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

7 Stalin’s Response to “Barbarossa”—II

An updated recounting of the events surrounding June 22 and its aftermath is based in some cases on new evidence. Still later, as-yet forthcoming documentary evidence could, of course, refute or on the other hand support the current “revisionist” consensus. Yet in their books and articles the newer version is taking hold among Russian historians in ways that profoundly embarrass some previous histories and Stalin biographies in Russia as well as in the West by making them look inaccurate and outdated.

Stalin’s war preparations for the country and his own actions in mid-1941 during the first days of the German penetration into the USSR have been reanalyzed from approximately 1997 to the present in such Russian publications as Voprosy Istorii (Problems of History), Vtoraya Mirovaya Voina (The Second World War), Istoriya Sovetskogo Obshchestva v Novom Osveshchenii (The History of Soviet Society in a New Light), Voenno-Istoricheskyi Zhurnal (Military-Historical Journal), Prepodavaniye Istorii v Shkolye (The Teaching of History in the Schools), and other journals. Together with these a number of new books published in Russia likewise elucidate the controversy, among them in particular the volume edited by Russian academician Yuri N. Afanas’iev, Drugaya Voina 1939–1945 (The Other War 1939–1945), published in 1996, as well as Edvard Radzinsky’s biography of Stalin that came out in the same year. Added to these titles is the 600-page study of the period 1939–41 written by military historian Mikhail I. Mel’tyukhov, published in late 2000, and Pavel Sudoplatov’s 1994 work, Special Tasks, based on Sudoplatov’s work as deputy chief of Soviet foreign intelligence in this period.

Fresh insights can also be pieced together from reading recently available memoirs by, in some cases, informed, putatively reliable participants and on-the-scene observers at that time. These include Vyacheslav Molotov, No. 2 to Stalin; Pavel Sudoplatov, deputy chief of foreign intelligence in the 1930s and early 1940s; the elder son of Stalin’s security police chief Lavrenti Beria (1899–1953), Sergo; Georgi Malenkov’s (1902–88) son, Andrei; Radzinsky’s eyewitness informant, Yu. E. Chadayev, who was Council of People’s Commissars official stenographer at Stalin’s dacha; and others whose testimonies may be found in other archival documents. Furthermore, an informative documentary film, under the title Stalin and Hitler: Dangerous Liaisons, prepared by Russian and French scholars, was issued in 1999 under the auspices of Films for the Humanities and Sciences. (Incidentally, this film’s French and Russian historian-consultants hew to an “offensist” line on Stalin military strategy of that time.)

That Molotov, for one, may be apologetic toward Stalin in certain respects is undoubtedly true. Yet in all cases these writers show considerable well-roundedness. They are otherwise extremely critical of Stalin—for example, as in the memoirs of Beria’s and Malenkov’s sons, Sudoplatov, and so forth. Nor is Molotov totally uncritical of the Khozain.

LATEST VERSION

The latest picture that emerges of Stalin’s behavior and actions in the immediate aftermath of June 22 differs in significant respects from Khrushchev’s and other traditional treatments found in Soviet and Western histories. The new version is revealing and instructive. In their memoirs published after the demise of communism, Molotov, Sergo Beria, Sudoplatov, and Andrei Malenkov make the following points, as do some authors in the historical journals mentioned above (in particular, in The Teaching of History in the Schools, no. 1 [1998]):

Stalin did not “collapse” upon hearing from his aides and military commanders of the German invasion on the morning of June 22. Though he was angry and cursing, he retained his composure. Molotov puts it this way in his 1993 memoirs, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, edited by Felix Chuev:

Stalin seldom lost his temper . . . I wouldn’t say he “lost his head” [in the days following the invasion]. He suffered, but he didn’t show any signs of that. He is not portrayed as he really was. They depict him as a repentant sinner! Well, that is plainly absurd. [In that period] he worked as usual, day and night, never losing his head or his “gift of speech.” Molotov further noted that Stalin had edited the speech that he, Molotov, delivered the day of the invasion.

Molotov’s version sounds believable if for no other reason than this close aide of Stalin nevertheless is critical of Stalin here and there in his brutally frank conversations with the interviewer, Chuev. (Molotov dissembles occasionally in claiming, for instance, that there were no secret protocols to the 1939 Nazi–Soviet agreements.)

Sudoplatov, in his book Special Tasks, states:

In his memoirs, Khrushchev portrays Stalin’s “panic” and “confusion” in the first days of the war and later. I saw no such behavior. Stalin did not isolate himself in his dacha until June 30, 1941. The Kremlin diary [office log] shows that he was regularly receiving visitors and monitoring the deteriorating situation. From the very beginning of the war, Stalin received Beria and [his deputy] Merkulov in the Kremlin two or three times a day.... It appeared to me that the administrative mechanism of command and control was functioning without interruption. In fact . . . I maintained a deep belief in our ultimate victory namely because of the calm, clear businesslike issuance of these orders.¹

For his part, Sergo Beria notes in his book that Khrushchev was a notoriously poor witness (Georgi Malenkov’s son, Andrei, says the same) as to Stalin’s behavior in Moscow in late June 1941.² Khrushchev, Sergo Beria insists, was a habitual liar and loved to flatter himself while embarrassing and overpowering his Politburo rivals and enemies with tales of their own “Stalin taint” (meanwhile overlooking his own deep involvement in the bloody purges in Ukraine in the late 1930s).

In any case, on June 22, as well as on the following days, Beria’s son points out, Khrushchev was posted in far-off Kiev, Ukraine. Indeed, his name does not appear on Stalin’s late June office log, mentioned above. His last appearance in Stalin’s office is recorded as taking place on June 16! So how could he have possibly known how Stalin was acting?

For his part, Sergo Beria claims that he himself was near Stalin during those days and that he held private conversations about the fateful events with his father, Lavrenti Pavlovich, top member of Stalin’s inner circle in charge of the secret police and other sensitive affairs of state. He witnessed everything in those days. As Sergo Beria writes:

Not a single book [including Zhukov’s memoirs] does justice to the facts.... What Khrushchev and Zhukov had to say [about Stalin’s behavior and actions at that time] has no relation to historical accuracy. A fact is a fact, after all. [The facts are that] on the [Saturday] night of the invasion it is not true that military commanders were sleeping peacefully or were partying. On the contrary. [As to Stalin] he was, to be sure, upset about how things were going at the front. When it is suggested that Stalin never expected Hitler to strike, that he had faith in Hitler, or that the latter had deceived him is just another myth. . . . Stalin was not so much upset by the so-called “surprise attack” as he was by the fact that the Army was incapable of holding back the first onslaught of the attacking forces.

[Various] commanders, including Commissar of Defense Timoshenko and Chief of the General Staff Zhukov before and during the first hours and days of the attack . . . had many times assured Stalin and the Politburo that the Red Army could withstand an attack. [Earlier] they had always said, “The Army possesses all that is needed.” But when Stalin heard that the army was retreating toward the east, he was quite naturally shaken.... It is true that our Army was not yet sufficiently prepared to fight against mechanized forces such as the Wehrmacht. [Sergo Beria, like some post-Soviet Russian historians, blames the military for this lack of preparation.] Stalin knew about the invasion plan “Barbarossa” before June 22nd from intelligence officers. ... In his first speech of July 3rd Stalin himself spoke about how Hitler, by his “perfidious attack,” had violated the Nazi-Soviet Pact, “ignoring the fact that the whole world would regard her as the aggressor.”

Then Stalin added significantly as though implicitly to answer the question, Why didn’t the Soviets strike first? “Naturally,” argued Stalin, “our peace-loving country, not wishing to take the initiative in breaking a pact, could not itself resort to perfidy.”

Leaving aside here the question of whether Stalin and the Soviets actually may have been developing a military strategy for waging their own preventive war against Germany (see discussion in chapter 5 and in the conclusions in chapter 8), the political-declaratory side of this doctrine, as opposed to the unpublished, operational part of doctrine and strategy, did not and possibly could not say this in so many words. If it had, such aggressive statements—made, at least, to a broad domestic and foreign audience rather than to a close circle of military or party officials—would damage the Soviets’ global reputation. It would also preclude any possible aid that might eventually come to the USSR from the as-yet noncombatants and potential anti-Axis, “coalition” partners, such as the United States.

As it was, the USSR was able to win the support of the Western Allies and the invaluable Lend-Lease aid mainly because the USSR was seen as the hapless victim, not the initiator of an aggressive attack. There is even some evidence that Stalin was prepared to fall back on Allied aid in case other scenarios failed. In other words, he did not entirely burn his bridges with the West despite the Nazi-Soviet agreements of 1939–40. Note the fact that he kept the “Westerner” Litvinov in limbo rather than in purgatory. He was later to be exploited toward the West once again as deputy commissar of foreign affairs and Soviet ambassador to the United States (during World War II). Anastas Mikoyan, the Armenian “Teflon” perennial in the Stalin Politburo, is another example of a useful emissary. He flaunted the air of a debonair, flexible negotiator. Yet his own political loyalties and affinities were rigidly Stalinist—at least while Stalin was alive. In the post-Stalin period, a similarly accommodationist role was played by another hardy perennial in the Politburo, Premier Alexei Kosygin. Like Mikoyan, he, too, was an orthodox party-liner on foreign affairs though seemingly less rigid than other top Soviet officials on domestic policy.

One of the Russian historical journals points out that the problem with Stalin’s assessment of the intelligence reports that warned of the invasion (coming from such agents as Richard Sorge in Tokyo) was their often contradictory nature. One author points out that the contradictions even extended to inside the Nazi leadership itself, where invasion dates were repeatedly shuffled and changed, and that Soviet partial knowledge of this also confused the picture.

Hitler’s decisions, as we have seen, were kept secret even from top Wehrmacht commanders, not to mention from the amicable German ambassador to Moscow, Count von Schulenburg. The latter strongly opposed a German war against Russia. Schulenburg was later executed in Germany because of his alleged involvement in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler, and possibly also for his earlier pessimism about Barbarossa and evident friendliness toward the Soviets.

Nor, as it is alleged in both new and old Russian literature on the subject, did Stalin trust what Churchill had told him. Stalin was convinced, not without some basis, that the Western powers kept hoping that Germany would attack the USSR, not only because it was a Communist dictatorship but because the Germans would thereby become bogged down in a self-destructive two-front war. The new “generation” of Russian historians also nearly unanimously adheres to this point of view. In some instances Soviet agents also made this point—as they said, based on secret information—in their messages to the top Kremlin leadership. Meanwhile, English officials, particularly within the military, it is true, erred profoundly, as Hitler himself had, in thinking that the Soviets could not withstand a German onslaught whether it were made in the short or long run.

Half joking at a postwar Big Three summit, Winston Churchill brought up this sensitive subject personally to Stalin—namely, the latter’s show of incredulity toward the prime minister’s warnings. Stalin punned back that, after all, it was hard for him to believe “everything” that he was told, even by his own agents.

One Russian journal author points out that the well-known story of Sorge’s pinpointing of the date of the Nazi invasion is itself suspect (see Yu. P. Bokarev in The Teaching of History in the Schools, no. 1 [1998]). Bokarev notes that Sorge reputedly made his prediction even before Hitler and the German High Command had themselves fixed the date! In any case, Stalin, it is revealed in new documents, had a copy of Wehrmacht planning embodied in part in Operation Barbarossa. This is also claimed by Sergo Beria. However, the actual top-secret date of Barbarossa, as noted, was withheld from the German documents.

In the matter of Stalin’s preparations for meeting what he and everyone had expected would be a German attack sooner or later, there is, as we saw in chapter 5, evidence that, indeed, defensive and possibly also offensive war preparations were speeded up in the Red Army and Air Force, on Stalin’s orders, during spring 1941 right up until the invasion. One-half of all the Soviet armed forces was deployed on the front facing the Germans after massive mobilization and redeployments were under way in late spring. Many emergency preventive measures, it turns out, had been taken—though not completed—to meet the invasion threat—or to prepare to wage a preemptive attack from the Soviet side.³

SOVIET UNREADINESS: THE SMOKESCREEN

Meanwhile, Stalin realized that the Soviets possibly would not be ready for full-scale war of whatever type, defensive or offensive. Some analysts say that he thought the Red Army would be prepared, however, by July 1941. Yet in his interview with Chuev, Molotov claimed that the USSR would be ready for battle only “by 1943.” In any case, the Soviet leader evidently calculated that on their part the Germans would not likely attack much before 1942.

As a result of these surmises, Stalin relied on the diplomatic ploy of stalling and misleading Hitler by means of several ruses that he thought would work. For example, as we saw, he ordered the news agency Tass and the party newspaper Pravda in mid-June to publish vehement denials that the Soviets were building up forces along their western frontier. They were, the item suggests, doing nothing extraordinary there, nor was German–Soviet friendship weakening in any way. Nor were Red Army scouts—ground or airborne—positioned along the frontier permitted to shoot at straying German planes or in any way create a rumpus that would “provoke” the Germans. The Boss himself explicitly conveyed such warnings to the Red Army leadership. He once remarked to Zhukov (according to Zhukov), “You must be out of your mind” in thinking the Red Army was prepared (in late spring 1941) to wage a preemptive strike. This was Zhukov’s denial that Stalin had ever accepted the thinking contained, for example, in the notorious, offensist Timoshenko–Zhukov memorandum of May 15 (see discussion in chapter 5 and the conclusions in chapter 8).

Besides making these verbal assurances through his controlled press—that he knew would be read and duly assimilated to Soviet advantage in Berlin—Stalin made sure that the deliveries of raw materials by rail to Hitler continued on schedule, which they did right up until June 22 (see chapter 4). Yet whether this diplomatic gambit reflects gross negligence and inattention on Stalin’s part or whether, on the contrary, it was a last-ditch effort to “postpone the inevitable” remains a matter of contention among Russian historians. The latter have said they are looking into this question thoroughly as more documents possibly are released from the several archives—namely, those in the Ministry of Defense, in the president’s office, in secret police possession under the supervision of the Documents Department of the Federal Security Service, in the old Central Committee archives of the CPSU, or as collected in the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Documents and Archive Affairs in Moscow.

STALIN MISLED AND MISLEADS HIMSELF

In early 1941, it seems to be true that Stalin was resentful as he made his vehement denials of the veracity of some of the reports he was receiving from his intelligence agents. On one occasion, he told the messenger of such information to tell the agent to go “f*** his mother.” Others he accused outright of being agents of Germany. A psychologist might proffer the opinion that Stalin deep down simply did not want to believe what he was being told. It upset his plans to delay war or, for that matter, possibly one day to wage his own offensive war at his, not Hitler’s, time of choosing. Reflecting on Stalin’s behavior with such speculation in mind is perhaps instructive.

At any rate, according to Molotov, all that Stalin really cared about was preserving and strengthening the Soviet Union. Yet the Russian historian Bokarev suggests that it was more complicated than that. He writes that Stalin was confused by the conflicting mixed signals he was receiving from his agents as well as by what he thought he himself knew of Hitler’s plans and actions as of early 1941. Stalin acted as though he had a direct line to the Führer. There have even been rumors, as yet unverified, that Stalin secretly conferred one-on-one with Hitler in Poland in autumn 1939.

Stalin misled himself, it seems, prior to the invasion. For instance, the German buildup on Russia’s Western Front in spring 1941 looked a good deal less threatening to Stalin and perhaps to some of the military than to those very governments or governments-in-exile into whose countries Hitler was pouring additional troops—states such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Rumania. At times, on the other hand, it appeared that German military moves in Eastern Europe were aimed at establishing airbases at a safe distance from the West European arena. Such bases were to be used, allegedly, in the German air and rocket war against Britain, not in a war against the USSR. Perhaps Stalin adopted this rationalization as well. Perhaps concerted German disinformation had misled him in this way.

Moreover, as some recent documentation shows, Stalin could not really believe that Hitler would bring on himself a two-front war—as had happened so disastrously for Germany in World War I—without, at least, first finishing off Britain with the ongoing air war and erstwhile German plans for an invasion of England. Apparently, Stalin was not impressed by Hitler calling off Operation Sea Lion, the intended invasion of England. To Stalin’s mind, Hitler remained tied down in the West. The Soviet leader was well aware that the German capital city was being bombed—actually, during one of Molotov’s sojourns there in 1940. Furthermore, what about America? That formidable state sooner or later was bound to be another “imperialist” country warring against Germany. Already it was steadily shipping Lend-Lease supplies to Britain.

Another important factor affecting if not misleading Stalin was the flight of the top Nazi aide to Hitler, “deputy führer” Rudolf Hess, to England in May 1941. From the Cambridge, et al. spies in England—Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt—Stalin was led to believe that England might well one day close a deal with Germany. Only then would Germany turn on the USSR. Similar information—or was it misinformation? —reached Stalin from his ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky. British Ambassador Stafford Cripps occasionally also used such “information” in order to pressure Stalin to come to terms with the British before it was too late.

All this, runs one version of these events, must in turn have influenced the “paranoid” Soviet dictator into thinking that Britain (and the United States) were involved in a plot to deceive him—namely, that British warnings of an imminent German attack were intended merely to provoke a Soviet–German war. Some of these informers seemed to be motivated as much by sycophancy toward (or fear of) Stalin as by any hard information in their possession. Pleasing or placating the Boss was often uppermost. One’s very life could depend on it, after all.

Another factor was the reluctance of Stalin’s sycophantic chief of GRU, General Golikov, to relay to Stalin the grim truth about the imminent execution of Operation Barbarossa. Given Stalin’s firm, self-deluding conviction about Hitler’s intentions and Stalin’s overconfidence in his own powers to anticipate Hitler’s moves, to do so could well have threatened Golikov’s life, as, indeed, it actually had the lives of other informants.

Although Sergo Beria denies it, other historians believe that NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria himself was among those who misled Stalin. He is said to have assured Stalin with the prediction that Hitler would not attack if it meant a two-front war for Germany. All of this input may have contributed to Stalin’s shock at the time of the invasion.

New evidence shows something else: Intensive preparations for meeting an imminent German invasion, perhaps for preempting an attack, were actually under way intensively in late spring and in June. The problem was that these preparations—movements of troops from the interior, even as far away as Siberia, to the front, securing means of signals and communications along the front, getting arms and fortifications in place, securing airbases with anti-aircraft batteries, building new defenses of the forward “Molotov Line” type, and much else—had not been completed in time. And this was amid evident assurances to Stalin from the Red Army High Command that the army was on the ready and invincible. Such reassurance may or may not have convinced Stalin.

Above all, it was fully expected by the military and civilian leadership that a forewarning of up to two weeks would precede any actual invasion as the Wehrmacht actually concentrated forces for such a vast undertaking. There would be time enough for both Red Army echelons—the first on the frontier and the “covering,” second echelon—to deploy and rally to the defense of the country. In other words, if this was a purely military miscalculation, the blame for the surprise may not rest solely on Stalin’s shoulders. Stalin had been largely assured by his military commanders, after all, that there was no worry. The Red Army was ready to respond to “any contingency.”

There were exceptions. At the very last minute, Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, on duty in the Baltic, was one of the few commanding officers to be quite thoroughly aware of the immanency of the German danger. One or two frontline army commanders risked their lives by likewise trying to alert the political and military authorities in Moscow to the immediate danger of an attack in late June.

Even after Soviet planes were being destroyed on the ground and Soviet ground troops were attacked in the eerie predawn light, the top command in Moscow, including Stalin, was incredulous as to the extent or seriousness of the hostilities initiated by the Germans. At least twenty-four hours into the invasion, Stalin is alleged to have believed only that border skirmishing had merely gotten out of control. He insisted that Soviet troops should do nothing to instigate further hostilities. One of his earliest orders of June 22, as we saw, was based on this assumption.

THE MILITARY SITUATION ON JUNE 22

All of these factors, say the new crop of Russian historians, are what led to the debacle that followed the June 22 invasion, together with German occupation of so much of European Russia in the first months of the war. It was not entirely a case of Stalin’s personal miscalculations or of his cowardice after the German juggernaut started rolling. More likely, it was the suddenness and sheer boldness of the Wehrmacht blitzkrieg—the unexpected, successful application to Russia of blitzkrieg tactics that had worked so well against an entirely different type of nation-state enemy in the West in 1940.⁴ These were tactics that were not supposed to be applicable against Russia, given its ultimate preponderance of troops and territorial space in which to retreat before counterattacking. This perception lulled the Russians into complacency concerning a German attack.⁵

In mid–June 1941 Soviet Russia had “on paper” 303 infantry, tank, motorized, and cavalry divisions, of which one-quarter, however, was still in the process of being formed.⁶ Nor was the Red Navy unimpressive with, for example, 212 submarines and many surface ships. Equipped forces deployed along the western frontier numbered 163 infantry, cavalry, tank, and motorized divisions consisting of 2,743,000 men with 57,000 guns and mortars, 12,762 tanks, 8,696 military aircraft in good condition, and 545 naval ships. All these composed the first strategic echelon of the Soviet military forces in the west. To cover them the Red Army had deployed along the frontier thirteen general forces armies.

On June 21, an urgent message was sent to Georgi Dimitrov, Comintern general secretary, from close friends, the Chinese Communists based in northwest China.⁷ Signed by Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung, the message warned Moscow of an imminent German attack. It drew this reply from Molotov: “The situation is not clear. A big game is in progress. Not everything depends on us. I will talk this over with J. V. [Stalin]. If something special comes out of it, I will telephone you!” The call was never made.

One still wonders what Stalin meant when, in his victory speech at a Kremlin reception in honor of Red Army commanders on May 24, 1945, he seemingly “repented” as follows as he heaped praise above all on one of the combatants on the multinational Soviet side, the “Russian people”:

[Before the war] our government committed no few mistakes; at times our situation was desperate, as in 1941–42, when our army was retreating, abandoning our native villages and towns.... Another people might have said to the government: You have not come up to our expectations. Get out. We shall appoint another government, which will conclude peace with Germany and ensure tranquility for us. But the Russian people did not do that, for they were confident that the policy their government was pursuing was correct.... I thank the Russian people for this confidence! To the health of the Russian people!

ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS AND QUESTIONS

Adolf Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 was motivated, some historians believe, by the Führer’s fear of an eventual two-front war that would likely be fought in the future on the European continent. He imagined that the war would widen, that, for example, America, a crucial, prospective combatant, sooner or later would enter the fray. Thus, by waging and winning a “preventive war” against the USSR already in 1941—even before he had defeated England throughout 1940—the German dictator sought to preclude a repeat of that crucial German predicament of World War I: that is, augmented forces of the Western Allies fighting Germany on one side and their Russian ally fighting Germany and the Central Powers in the east.

America’s Expected Role in the War: Hitler had America on his mind, as did apparently Stalin. They both reasoned that sooner or later this large, crucial country with its impressive economy and defense-producing potential would surely enter the global war. Hitler sought to preempt this likelihood by defeating Russia ahead of time, thereby dominating the Eurasian continent as proposed by his “official geographer,” General Karl Haushofer.

Stalin, by contrast, appears to have relished U.S. entry into the war even before the USSR was attacked. Whether Stalin looked forward to the likelihood of American involvement in hostilities with a diabolical aim in mind (namely, seeing America weakened and revolutionized by global war that was to include Japan) or with a more realistic expectation that America might thence become a future Soviet ally remains a subject for future investigation. At present no documents support one or the other view.

Still, by early July 1941, he immediately sought Western aid against the “common foe,” Germany. Much earlier, in his speech to the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, Stalin had referred to the United States as a “nonaggressive” capitalist country. Later, he had sent friendly feelers in the direction of Washington.

Did Stalin Anticipate the United States as an Ally?: The second volume of Yakovlev’s edited The Year 1941: Documents reproduces a revealing conversation that was held in Moscow on June 5,1941, seventeen days before the German attack. The talks were between U.S. Ambassador Lawrence Steinhardt and Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs S. A. Lozovsky.⁸ Both made significant concessions on trade and various other issues. It was obvious that Lozovsky had been given orders from above in the Kremlin to be forthcoming to the American. The new Soviet attitude was quite perceptible.

The Unwise Decision to Attack Soviet Russia: The decision to attack the USSR ran absolutely counter to Hitler’s earlier, explicitly expressed tactic of seriously courting that state on a long-term basis. Indeed, both dictators had described their emerging interstate friendship as “long lasting.” Hitler and Stalin’s joint initiatives in 1939–40 in signing various sweeping agreements, including the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 (see chapter 4), was, to Hitler’s mind, a safe way of avoiding—short of war—the pincers of a two-front vice.

Still, it might be asked, if forestalling a two-front war by diplomatic means was indeed Hitler’s principal motive in establishing “lasting friendship” with Soviet Russia, thus waiving Nazism’s condemnation of “Jewish Bolshevism,” why did the Führer decide to turn against his newfound Soviet ally in June 1941? Was, in fact, such an invasion nested in Hitler’s plans all along? Likewise, Stalin is known to have confided to intimates that sooner or later Germany and the USSR would be at each other’s throats. As far as Germany was concerned, in his diary Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels indicated the same prediction. So it would appear that stated sentiments on both sides of long-lasting friendship were disingenuous.

Was Hitler “Forced” into the Invasion?: Was Hitler forced or, on the contrary, did Stalin’s own new show of westward aggressiveness, his large-scale territorial annexations in 1939–40 against German interests in Central and Balkan Europe, and his various demands proffered in late 1940 so profoundly alarm the Germans that Hitler was “forced” to preempt Soviet Russia’s own aggressive plans vis-à-vis Germany? Although historians—especially those in Germany and Russia today—do not agree on the answers to these questions, on one thing they unanimously concur: Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia in mid-1941 turned out to be Hitler’s fatal mistake, dooming him to defeat against the Allies in World War II. His rout in Russia, like Napoleon’s 125 years before, paved the way to the Allied victory, not only over the European Axis but also over Japan, the newly become Asian ally of Hitler and Mussolini.

Significantly, too, Operation Barbarossa had precluded Soviet Russia’s own joining, as seriously anticipated in Moscow and Berlin, a projected Four-Power Alliance, an expanded Axis, that was to include the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan. This monumental scheme was seriously discussed in secrecy between the Germans and Soviets in 1940 and is now part of the public record. However, because of Operation Barbarossa, this potential grand alliance, embracing three continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa), obviously could never see the light of day. However, had it materialized, without doubt the outcome of World War II would have been vastly different.

The Controversy Continues: Today two groups of historians—some Russian, some German, others Americans or British—take opposing views on the question of the Nazi–Soviet alliance and the German attack together with its consequences. One school insists that Hitler, as early as mid-1940, defying doubts in the minds of trusted aides (among them, it appears, Air Marshal Hermann Goering, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Propaganda Minister Goebbels, and Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg), had decided to invade Russia and terminate Nazi–Soviet friendship and collaboration—a scheme that he had in general long nurtured. The timing of the attack was not a badly calculated one. Having failed to subdue England in the air blitz of 1940–41 and fearing eventual U.S. participation in the war, possibly alongside Soviet Russia, Hitler decided to act decisively before it was too late. He would settle scores with Bolshevik Russia once and for all and return, in a sense, to what he had preached so vehemently in Mein Kampf. Whatever Stalin was up to at that time by way of aggression or pure defense was irrelevant. So runs one conventional interpretation.

On its part, a second group of historians—among whom are some contemporary Russian authors and scholars together with some Russian, German, and British ex-officials, memoirists, and other writers who in part rely in their research in newly opened Russian archives—insists that by their aggressive actions, Stalin and Molotov by mid-1940 had profoundly alarmed and infuriated Hitler.⁹ At that time Moscow had begun making brazen demands on the Germans, such as insisting on giving the USSR a unilateral free hand in the oil-rich Middle East, the Balkans, Finland, and the Turkish Straits while threatening to seize the Rumanian oil fields. In starting to gobble up large swatches of territory in the Baltic and East European regions, the Soviets did not bother to inform Berlin, Moscow’s putatively sworn ally, of the dates and details as warranted by their agreements of 1939.

According to Ribbentrop, Hitler’s pro-Russian, anti-British foreign minister, Hitler thus was “forced” into making a decision to stop Stalin, a conclusion he had reached, Ribbentrop and others claimed after World War II, only in late 1940. Hitler had not made the Operation Barbarossa decision, as alleged by some, Ribbentrop has claimed, as early on as June or July 1940.

As indicated above, one of the most intriguing, controversial questions haunting historians of World War II concerns Soviet—or rather, Stalin’s—behavior in the aftermath of the signing of the several Nazi–Soviet agreements in Moscow beginning in August 1939. As we have seen, in the conventional interpretation of the run-up to the German invasion of June 21, 1941, the Stalin regime was and still is depicted in a number of histories as being terrified at the prospect of any ensuing deterioration of Nazi-Soviet relations, let alone all-out war. After all, since autumn 1939, the Soviet leader had ordered his government-controlled media not to criticize Hitler and Nazism. Not even the word fascism was allowed to appear in print in Soviet media. Moreover, besides shipping him vital raw materials used in the war against the Western democracies, Stalin did all he could in other ways to help or even placate Hitler. For example, he ordered, communist fifth-column agents to sabotage Western defense plants (i.e., until mid-1941) while sending congratulations to Hitler when the Wehrmacht took Paris in May 1940.

On several occasions and via various memoranda, Stalin and Molotov indicated fulsomely to Berlin that Moscow was on Germany’s side in fighting the so-called bourgeois, plutocratic, and colonialist regimes of Western Europe. Both dictators relished the prospect of an utterly destroyed British Empire that together they would help bring about.

To this hypothesis, other authors respond: Yes, Stalin did all these things to placate but also eventually to mislead Hitler. The Soviet dictator, it is alleged, greatly feared Hitler. He did all he could to demonstrate his friendship with his totalitarian German counterpart as well as showing loyalty to the Nazi–Soviet agreements. Stalin had drunk toasts to Hitler, whom, he said, he knew the German people admired and whose “iron rule” in Germany he sincerely respected no less than Hitler appreciated Stalin’s new order. Stalin had made sure that the billions of dollars worth of deliveries of war-related raw materials—rubber, oil, food, textiles, rolled steel, and other goods under the economic aid terms of the Nazi–Soviet agreements—were made punctually. They were, in fact, kept strictly on schedule, reaching Brest-Litovsk in former Poland and then downloaded from the wide-gauge Soviet railroad cars onto the narrow-gauge tracks to ship them on to Germany. Stalin also said that Soviet–Nazi friendship was “sealed in blood.”

LATEST OFFENSIST ARGUMENTS

Meanwhile, as some Russian historians allege today, Stalin, who was stalling for time during this “breathing space,” was secretly planning his own offensive war against Germany and, in fact, the rest of Europe (see chapters 5 and 7). Historians who think this way find themselves in agreement with, for example, the British ambassador to Berlin in the late 1930s, Sir Neville Henderson. According to Henderson, Stalin’s true motive in joining forces with the Nazis and helping them defeat the West was so that the USSR could stay out of the fray while watching the Allies and Axis destroy one another. The Soviets would help along this process of self-destruction by aiding Germany and by sharing the spoils of aggression with them, as described above. Perhaps the ambassador had been reading Stalin’s Works. At the conclusion of this collaboration and ultimate German defeat or the mutual exhaustion of the belligerents, Henderson insisted, the Soviets would thereupon march west for the kill, sovietizing all of Europe as openly stated by their own ideologists as well as by the Communist International (Comintern). Henderson, it seems, had taken seriously Stalin’s statements along these very lines in 1925.

However, once Hitler perceived that this was Stalin’s game, some argue, Hitler decided to act. Operation Barbarossa was formally approved by Hitler for active preparation and implementation by December 18, 1940. As some historians note, this decision was made precisely at the time German disagreements with their Soviet “partner” over Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland, the straits, and so on were reaching a climax. When they were informed of Hitler’s final decision to go ahead with Barbarossa, Mussolini and many Nazi aides were left in a nervous state. In his diaries Goebbels made fun of such “cowards.”

As we now know, the British got wind of Barbarossa through their reading of German signals traffic via their captured (in Poland) Enigma Machine and Ultra deciphering program at Bletchley Park. Not wishing in any way to reveal that they had this machine as well as the remarkable breaking of the code that allowed the reading of top-secret General Staff orders, the British nevertheless discreetly “leaked” to Soviet intelligence only bits of what they carefully chose from the closely guarded information, lest it be known that the British had such a system. (Not even the ubiquitous Soviet agents in Britain, it seems, were able to penetrate the premises where Engima and Ultra were secretly ensconced.) Among these pieces of information, as we saw, were details of German planning for the invasion of the USSR.

Yet Stalin apparently remained unpersuaded by the British information, the secret source of which he did not, of course, know. He calculated that London was merely trying to break up the Soviet–German romance and get the USSR embroiled in war, which, among other things, would have corresponded to the long-held, anti-Soviet sentiments of Prime Minister Churchill. Nor did some informed warnings by certain Red Army commanders in spring and summer 1941 impress Stalin, for in these early times he tended to mistrust his generals. He had brutally purged many of them in previous years, from 1937 onward; he continued to badger and threaten them. As we saw, even the warnings of his top spy posted in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, who predicted within days the exact date of the German attack, did not convince Stalin that a Nazi double cross was in the making.

At his post in Japan, Sorge, in fact, was abandoned and left defenseless by Stalin when the Japanese government learned of his espionage activities, for which he was executed in Tokyo in late 1941 when no attempt was made by the Soviets to get him out of Japan. (Sorge had also tipped off Stalin on Japanese planning for the Pearl Harbor attack—a bit of information that Stalin did not share with Washington.) Shortly before this, Sorge had informed Moscow that Ribbentrop was trying to get the Japanese to break their neutrality treaty with the USSR that had been signed in spring 1941. (His yeoman service to the Boss was left mainly to the annals of history, although he was given posthumous recognition in the Brezhnev period of the 1970s.)

In articles appearing in the States-side Russian weekly Panorama in the late 1990s, Russian military historian Vladimir Lyulechnik demonstrates by references to archival documents how Stalin considered without reservation an eventual war with Germany to be “inevitable.” Stalin perceived that a short period of collaboration with Germany would delay the inevitable conflict while permitting Soviet Russia to further build up its own offensive and defensive military forces, a process that dramatically accelerated at this time. So Lyulechnik claims.

Meanwhile, the allegation in old-style Soviet propaganda (still encountered today in Russia and in many Western history texts) that Stalin had seized the Baltic states and made other territorial annexations in 1939–40 to create a “buffer” against a near-term German invasion of Russia is not borne out by the facts, Lyulechnik continues. His view is shared by a few Western-based historians (Raack, Tolstoy, Topitsch, and Suvorov, among others) and a number of contemporary Russian historians (such as Bobylev, Nevezhin, and Radzinsky).

Lyulechnik, like some other latter-day authors, notes that Stalin ordered no systematic, thoroughgoing defense measures to be undertaken in those territories that he had seized in 1940 bordering German-held territory to the west. If defense rather than offense was on Stalin’s mind, wouldn’t he have ordered defensive preparations along this new line 300 miles west of the former Soviet frontier? these authors ask.

Moreover, the notion of delaying a German invasion as the motive for these annexations is canceled out by the fact that Stalin, by virtue of his seizures of the western lands, succeeded in further endangering the USSR by moving Soviet borders nearer to those of German-occupied Europe. The Germans could then proceed, as they did, to mobilize along that extended, largely unprotected front. Still, the “buffer” argument, accepted uncritically, continues to be dominant in standard American world history textbooks and many books on World War II (for further discussion of this point, see chapter 5).

Like Lyulechnik, former Soviet artillery and GRU officer Viktor Suvorov (nom-de-plume of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun), as mentioned earlier, author of a half dozen insider books on the Soviet intelligence and the military, maintains in his 1992 book, Ice-Breaker, that Stalin in effect forced Hitler’s hand in making war against the USSR in 1941. The Germans, he says, concurring with a few other observers, adopted a policy of preventive war simply to defend themselves against an eventual, perhaps even imminent Soviet attack on them. They apparently had foreknowledge of this Soviet plan. In any case, this was the official pretext proffered by the Germans, and Hitler personally, just after the June 22 invasion in the declaration from Berlin that followed the opening of hostilities. At one point Stalin in late 1941 cursed in retrospect Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, co-signer with Molotov of the Nazi–Soviet agreements in August 1939, calling him a “scoundrel” (podlets).

According to Suvorov, German worries about a Russian attack were borne out by the fact not only of Stalin’s several threatening territorial acquisitions on the German eastern flank. This may be ascertained as well from other information that Suvorov gleaned from Soviet published sources. Moreover, Suvorov reasoned that by 1941 Stalin had perceived that the German position of strength gained in Nazi-occupied Central, Eastern, and Western Europe and the possible, even likely German acquisition of the British Isles constituted a dire threat to Soviet security. German expansion in Africa and the Middle East not to mention Norway likewise was threatening to Moscow because it could be seen as an undisguised attempt to outflank the Soviets’ own ambitions to secure warm-water egress to the south (Iran, Persian Gulf, India, etc.).

As alleged by Suvorov, Lyulechnik, and a few other authors, by summer 1941 Stalin began actively to plan an offensive war against Germany. He calculated that to sit and wait for a German attack and, therefore, to wage only defensive war would mean, among other things, losing hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers as POWs, for many could be expected to defect to the Germans if the Soviets fought merely defensively. (As a matter of fact, over a million did defect in any case.) Another Russian military historian (see chapters 5 and 8), Pavel Bobylev of the Institute for Military History attached to the RF Ministry of Defense, criticizes Stalin in a 2000 article for not taking the allegedly planned offensive indicated as being his long-term option in the relevant documents.

Two French authors, I. A. Dugas and F. Y. Cheron, cited by Lyulechnik in the weekly Russian paper Panorama, likewise insist that Stalin calculated that an offensive strike against Germany would be the most feasible option for Soviet Russia for military as well as sociopolitical reasons. It would jive with the long-standing Marxist-Leninist-Comintern formula of exporting “proletarian revolution” on the tips of bayonets. In its plan Germany was to be a principal target as the bridge to the rest of Europe.

In November 1940, these several authors point out, Moscow, via Stalin’s right-hand emissary to Berlin, Molotov, was backing Berlin into a corner by making extravagant territorial demands—as, for example, against Rumania, a mutually recognized German satellite—and by making seizures of Lithuanian territory in violation of Soviet–German agreements while continuing to complain about German ties to Finland. Together with Soviet pretensions of control over the Black and Baltic Seas, Berlin perceived the emergence of “Soviet provocation.” This was bound sooner or later to escalate into an armed confrontation between the two states as they jockeyed for position in the Balkans. In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer quotes Hitler as saying at that time: “Stalin is clever and cunning. He demands more and more. He’s a cold-blooded blackmailer.” As for Hitler, Lyulechnik writes (Panorama, June 21–27, 1995): “Stalin was convinced that the German leader would not risk waging war on two fronts. Therefore, Stalin decided to act aggressively against his former ally, Germany.”

Lyulechnik, like Suvorov, finds the proof for his offensist interpretation in the altered Soviet military doctrine worked out in 1939–40. In the new doctrine are several revisions of the former, largely defensist doctrine; the new amendments, he claims, all point in the direction of waging offensive war. Above all, the new doctrine detailed secret plans for rapid deployment of offensive Soviet air, ground, and naval forces to be hurled against Germany as well as plans for “carrying out military exercises to prepare Soviet forces to wage such offensives.” Suvorov, claims Lyulechnik, is essentially correct in setting the date for the opening of the Soviet offensive on July 6, 1941. And according to Joachim Hoffmann, the German historian cited by Lyulechnik whose articles appear occasionally today in Russian historical journals, Stalin, with offensist designs in mind, began deploying on the Soviets’ Western Front 24,000 tanks, including the new, long-barreled T-34 amphibious “Stalin tank”; 23,245 aircraft; and 148,000 vehicles and mine layers, 3,710 of which were of late design.

In agreement with other researchers of the “revisionist” school, Lyulechnik concludes that the facts show that Stalin made his pact with Hitler on August 23, 1939, in order to unleash war in Europe. In fact, in Poland on September 17, 1939, he had in essence taken part in the war as a “full-fledged aggressor.” By November 1940 via Molotov in Berlin he let it be known that he had no fear of Hitler. Confidentially, Stalin considered a Soviet–German war to be an inevitability. He indicated that he would take the initiative for starting the war into his own hands, as stated in the military writings of the period. Moreover, he stressed that under no conditions should war be allowed to be waged on Soviet territory itself. This, in any case, would be precluded by the Soviets taking the offensive via a surprise invasion, or “first strike” (pervyi udar, or uprezhdayushchyi udar), against the enemy.

Disputing this view to an extent in his writings in the mid-1990s was Yeltsin military adviser retired General Dmitri Volkogonov. He insisted that no document had yet been found that definitively proved Stalin planned such an offensive. To this Lyulechnik, like Suvorov, has answered that on the contrary “such documentation does exist. It was recently published, in fact,” he continues, “and is known under the rubric, ‘On the Plan to Deploy the Strategic Forces of the Soviet in a War Against Germany and Its Allies,’ found in reproduction in an article by Yu. A. Gor’kov, published in the [Russian] journal Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya (New and Latest History), No. 4, 1993.”¹⁰ The author writes that “in making his attack upon the Soviet Union, Hitler had merely outsmarted Stalin by anticipating the latter’s near-term plans.”

Lyulechnik contends that Stalin, in any case, was not entirely taken by surprise by the Nazi invasion:

He expected Soviet forces to be thrown back in the initial phase, if such an attack were first made by the Wehrmacht. It seems that Stalin himself was prepared to give up territory under such circumstances—at least, for several weeks. When the Germans actually did attack and Soviet forces were driven back so disastrously far, Soviet military planners were stunned. Stalin, however, did not panic [as alleged by Khrushchev and others].

Stalin quickly rallied and began over time to rely on his professional military so that Soviet Russia eventually could apply that same offensive strategy against the Germans. This they did by 1942–43 in the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and beyond.

By 1944–45, all parts of the Soviet offensive military doctrine and strategy were being fully applied against Hitler and his allies. Together with this, the global messianism of Marxist-Leninist doctrine was beginning to manifest itself. Former Soviet Foreign Intelligence Deputy Chief Sudoplatov notes, significantly, in his book Special Tasks, how Stalin sought nothing less than

world domination. Although originally this concept was ideological in nature, it acquired the dimensions of Realpolitik. This possibility arose for the Soviet Union only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. In the Secret protocols the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interests and natural desires for the enlargement of its frontiers were for the first time formally accepted by one of the leading powers of the world.¹¹

By 1941, Lyulechnik contends, Soviet Russia possessed overwhelming military superiority. The Red Army had seized forward positions in Eastern Europe from which it could jump off in waging an offensive war against Germany. By spring, political and military preparations of the Red Army were nearing completion. Yet in June the Soviets still were not ready to see through their offensist plans, the writer alleges. Hitler had gotten the jump on them.

TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS

How had Stalin managed to be caught off-guard so ignominiously by Operation Barbarossa? From what has so far come to light from the partially opened archives in Moscow, it is clear that it was a case of Stalin’s own offensive strategy blinding him to the Germans’ corresponding offensive plans. Ironically, the Soviet-German offensive strategy had been jointly developed in the proto-blitzkrieg war games played out on the Russian steppe in the presence of Red Army and German officers from the Weimar Republic in the 1920s up to 1933. This was when the German General Staff sent representatives—Guderian, Manstein, Keitel, Brauchitsch, Model, Horn, et al.—to Soviet Russia in the years and months preceding Barbarossa for waging offensive war (see chapter 3). The offensive strategy, ironically, had been the brainchild of Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and his associates, whom Stalin had purged in 1937–38 and who had previously been participants in the Soviet–German military collaboration of the 1920s.

There is, incidentally, documentation for the possibility that Tukhachevsky actually was involved in a germinating plot to do away with Stalin. At the same time there were many, utterly ridiculous trumped-up charges made against the marshal at the purge trial in 1937. One of these was that he was “Trotskyite”; another, that he was collaborating with the Germans. Some researchers question the veracity of the claim made by certain authors that Stalin had been swayed by outright disinformation concocted about the “officers’ plot” and handed over to the Soviet dictator by the Germans. Their purpose, it is said, was to mislead Stalin into decapitating the Red Army. But Stalin, new evidence indicates, had his own dossier for incriminating the professional soldiers, whom he considered plotters or at the very least dangerous rivals.

Indeed, the German generals’ familiarity with and appreciation of the talents of their Soviet counterparts of the 1920s indirectly contributed to Hitler’s perception of an enfeebled, “decapitated” Red Army due to the bloody repressions of those top Soviet officers that had taken place ten years later in 1937–39. Three out of fifty-four marshals were bloodily purged. Similarly liquidated were thirteen of fifteen Red Army commanders, eight out of eight fleet admirals, fifty of the fifty-seven corps commanders, and so on. Some of the best Red Army military brains were purged, including all eleven vice commissars of defense. A total of 43,000 officers were liquidated. This left inexperienced “lieutenants” in charge. Two years later the Soviets’ debacle in the early, disastrous phase of their ‘Winter War’ against Finland merely confirmed Hitler’s impressions of a paper-tiger Red Army. British intelligence got the same impression, which dovetailed with London’s apparent disinterest in collective-security arrangements with such a weakened power as Soviet Russia.

In Moscow in spring 1941, Zhukov and Timoshenko, respectively chief of the General Staff and commissar of defense, urged Stalin to sharply boost preparedness on the Western Front and to take other measures kak vozmozhno skoreye, or “as soon as . . . .” Zhukov, as Lyulechnik has noted, even called for a preemptive strike against the Wehrmacht (see chapter 7). He continued to urge a counteroffensive or all-out offensive strategy that became the theme of Stalin’s secret speech to the graduating cadets in May 1941.

In the opening weeks of the “Great Fatherland War,” Stalin would issue urgent orders to commanders to wage counteroffensives or at very least “partial counteroffensives.” And he called for the arrests of a number of frontline commanders, many of whom were in due course tried and shot on Stalin’s orders. These included such officers as his commander of the entire Western Front, General Dmitri G. Pavlov, and his chief of staff, General Vladimir E. Klimovskikh, together with his signals and artillery commanders. The commander-in-chief of the Fourth Army, Andrei A. Korobskov, likewise was shot, as were the commanders of an aviation division on the Western Front and of the Kiev Military District Air Force.

In addition to ordering the immediate execution of officers or men who did not follow orders, retreated, or worst of all indicated that they wished to defect to the enemy, Stalin was brutal about Red Army men who became POWs. A special order was issued that read: “All service personnel taken prisoner are declared outside the law while their families are subject to punishment.” Lieutenant Yakov Djugashvili, Stalin’s eldest son, became one such POW in the war. This infuriated his father, who disowned him. The son finally committed suicide, it is said, in a German POW camp by electrocuting himself on a wired fence in the compound. “I don’t know if I could face my father,” he said to his captors during a recorded interrogation in 1941: “I’m ashamed to be alive.”

Stalin’s occasional erratic behavior in this period anticipated Hitler’s in the concluding phase of the war in Europe. At that time the German dictator sometimes gave frantic orders that were unrealistic to the frontline commanders ordered to carry them out. During this initial period in Moscow, Stalin did not assume the post of supreme commander-in-chief, although he quickly ordered the formation of a combat High Command Headquarters, or “Stavka.” Stalin’s self-appointment to the post of CINC came later in the year 1941.

As to his later, vainglorious rank of “generalissimus,” Stalin did not appropriate that supreme title for himself until the end of the war in 1945. General Alexei V. Suvorov (1730–1800) was the latest previous holder of this highest rank, awarded to him in 1799, the year before his death. Besides Suvorov there were only three other holders of this title in Russia.

In conclusion to this chapter concerning June 1941, mention should be made of a most ironic order jointly issued by the Council of People’s Commissars and the Communist Party Central Committee to the Red Air Force on June 19, 1941, just three days prior to the German attack. Signed by Chairman (Premier) and General Secretary Josef Stalin and classified top secret, it commanded that all military aircraft and hangars were to be painted in summer camouflage. The deadline given for completion of this task was July 30. A month too late....

NOTES

1

Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), pp. 134–35. Sudoplatov notes that “we were in a state of alert [vis-à-vis Germany] from November 1940.” Other documented information from other researchers confirms this statement. Cf. M. I. Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi Shans Stalina Sovetskyi Soyuz i Bor’ba za Yevropu 1939–1941 (Moscow: Veche, 2000), p. 495.

2

Sergo Beriya, Moi Otets Lavrentii Beriya (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1994), p. 167ff.

3

One of the most recent offensist arguments concerning Stalin’s and the Red Army’s pre-June 22, 1941, military policies and actions may be found in Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi Shans Stalina, pp. 370–414. The Russian historian’s arguments are summarized here in the conclusions in chapter 8.

4

Viktor Suvorov, in Samoubiistvo Zachem Gitler Napal na Sovetskyi Soyuz? (Suicide: Why Did Hitler Attack the Soviet Union?) (Moscow: Act, 2000), analyzes Hitler’s “suicidally” faulty reasoning in taking on such a formidable foe as the Soviet Union. He and his General Staff underestimated the fact of the Soviets’ huge army, increasingly modern equipment, and space to withdraw and to take up new defense positions against an advancing Wehrmacht, whose lines of supply were overstretched, whose depth of manpower was far less than that of the Soviets, whose soldiers were ill-clothed for the Russian winter, and so on. Moreover, German military intelligence on the Soviets was obviously faulty. Chief of the German General Staff Halder wrote pessimistically in his diary only two months following the German invasion that the German cause seemed lost: “Russia, a colossus that deliberately prepared for war, was underestimated by us.... When the war started, we had 200 divisions against us.... Now, on August 11, 1941, after the bloody losses they have suffered, we estimate the number of [Red Army] divisions is 360. Even if we smash a dozen of these, the Russians will organize another dozen” (quoted in Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin [New York: Doubleday Publishing Co., 1996], p. 479).

5

The unlikelihood of Hitler erring so profoundly in attacking a country of Russia’s exceptional size and military strength, strength at the very least in depth of reserves and its military-industrial complex, new weapons coming on line, and so forth, seems also to have impressed Stalin. This point is made in a new review of Soviet military strategy—General—Major V. A. Zolotarev, ed., Istoriya Voyennoi Strategii Rossii (Moscow: Institute of Military History, Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, 2000), p. 286, on which page, too, the statistics in the sentences to follow may be found.

6

See Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi Shans Stalina, whose appendixes provide exhaustive tables of the data for Red Army weapons deployments by years—models of tanks, infantry vehicles, planes, and so on—per military districts on the Western Front for the years 1940–41. It is a picture of steady, sharply increasing Red Army preparations for fighting a war. It appears that the leadership in Moscow was assured by the military that these preparations would be completed by mid-July 1941.

7

A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 god. Dokumenty, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniy Fond “Demokratiya,” 1998), p. 416.

8

Yakovlev, 1941 god. Dokumenty, vol. 2, pp. 315–22. Senator Harry Truman was quoted in The New York Times in mid-1941 (The Topeka Daily Capital published his remarks on June 23, 1941) with the statement that he hoped both the German and the Russian armies would kill as many of each other as possible. If one side is winning, he said, we should help the other side, and vice versa. In a personal letter to me, the retired ex-president in Independence, Mo., denied ever having seen such a quotation let alone having said any such things himself. See Albert L. Weeks, The Other Side of Coexistence: An Analysis of Russian Foreign Policy (New York: Pitman, 1970), p. 94. The quotation was often reproduced in the Soviet Union during and after the war. It still appears occasionally today (e.g., in Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi Shans Stalina, p. 509; and in Robert Ivanov, Stalin i Soyuzniki 1941–1945 [Smolensk: Rusich, 2000], p. 143).

9

Such contemporary writers more or less of this persuasion include Joachim Hoffmann, R. C. Raack, Ernst Topitsch, Pavel Bobylev, Viktor Suvorov (Rezun), Aleksandr Nekrich, Robert Conquest, and Robert C. Tucker, among several others. The late Dr. Andrei D. Sakharov was also of this persuasion.

10

This is evidently a reference to Doc. 473 reproduced in Yakovlev, 1941 god. Dokumenty, pp. 215–20, under the title “Memorandum of the USSR People’s Commissar of Defense and Chief of the General Staff to Chairman of the Council of Ministers J. V. Stalin on Considerations of the Plan for Strategic Deployment of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union in Case of War with Germany and Its Allies,” May 15,1941. Among other things, the memorandum, signed by Timoshenko and Zhukov, proposes that the Soviet side attack the “deeply mobilized” German Army first before it is able to initiate an attack against the Red Army, which the memorandum adds, is the obvious German plan. For discussion of “Considerations,” see chapter 5.

See also Yakovlev, 1941 god. Dokumenty, vol. 2, pp. 389–90.

11

Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 102. “Once again,” Sudoplatov, former deputy director (after March 1939) of the NKVD First (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate, observes, “only military strength and domination of the countries on our borders could ensure us a superpower role” (emphasis added). Note that the NKVD officer does not cite “buffer” security as a motivation for the enlargement of Soviet borders in 1940.