances, would the heavily protected Stalin take such a risk? What if a German Heinkel bomber... ?

As disclosed only recently, the ultra-security-conscious Stalin did not actually speak in Red Square as broadcast by radio and depicted in a newsreel at the time of the parade. His speech was later dubbed onto the footage shot of the parade in Red Square on that bitter-cold day. The security-conscious Stalin had ordered the cameras to be set up later inside the Kremlin in order to stage the speech. Audiences watching the newsreel presumably did not notice that on that cold day the Leader’s breath did not show up on the screen as he stood reading his address—as it turned out, indoors....

Thus, on the preceding day, June 23, the stuttering (ironically, England’s World War II monarch, King George VI, had the same speech defect) Molotov had done what he could in his brittle, tenor voice to broadcast the address. Nearly everyone heard his shocking words. In those days, the Communist authorities had rigged up at almost every main intersection or meeting place in towns and villages across the USSR ubiquitous indoor and outdoor loudspeakers attached to telephone or power-line poles. The address was aired several times.

As for Stalin himself, so the traditional story goes, he continued to remain “secluded” for weeks. He would venture only haphazardly to the Kremlin, or he would stay in a house on Kirov Street in the capital, or sometimes he would stop over at General Staff Headquarters a few blocks away from Red Square. Although there were as yet no air-raid shelters in Moscow—except, of course, for the intentionally deeply dug subways—all official buildings were very closely guarded.

However, as exploding shells near the outskirts of the capital began to be audible (some exploding in Moscow itself—scars from them are still visible here and there in the capital city) later in summer 1941, extensive protective measures were adopted. A special shelter was built for Stalin near his dacha. Also, evacuation measures were ready, if the need arose, to move Stalin and his entourage to safely distant Kuibyshev, some 600 miles to the southeast of Moscow on a large loop of the Volga River. This is how the standard version of Stalin’s behavior and actions reads during those first hours, days, and weeks of the German invasion.

NEW VERSION OF STALIN’S BEHAVIOR

Today, however, that version is being challenged in several ways as new facts have come in. As they reexamine the documents of newly opened archives, some Russian historians now are recasting their investigations in terms of answering several big questions:

If Stalin was totally unaware of a German military threat and therefore was “caught utterly by surprise” by the German attack—as official Soviet histories of the period claim—why had he started actively mobilizing for war the way he did and as documents show that he did in the opening months of 1941? Why would he plan to preempt a German attack, as some Russian military writers today insist that he was (see chapter 5), if he did not expect a sudden attack from the other side? The same documents, some of them new, show that he was fully aware of the ongoing German buildup opposite Russia’s Western Front.

On the other hand, assuming that Stalin was preparing his own preemptive attack for a later secret date (e.g., July or autumn 1941 or possibly in 1942) and, at any rate, was actively preparing for war of whatever type against the Wehrmacht to be launched by either side at some proximate date, it seems possible that Stalin was simply misled as to the exact day and time of Hitler’s attack (as Molotov said). And as a result, he was preempted by Hitler instead of the other way around (see discussion in chapter 8).

I will attempt to answer these questions in the light of what some authors presume were Stalin’s putatively offensive war plans. At the same time the defensist argument will be canvassed keeping in mind whatever old or new information points to a credible inference. The overarching questions can be put as follows:

Had Stalin poorly prepared Soviet Russia for a German invasion?

Was he, in fact, taken totally unaware when the Germans crossed Soviet borders in force in the early morning hours of June 22, 1941, or did the catastrophe ensue because of other reasons?

As a result of the surprise attack, did Stalin virtually collapse, secluding himself for weeks in his dacha outside Moscow, leaving others, the military and his closest aides in the Politburo, to cope on their own with Hitler’s “double cross”?

Until recently, the answer to each of the above was a nearly unqualified yes. But new evidence has been uncovered in Russian archives and from memoirs by witnesses to the events and Stalin’s behavior on June 22 and during the days immediately following the debacle on that fateful Sunday morning (see chapter 8). These testimonies cast doubt on some of the assumptions of the conventional view—namely, that Stalin was “paralyzed,” hysterical, and so on; that he removed himself from the scene in total confusion, wallowing in alcohol, as it is claimed, for several weeks; and so forth.

The conventional view has reigned unchallenged up to now ever since First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev gave his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. Much of its contents were repeated in Khrushchev’s post-1964 taped interviews when he became a pensioner and were then assimilated by historians—Russian and Western—as the gospel truth. But the veracity, not to mention the motives, of some of Khrushchev’s contentions concerning Stalin and his aides, who had since 1953 in many cases become Khrushchev’s rivals, has since been questioned.

One of the most telling recent pieces of evidence that this version may not be true is Stalin’s—that is, The Boss’s—very busy Kremlin office log during those trying days and weeks from the end of June to the first week of July. Recently disclosed documents show that instead of the Leader’s seclusion, Stalin was constantly present in his office on all the days following the German attack, working, as usual, past midnight.⁶ Without evidently missing a single day, Stalin was holding important meetings in his office in Moscow with all of his top military, party, and government officials. Documents found in newly opened archives disclose that the Soviet leader engaged in daily, many-hour sessions with his top military and civilian officials. Among the most frequent regular visitors of the dozen or so such top officials in Stalin’s office on a daily basis in late June were party and government officials Molotov, Beria, and Kaganovich and military staff officers Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Timoshenko, and Vatutin.

Khrushchev and others could invent freely. Stalin always tried to keep his vilest deeds—and mistakes—off the record. He ordered almost all top-secret documents and stenographic transcripts (that is, when they were kept) to be destroyed. What he did not destroy, his closest aides destroyed, to protect either the Leader or themselves. Yet the ultrasecretive dictator could not erase all the evidence. Some formerly hidden facts have been discovered in civilian and military archives in Russia in recent months and years. Since the demise of communism in Russia, certain memoirists have begun to speak out in ways that clash with the formerly accepted versions of events.

DEFENSE PREPARATIONS

One of the bigger “white spots” in the Soviet history of World War II concerns, as we have seen, Stalin’s defense preparations for a German invasion of the USSR. Obscured, too, are what his actions really were immediately after it. As to war preparations, we saw in the preceding chapter that in his address and remarks at the reception for the graduating military cadets in the Grand Kremlin Palace on May 5, Stalin had said outright that the principal, near-term enemy was Germany. For which threat, he said, stepped-up military offensive (his word) preparations should be made, including, it seemed, planning of a Soviet preemptive attack. From documents released in recent years, it has been learned that Stalin was already sending out feelers to a number of states in search of future wartime allies—allies in a common war against Germany. Among those governments approached were France, the United States, England, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Poland—the latter three being approached through their governments-in-exile.⁷

Before Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in Moscow in February 1956, Stalin’s war preparations were officially described as having been “fully adequate” and to have been “exclusively defensive” (sugubo oboronitel’niye), not offensist. Soviet declaratory military doctrine and strategy, it was averred, was one merely of “active defense” (aktivnaya oborona). The party line was that Stalin had wanted peace as long as possible. At the same time he built up the country’s industries and defense capability for a war that he “wisely knew” would eventually—as he said, “inevitably”—come. It would be a war that would be foisted on the USSR, certainly not an aggressive one launched on Soviet initiative.

In similar fashion, immediately after World War II, Stalin was to order his civilian and military propagandists to describe what he called the long-standing Soviet defense policy’s recognition of “permanently operating factors” in war. These boiled down to a Soviet policy of overt defensism based on the USSR’s eleven-time-zone-wide territory and its “peaceful aims” and intentions. Was this mere disingenuous hindsight?

Likewise, in this earlier, pre-1956 version it was claimed in retrospect that by the time of the Nazi–Soviet agreements of August-September 1939, Stalin and the military had wanted merely to “delay” the inevitable “big war” for as long as possible so as to be fully prepared when it finally did come. As it turned out, it was “postponed”—by a year and ten months, as Stalin boasted in his first war speech on July 3, 1941. By the Germans’ “perfidious” attack on June 22, Hitler had torn up these agreements, double-crossing Stalin by unexpectedly putting into action Operation Barbarossa—which had been first conceived by Hitler back in June 1940 if not foreshadowed in Hitler’s 1920s “bible,” Mein Kampf.

However, three years after Stalin’s death in 1953, much of this boilerplated version of the events of 1941 began to be scrapped in part by the Communist Party and its corps of historians. With this came Khrushchev’s secret “de-Stalinization” speech at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in February 1956. He brought to light many alleged new facts (including, it should be noted, a number of Khrushchev distortions) about Stalin.

The late dictator was depicted by Khrushchev—one of whose aims was to tar some of his rival comrades with Stalinism, thus exonerating his own deep involvement in Stalin’s crimes (especially in the purges in Ukraine of 1937—39)—as not only genocidal and paranoiac. Stalin was depicted as a self-glorifier who covered up his many costly policy mistakes before and during the war that had cost the lives of millions of soldiers and civilians. Many of the dictator’s military decisions were fatally flawed, Khrushchev alleged. They were the product of a disordered mind. For instance, according to Khrushchev, to the horror of his top military commanders Stalin used a large globe instead of large-scale military maps to plot Red Army counteroffensives. (The suggestion here was that Stalin acted like Ivan the Terrible, as in Sergei Eisenstein’s famous film of the late 1930s of the same name, in which the half-mad, bearded tsar is seen running his acquisitive fingers over an outsized globe as he planned his next conquests.)

However, by contrast, more credible information, based on later memoirs by retired soldiers and others, proposes that although Stalin interfered in battlefield decisions made in the first months of the war, by the later war years he began gradually to defer more to the professional military—Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, Timoshenko, Vasilievsky, Rokossovsky, Vatutin, Yeremenko, et al. Their input was crucial when the commander-in-chief, Stalin, approved the soldiers’ detailed combat decisions. However, in the earlier period of the war, many of the reckless, offensive operations, like many of Hitler’s after 1941, were ill-conceived and needlessly costly in casualties. Stalin was largely responsible for approving, if not initiating, these ill-conceived, early offensive operations.⁸

According to Khrushchev, one of the Stalin-fostered fantasies about fateful 1941 grossly covered up the late dictator’s utter lack of military acumen as well as his “actual” behavior on the eve of and after the German invasion on the fateful morning. In his narrative delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and in his taped memoirs after 1964, Khrushchev ridiculed the notion that Stalin had been a “genius-strategist,” that after the Wehrmacht’s surprise attack, he had risen bravely to the Nazi challenge, firmly taking the helm, ably leading the Soviet armed forces and people to ultimate victory.

The truth, claimed Khrushchev, was just the opposite. There was no surprise at all—that is to say, not to Khrushchev and a few others—about an imminent German invasion. Only Stalin was duped, by himself. As Khrushchev put it, “Sparrows were chirping about it at every crossroad.” Yet, he complained, Stalin had stubbornly refused to believe the many of his own intelligence agents’ reports that had crossed his Kremlin office desk prior to the attack. These reports, dozens of them, had warned of an approaching, full-scale Nazi invasion. Some warnings had come from Stalin’s best foreign agents. Other reports came from official sources in the West, including a personal, secret message from Prime Minister Winston Churchill (who did not reveal his source of information, namely, the Enigma Machine that by means of the Ultra operation at Bletchley Park decoded messages of the German High Command).

Stalin’s highest military intelligence (GRU) officer, Lieutenant-General Filipp I. Golikov, helped water down or otherwise discredit the most ominous reports before they reached Stalin. (Stalin, who centralized all sensitive functions within himself, had set up no “intelligence assessment” department—a department that was later instituted within the Soviet Ministry of Defense only after his death.) Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, also participated, it is said, in the discrediting of such reports. Most of this behavior by Golikov and Beria was motivated by sycophancy. On June 21, the day before the German invasion, Beria personally assured Stalin: “I and my people [in the NKVD], Iosif Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise instruction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941!”⁹

SO, DID STALIN “FALL TO PIECES”?

Like most tyrants, Stalin surrounded himself with toadies. The character “Shuisky” in Boris Godunov is the perennial Russian stereotype of a sycophantic official who has the ear of the tsar. The Kremlin was full of Shuiskys during the reigns of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors. When the attack occurred, Khrushchev had snarled, Stalin “fell to pieces.” He was paralyzed by “nervousness and hysteria.” He retreated in confusion to his dacha at Kuntsevo, where, as some others have claimed, he began drinking heavily. Hours after the invasion, he cowered when some Politburo members came to visit him at his suburban retreat. Stalin thought they were going to “arrest him,” Khrushchev claimed. But Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, et al. had come to visit the dictator in order merely to plead with him to rise to leadership.

But Stalin was inconsolable. “We f***** up, all is lost,” Stalin reportedly growled sullenly to the astonished Politburo squad. Moreover, in these first days and weeks, Stalin immediately started wheels turning, according to ex-General Dmitri Volkogonov, the post-Soviet biographer of Stalin, to work out a cowardly compromise with Hitler. In the proposed deal, according to this story, which has never been fully confirmed, the German invasion would be halted. In return in his suit for peace, Stalin would agree to hand over to the Germans all three Baltic Soviet republics, plus Moldavia as well as a large share of Ukrainian and Byelorussian territory already occupied by the invading Wehrmacht. Recent Russian sources deny the authenticity of the “cave-in” story.

A similar version of Stalin’s “collapse” was put out in the officially cleansed (under Brezhnev in the 1960s and 1970s) memoirs of Marshal Georgi Zhukov. So too have various post-1956 Communist historians put out like similar stories—at least up to 1992. Noted post-Soviet military historian Volkogonov himself hews to this version in his 1991 biography of Stalin. Present-day Communist and pro-Communist newspapers in Russia still claim that Stalin’s domestic policies in “building socialism” were mostly justifiable. Yet, they say, his behavior before, during, and immediately after June 22,1941, was inexcusably “abnormal.” So was his penchant for brutally purging coworkers and committing genocide against whole peoples and classes, they admit. But the latter-day Communists aside, the old version of Stalin’s behavior on the fateful days in late June 1941, inundated as it is by new documents, is losing its grip on credibility.

NOTES

The first epigraph is from Nikita Khrushchev, “Special Report to the Twentieth Party Congress, February 24–25, 1956,” in The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ed. Boris I. Nicolaevsky (New York: New Leader Magazine, 1962), p. 40.

The second is from Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), pp. 23, 29.

1

This was told to me by Dr. Ellsworth Raymond, who was on duty in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the weeks and months before, during, and after the Wehrmacht attack.

2

Dennis Showalter, “Operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s Greatest Gambit,” World War II Magazine (May 2001), p. 45.

3

Anatoly Kvashnin and Makhmut Gareyev, “Sem’ Urokov Velikoi Otech-estevnnoi” (“Seven Lessons from the Great Fatherland War”), Nezavisimoe Voyennoye Obozreniye (April 28-May 11, 2000), p. 2. Kvashnin is present chief of the General Staff; Gareyev is a well-known ex-Soviet military strategist and author, now president of the Academy of Military Science, Moscow.

4

Andrei A. Kokoshin, Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917–91 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 109.

5

Compare corresponding documents containing agents’ reports in A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 god. Dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond “Demokratiya,” 1998). Interestingly, Soviet Ambassador to Berlin Dekanozov’s and agents’ reports from various sources on Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland provide a somewhat ambivalent picture as to the true circumstances and motivations allegedly surrounding the flight of the “deputy führer” who parachuted from an Me-110 onto a Scottish estate on May 10, 1941. Gabriel Gorodetsky’s view, paralleling that of reports filed to Moscow by such agents in Britain as Kim Philby, proffers the belief that Hess was put up to the mission by Hitler in order to conclude a modus viviendi with Britain in opposing the USSR. However, later information reaching Stalin suggested that Hess, a “romantic” and “peace lover,” had made the flight strictly on his own initiative. This theory was borne out by the vehemently angry reaction in Germany, including that of Hitler himself, to Hess’s flight, as one Soviet agent duly reported. It is by no means clear from the available evidence whether Stalin went along with the conspiracy theory, least of all that England was about to mend bridges with Nazi Germany. The notion that Stalin bought the conspiracy theory, however, despite what Churchill or others claimed to the contrary, became frozen as the Soviet party line on the incident. However, some contemporary Russian historians suggest that Stalin’s reaction may not have been so “paranoid,” especially as clarification of the incident reached him from various sources. Such information indicated distinct German displeasure with Hess’s action, further confirming that Hess had acted alone. Incidentally, many of Philby’s reports seemed designed to cater to what he and some of the other operatives regarded as Stalin’s basically suspicious nature. Some Western historians display a suspiciousness toward England’s policy at that time that is at least as virile as Stalin’s reputedly was.

6

Yu. A. Gor’kov, ed., Kreml’, Stavka, Genshtab (Tver’: RIF Ltd., 1999), pp. 255–56. Stalin and his visitors on the following dates are so logged: June 22—Molotov, Beria, Timoshenko, Mekhlis, Zhukov, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Molotov, Shaposhnikov, et al.; June 23—Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, Timoshenko, Vatutin, et al.; and June 24—most of the same party, government, and military officials were in conference with Stalin, usually in the middle of the night, when Stalin preferred to work. All the rest of the days up to Stalin’s first radio address to the country, on July 3, show the same picture of Stalin, the alleged “workaholic,” evidently very much in control of himself and others, thus putting into question opposite interpretations.

7

Mikhail Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi shans Stalina Sovetskyi Soyuz i bor’ba za Yevropu 1939–1941 (Stalin’s Lost Opportunity: The Soviet Union and the Battle for Europe 1939–1941) (Moscow: Veche, 2000), pp. 495–96.

8

A number of post-Soviet Russian military writers note that Stalin, in contrast to Hitler, butted in less and less on a regular basis as the war went on. Hitler, on the other hand, increasingly defied any contrary advice from his generals, especially his line commanders on the Eastern Front, in setting tactics and strategy. The latest interpretations by some Russian military writers of Stalin’s decision making at later phases of the war depict the dictator in a relatively favorable light as being quite up to the job as commander-in-chief. Yet this is still being roundly debated among Russian historians. That he took no interest in military matters, as alleged by historian Gorodetsky, is, of course, untrue.

9

Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 244.