Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941 - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Weeks (ч. 15)

8 Conclusions

The tragic start of the war [on June 22, 1941] for the Red Army is one of the most “encrypted” pages in our history.

—Pavel N. Bobylev, military historian

The [Red Army] term “active defense” [aktivnaya oborona] need not cause any confusion. It signifies a combination of both defensive and offensive operations.... Since [in archive documents] it is clear the Red Army would be the initiator of military actions, this term, above all, conceals the fact of the Red Army’s plans to conduct offensive operations aimed at pinning down [skovyvat’] the enemy.

—M. I. Mel’tyukhov, military historian

In examining the controversy revolving about Stalin’s plans for war in the months, weeks, and days before the German attack on June 22, 1941, it was necessary in the above chapters to sketch in the ideological, diplomatic, and military background before the momentous and tragic events of that summer. Stalin’s behavior and other relevant events on and just after the day of the invasion also shed light on the dictator’s attitude toward the coming, “inevitable” war.

In chapter 5, I canvassed the various lines of the controversy over Stalin’s war plans as they are argued in current Russian military literature. For this purpose I focused on two of the latest, most comprehensive as well as recent of such writings, that of military historians Pavel N. Bobylev and Mikhail I. Mel’tyukhov. I included in this discussion documentary evidence as reproduced in another relatively new work, the two-volume The Year 1941. Documents (1941 god. Dokumenty), a compilation of documents edited by Aleksandr N. Yakovlev. Defensist arguments likewise are presented in the preceding chapters. Here I will review and critique this research and analysis based on the most recent findings of Russian historians. These include new writings by Russian historians that Western scholars to date have not discussed.

THE MAY 15 MEMORANDUM AND OTHER WAR-PLANNING DOCUMENTS

At the nub of the offensist–defensist issue is Stalin’s acceptance or nonacceptance of the Timoshenko–Zhukov memorandum of May 15, “Considerations on the Plan for Strategic Deployment of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union in Case of War with Germany and Its Allies.” This is the strategic plan that was overtly offensist. The generals even recommend a preemptive attack against the German Army poised along Russia’s western frontier. Given the extreme paucity of such crucial documents and because of the high source of this document, much attention is legitimately focused on the May 15 memorandum as well as Stalin’s remarks on May 5. (Of course, other documents, canvassed in the preceding chapters, need to be considered as well.)

In his controversial interview with a historian, who at that time followed the official Soviet line on military history, Marshal Zhukov stated flatly that Stalin had “categorically” rejected the outright offensist “Considerations” submitted to him on May 15, 1941. Yet, in writing about his talks with two senior military officers in 1991, the same interviewer, N. A. Svetlishin, notes that neither Zhukov nor Marshal M. Vasilievsky had made any reference to the idea of a preemptive attack. Yet this was embodied in the May 15 memorandum. As a result of what they call a “subterfuge,” some Russian historians today attribute the silence about Red Army offensism to an intentional cover up by these officers. Any notion that the Red Army had plans for waging preemptive war would run up against the Kremlin Wall that banned all such speculation or evidence along these lines. Too, the Zhukov/Vasilievsky memoirs were surfacing at the time of Brezhnev—a period in which the positive memory of Stalin enjoyed a comeback compared with earlier years and, importantly, in which defensism was touted during Brezhnev’s detente as the hallmark of declaratory Soviet military policy.

“Forgetfulness” on the part of Zhukov and Vasilievsky concerning the crucial May 15 memorandum, according to historian Bobylev, can be explained by the fact, as he writes, that “any discussion of Red Army plans for making preemptive attacks was a theme forbidden by Soviet authorities” —forbidden then and in the later postwar period. Furthermore, discussion of such secret planning obviously was crucial in the military-security sense of guarding secrecy at the time of the documents. Disclosure at that time and later likewise would be politically damaging to a regime whose propaganda—at the time of Stalin and under his successors—insisted that it had only peaceful intentions toward any country and especially toward Germany as of 1939–40 and early 1941.

For this reason, Bobylev continues, the military writer Viktor A. Anfilov, who followed the official line and who knew of the May 15 memorandum, obviously “wrote nothing about it in 1965 [when he first learned of its existence] but only referred to it later when perforce it arose in discussion [i.e., after 1991].” That was the year another researcher, Yu. A. Gor’kov, discovered the document in the archives and disclosed its contents, for which a number of Russian historians now express their gratitude to him. They express thanks despite the fact, as they have noted, that Gor’kov did not draw the conclusions from his discovery that other, latter-day historians thought he should have.

The same “oversight” concerning the document is true of Svetlishin, insists Bobylev: “[Svetlishin] only referred to the May 15 Memorandum by 1992,” although he was informed of it by Zhukov back in 1965.¹ Zhukov had thus tacitly revealed to Svetlishin that Stalin had actually read the two staff officers’ preemptive attack memorandum! That Stalin did not read the memorandum has been the assumption of some Western historians (Gorodetsky, Glantz, et al.). Thus, if Stalin “rejected it,” he must have known of it. But, alas, there is no proof that he rejected it.² The notion that Stalin rejected the views contained in the memorandum, as one Russian historian puts it, is “premature.” Some Russian historians question whether, indeed, Zhukov is to be believed in his allegation that Stalin did not approve the plan.

Given the absence of any Stalin document following up the “Considerations” that clearly indicates either approval or rejection by Stalin, some historians now take the view that, nevertheless, several documented clues, both preceding and following the offense-oriented “Considerations,” indicate what Stalin’s intentions were. They claim that there is hard evidence Stalin had given his approval to the thinking embodied in the offensist memorandum. They further cite this passage from the memorandum: “In order to fulfill the demands [of the thrust of this memorandum], it is necessary at a favorable time to carry out the following measures without which it would be impossible to make a surprise strike against the foe either from the air or on the ground.”³ Likewise, hadn’t Stalin, on May 5, touted offensive war against Germany (see chapter 5)? Moreover, the Russian historians allege the following:

After Stalin’s May 5, 1941, speech and remarks to the military school graduates containing an offensist thrust, the military gave indications of preparing the forces to take the offensive on Red Army initiative. They were emboldened, in fact, to make such proposals from Stalin’s own verbal leads in his May 5 statements.

They point, moreover, to several documents, among which are not only the May 15 memorandum but various Red Army General Staff orders and local orders issued at the military district level along the Western Front aimed at readying the troops for eventual war. The thrust of these orders, including those to district commanders, is, they allege, offensist. The pertinent sentence from the May 15 memorandum reads:

In order to prevent [an initial attack by the Wehrmacht] while also destroying the German Army, [we] consider it necessary that under no conditions should the initiative for starting hostilities be given to the German Army. It is necessary to preempt the enemy in deploying for attack and to attack the German Army at the moment when it is at the stage of deploying for attack and is as yet unable to organize its front and coordinate all of its force.⁴

Too, they cite, for example, the General Staff’s March 11, 1941, “Refined [Utochennyi] Plan,” first published in Voyennyi Istoricheskyi Zhurnal, no. 2 (1992). In this plan are laid out undeniably offensist, preemptive tactics. Historian Gor’kov gives evidence for the fact that the offensist thrust of the contents of the May 15 plan was circulated via operational orders sent out to all military district commands in the period May 5—14—that is, even before the political leadership had officially endorsed the plan on May 15.⁵ The distribution of these orders further confirms, as Bobylev asserts, the existence of the May 15 document and of its instrumentation throughout the western military districts. In any case, few if any Russian historians now deny its authenticity. Any lingering doubts are found largely in works published abroad.

They note, moreover, that the phrase “active defense,” frequently used in such orders, contains the hidden meaning of waging offensive war and seizing the initiative from the enemy (specifically named in the documents as Germany and its European/Axis allies) at or before the very opening of hostilities. At the very least, it suggests applying a combination of offensist and defensist tactics, and especially the former, in the initial stage of war.

Moreover, as indicated, such researchers point to the thrust of the indoctrination of soldiers, especially after Stalin’s May 5 statements. This indoctrination was of a strongly worded offensist nature. Some researchers, like historian V A. Nevezhin, allege that such a thrust in the indoctrination would have been impossible to assert if Stalin, in fact, did not approve of offensism in the way soldiers were being prepared “morally” for combat.

They further point out that soon after hearing and digesting the news of the Wehrmacht’s attacks against the Red Army along the Western Front on June 22, 1941, Stalin, significantly, immediately ordered his commanders to take offensive rather than defensive actions. Any commander who took defensive actions could be, and was in many cases, shot. This, they say, is one more clue to Stalin’s pre–June 22 thinking about the coming war with Germany. A true combination of a defensive and offensive doctrine would have dictated, at the very least, a defensive posture in order to initially absorb an enemy’s attack. Defense of second-echelon forces might soon be followed by an offensive counterattack by those forces. Instead, the Red Army’s offensive-designed, frontline forces were deployed directly facing the enemy as though no defensive action would have been necessary.

In his radio address to the nation on July 3, 1941, moreover, Stalin noted that the Wehrmacht had been “completely mobilized, that it had thrust 170 divisions into combat against the USSR.” The latter’s Red Army, he said, “were in complete readiness for war and were merely awaiting the signal to act since its armies were still in the process of mobilizing and deploying forces to the western front.”⁶ Bobylev notes that in this speech Stalin declared significantly that “Fascist Germany had unexpectedly and treacherously broken the [Nazi–Soviet] nonaggression pact.... It is understandable that our peace-loving country, not wishing to take upon itself the initiative of destroying the pact, was not able itself to resort to such treachery.” To which Bobylev comments: “This remark by Stalin amounted to a reaction to the Hitlerite politicians’ excuse that their attack on the USSR was a preventive one. Yet there could have been other reasons for Stalin’s remark. In any case, [the German attack] obviously had nothing to do with any defensive [or offensive] measures undertaken by the USSR and its armies. Its meaning was to explain why the USSR itself had not preempted Germany’s attack” (emphasis added).⁷

In March 1938, over three years before June 22, as he examined the opening phase of war, then Chief of the General Staff General Boris M. Shaposhnikov anticipated a prolonged warning period. It would last anywhere from sixteen to thirty days, depending on local circumstances in a given sector, whether south, center, or north, before the enemy could launch an attack. During this rewing-up period the Soviets presumably would be alerted to an impending attack. In addition the Red Army would have ten days in order to shift its forces depending on the direction (sector) of the enemy attack along the Western Front. It could then concentrate the troops at the appropriate place along the front. If the attack came in the southwest sector in Ukraine facing Rumania, he said, the warning period could extend from twenty-two to twenty-six days or even from thirty-two to thirty-seven days. This would provide time enough for the Soviet side not only to prepare for an attack “but to launch an offensive and destroy the enemy.”⁸

Before June 22, it was staunchly maintained by leading staff officers (namely, Timoshenko, Meretskov, and Vatutin, among others) that the southern sector would constitute the principal direction of the German attack out of the three main, possible axes in the west—north, central, or south. The generals added that this was the direction, too, best suited to the Red Army for launching offensive war. Such was the professional military’s view, says Bobylev, that was all but “foisted” on Stalin. The latter, he insists, cannot be entirely blamed for the disaster as Stalin has been in Russian and foreign accounts up to now. Yet it is also clear Stalin had convinced himself that Hitler had given the highest priority to attacking the Ukraine, the Soviet breadbasket and location of many of the USSR’s most crucial resources and military-industrial assets. Bobylev further notes that, significantly, absolutely no defensive measures were undertaken in this sector. This strongly suggests that the Red Army leadership harbored only offensive-oriented plans against the Germans.

When in February 1941 Zhukov assumed leadership of the General Staff, the above plans were reaffirmed. Zhukov displayed no reservations about them. In February–March 1941, according to Svetlishin’s book on Zhukov, the operational plans were reworked, Zhukov claiming, disingenuously, according to Bobylev, that Stalin had seriously erred in expecting the direction of an enemy attack to the southwest. Yet, Bobylev observes, Zhukov himself had just assumed the new post of commander-in-chief of the Kiev Military District (namely, in the south). The “Refined [Utochnennyi] Plan” of March 11, 1941, drawn up on Zhukov’s orders, established the priority of the southern direction in Red Army planning. This resulted in neglect of sectors to the north. Yet it was to the north that the Wehrmacht concentrated the brunt of its attacking forces in summer 1941, thus outsmarting the Soviet military leadership.

At the basis of this errant planning in which Zhukov participated, according to Bobylev, was the September 18, 1940, General Staff “formula,” which was to apply to the years 1940–41. It called for waging offensive war instead of setting out concerted plans for developing strategic defense (strategicheskaya oborona). The basic sector expected for an enemy attack was designated as the southwestern. Mel’-tyukhov in general agrees with the above analysis.⁹

Historian Bobylev analyzes the significance of the actions taken by the Red Army after the respective May 5 and May 15 Stalin statements and Red Army strategic plan, especially following the latter “Considerations” memorandum. He notes that pursuant to the plan, more than 800,000 men were called into military service to fill the ranks of the divisions positioned on the western frontier. Four armies in the interior of the country (from the Caucasus and from western Siberia)—the 16th, 19th, 21st, and 22nd—were shifted to that front (to the Dnieper and Dvina Rivers), the 16th and 19th being moved precisely to a sector specified in the May plan. Three additional armies were to be so moved to the Western Front. These and other similar deployments and actions likewise related to the May 15 plan—for example, moving command points right up to the front—were ordered to be carried out in absolute secrecy.

Bobylev notes that, moreover, there is no evidence that any such moves were made in response to warnings of German preparations for war. Thus, the post-May 15 moves by the Red Army signify the decision that was made, he writes, to prepare the Red Army “for launching a preemptive strike, which was considered above and beyond any considerations of an offensive that might come from the enemy side.” This thesis, he continues, “conforms to the General Staff orders sent to the front’s military districts on June 21, 1941. In these orders the troops were tasked ‘not to give in to any provocative actions that could cause huge complications.’ Obviously, by the calculations of the General Staff, Germany was not yet ready to attack the USSR, and . . . it would not be ready until much later.”

Furthermore, as Bobylev writes, the Western Front districts were given orders not to strengthen their defenses. Such preparations, reads a directive from General Zhukov, dated June 10, would only “provoke” the Germans prematurely. Yet, at the same time, the commander of the Carpathian Military District, General M. P. Kirponos, was ordered to “advance to the frontier.” Writing in his memoirs, Zhukov claimed that this was followed by a countermanding order directly from Stalin to halt such forward deployments of Red Army troops. Zhukov, who oversaw from Kiev the key sector of the Western Front at that time, added that if Stalin’s order had not been followed, he would have been “arrested” and, therefore, have “drunk tea with Beria.”

Bobylev claims that Zhukov’s testimony is totally unconvincing. “Other memoirists confirm,” he writes, “that no such telegram [of June 10] came from Stalin. On the contrary, it is more accurate to say that the forward deployment was carried out on his [Zhukov’s] own initiative, that so-called defensive measures had nothing to do with it.”¹⁰

Bobylev refers to the conference held in Stalin’s Kremlin office on May 24 within the context of the meeting’s agenda that, as he argues, was the plan to preempt the Wehrmacht. Present at the secret conference besides Stalin and Molotov were the commanders of all five western military districts—Kiev, Leningrad, Carpathian, Odessa, and Baltic—plus members of the military councils, the commanding officers of the corresponding Red Air Force units attached to these districts, and General Staff and other staff officers including Timoshenko, Zhukov, Vatutin, and P. F. Zhigarev, commander-in-chief of the Red Air Force. According to historian Yu. A. Gorkov, using archive documents, the conference went over the “mission of the western districts in the light of the operational war plan [of May 15] under current strategic conditions.” Another historian, V. D. Danilov, reasons that the conference directly took up the questions “related to preparing a preemptive strike.”¹¹

On his part Bobylev adds that “if the conference was devoted only to matters of defense, why wasn’t there a single indication following it that strengthening defenses was a top priority?” Nor, the Ministry of Defense institute historian notes, are there any living witnesses to the conference and its aftermath who could throw any light on this question. “On the contrary,” he writes, “it seems that the secretive attitude [toward the conference] indicates that the subject of the meeting was the preemptive strike, that any leakage of this discussion had to be prevented lest it compromised all the preparations that were being made for it.”

1940–41 RED ARMY WAR GAMES CONTROVERSY

A similar puzzle concerns contradictory interpretations of the war games fought between the “Blues” (West) and the “Reds” (East or Soviet) in late 1940 and early 1941. An analysis of the games might throw light on the question of what strategy underlay the Red Army vis-à-vis Germany. However, it is not unusual for post mortems of such exercises, conducted by whatever country’s armed forces, to provoke differences in the conclusions drawn within the military and civilian leadership after the games have been analyzed. Clouding the Soviet pre–June 22 picture is the lack of full documentation of the postmortem appraisals of and conclusions drawn from the two sets of games, played out in late winter 1940–41. Some Russian historians believe that the obfuscation, amid the absence of relevant top-secret documents, has been intentional on the part of certain postwar military memoirists.

The ongoing discussions about the outcomes and inferences drawn from the games in the USSR in early 1941, especially those based on some new archival documentation, might contribute some knowledge to the overarching controversy concerning the main lines of Soviet war planning on the eve of the German attack. What did the games prove to the civilian and military leadership in the USSR about offensive versus defensive war?

What conclusions did the top Soviet military planners draw from them? In his book The Russian Way of War, Richard Harrison, using new archive documents, notes that the first of two major war games before summer 1941 were played out along part of the Soviet Western Front in winter.¹² The organizers of the games imagined that the enemy would open hostilities to the northeast on July 15, 1941. Zhukov, in command of the “Blue” attacking forces, numbering fifty-nine infantry divisions plus 3,516 tanks and 3,336 aircraft, sought to defeat the Soviet covering armies. The attackers were to advance by mid-August to the line of Riga-Dvinsk-Baranovichi. However, as it was played out, the game did not anticipate an “enemy” attack along the Brest-Baranovichi axis, which—ironically—actually occurred in real war six months later.

Zhukov was opposed by Pavlov’s “Red” defending Northwest Front armies (the 1st, 9th, 14th, 19th, and 27th plus a cavalry-mechanized group). These numbered 8,811 tanks and 5,652 aircraft. To the south of the Pripyat Marshes, Colonel-General Grigori M. Shtern commanded the Southwestern Front. Given the preponderance of force on the defending “Red,” Soviet side, the outcome of this game was assured. Zhukov was forced to retreat to his fortified position by August 1. The attack on Leningrad was also defeated. Meanwhile, Zhukov was to await reinforcements to resume his offensive with the aim of achieving his objectives by September 5.

Here, as noted by Harrison, the official report of the games becomes clouded. General Matvei V. Zakharov merely stated that the attacking “Westerners” won the operation. He disclosed that the games “abounded in dramatic episodes for the eastern side,” upon which he did not elaborate. As it turned out with cruel irony, this situation was true of the actual one in June 1941. Zhukov repeats the phrase about “episodes” nearly verbatim but fails to provide any details of the game’s actual conduct. He does not explain how it happened that the “Red” defenders ran into difficulties.

In the second round of games also fought in late winter 1940–41, two Western (“Blue”) Fronts attacked “Red” forces south of the Pripyat Marshes. The attack was opened with forces almost as large as those of the preceding game. This time Zhukov defended against the forces attacking from the west. As with the earlier game, the preponderance in tanks on the Soviet side was overwhelming compared with the number with the attacking forces, this time led by General Lieutenant Nikolai A. Kuznetsov. These disproportions perhaps meant “loading the dice” in the exercise for the “Reds.”

According to the contrived scenario, the Westerners attacked on “August 2, 1941,” after completing their concentration and deployment along the frontier. As the games were played out, by August 8 the attacking “Blue” forces had been thrown back to a line running southwest from Brest along the Vistula River to the Carpathian Mountains at Grybow. Yet, significantly, they had made major advances and trapped Soviet forces around L’vov

At this point, the game’s umpires assigned the two sides their respective, new strategic tasks. By these orders, the southern salient was to renew its offensive in the direction of Ternopol’ and Proskurov. The Southeastern Front’s center would continue to defend along the Dunajec. These and other orders by the umpires, Harrison points out, assigned the Soviet side extreme, “breathtaking” tasks to rout the enemy. For instance, the attacker’s goal—surrounding Moscow—was to be attained by a fictitious October 16,1941. This, as it turned out with cruel irony, was the very date that the German forces were actually to stand at the gates of Moscow later that year. However, the final report in the documents on the outcome of the games—and thus of the enemy’s renewed drive to the east—is disappointingly skimpy. In fact, the ultimate result of the games is left hanging in the air. Although the available literature in general on both exercises is sparse, notes Harrison, “given the scenario laid down . . . as well as the limited capacities of the two attacking ‘western’ commanders, it is unlikely that the Soviets were defeated.” But the dice were loaded....

Whatever the true outcome of the second game, Harrison writes, “there is no doubt that Stalin was highly dissatisfied with the overall results . . . for which he harshly criticized [General Dmitri G.] Pavlov,” who had commanded the defenders in the first game and who apparently had been defeated. (Yet Stalin left Pavlov at his post as commander of the Western Front in late spring 1941. But he saw to his execution following the June 22, 1941, debacle.) As a result of the outcome of the first game, major transfers and demotions were made by Stalin. Zhukov, significantly, replaced Meretskov as chief of the General Staff. Many other shufflings took place within the High Command. These changes, Harrison claims, may have further weakened the Red Army as it approached its moment of truth in real time in summer 1941.

What the shuffling of the generals may have indicated in terms of Stalin’s putative preference for an offensive war strategy is unclear. Yet the promotion of Zhukov would seem to fit Stalin’s offensist war plans. The Soviet leader may have positively evaluated Zhukov’s performance in the first round of games. However, the scant information about them that is available to historians leaves this assumption moot.

In retrospect, the author concludes, Stalin had every right to be disappointed with his army’s overall performance in the games. It seems that whether the “armies” were playing the role of attacker or of defender in the exercises, their performance left a good deal to be desired. How the games may have chastened Stalin in laying his own real plans for war—whether purely defensive, purely offensive, or a combination of both—can only be surmised. In any case, it seems clear that Stalin was of a mind to postpone hostilities with Germany for as long as possible—at least until mid-1941, late summer, and perhaps into 1942.

ANFILOV’S “SEVEN LESSONS” FROM THE WAR

One of the most articulate, semiofficial voices among today’s Russian military historians is the veteran writer Viktor A. Anfilov.¹³ In his latest as in his earlier works, this writer has followed the traditional, pre-1995 line on Stalin’s war plans. On the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet capture of Berlin in 1945, Anfilov laid out what he called “Seven Lessons” learned from the Great Fatherland War. The way he expresses his lessons is revealing.

By way of implied as well as direct criticism of policies established before June 22,1941, Anfilov retrospectively discloses in his April–May 2000 article what the contemporary Russian military now chooses to describe as the “fundamental mistakes” made at that time. So doing, Anfilov’s lessons also communicate, indirectly, the current semiofficial view on the nature of the miscalculations made by Stalin but also by the Red Army General Staff in spring 1941.

According to the writer, these boil down to one crucial error: the failure to adopt defensive measures because of what he terms mistaken offensist “ideological” pressures and Stalin’s penchant for making unwise decisions concerning the deployment of Red Army units along the western frontier on the eve of the German attack. (This is a subtle way of saying that Stalin deployed his offensive-designed forces in defenseless fashion directly opposite the German forces without providing them defensive means—the very claim made by the new Russian historians.) In examining these lessons, as presented by one of Russia’s leading, conventional military historians, we can see where the semiofficial consensus rests today on the problems explored in the foregoing chapters.

Lesson number 1, according to Anfilov, concerns the lack of “coordination between the military and civilian leadership on the eve of the German attack.” The tasks, even the basic strategy, lacked substance, he writes. When the attack materialized, Stalin at first ordered that immediately to counterattack would “produce political complications.” The problem was aggravated by the fact, Anfilov continues, that only part of the forces deployed in the newly acquired western territories was sufficiently prepared for combat; nor were the forward echelons sufficiently covered (another indication of their offensive posture). Stalin reasoned that these territories had to be heavily occupied with Red Army troops lest their native populations considered the Soviet regime and forces there to be merely temporary. They would thus readily help surrender valuable terrain there to the enemy. As a result, this calculation put large numbers of ill-prepared troops at the mercy of the invaders. In other words, institutionalized, “organic unity” and coordination between the professional soldiers and the civilian leadership, alleges Anfilov, would have prevented such miscalculations. The last word rested, unfortunately, with the civilian leadership—meaning the single autocrat, Stalin.

The second lesson concerns miscalculations by the Red Army High Command itself. Here Anfilov, a writer previously reticent in criticizing the professional military, lays out new ground, perhaps in response to the “new historiography” of the post-1991 “generation” of Russian historians. The military, he continues, had failed to make accurate predictions and thus failed to make adequate preparations for an anticipated enemy attack.

Anfilov quotes Zhukov to the effect that “in practice the particularities of waging contemporary war were not taken into account.... The error consisted in thinking that the timetables for carrying out concentrations of troops on both sides were the same.”¹⁴ But this was not the case, Zhukov has alleged. In the “formal” sense the importance of making defensive preparations was not denied, Anfilov writes. Yet “the essence of the matter did not revolve about the recognition or non-recognition of the importance of defensive measures but rather in the practical conclusions to be made concerning defense.” If defense (read: defensist) considerations were uppermost, then measures should have been taken to bolster defenses with the maintenance of constant readiness (to meet an enemy surprise attack) plus a more concerted, concealed preparation and combat readiness for this. This is a revealing admission on the part of Viktor Anfilov. “The lesson seen in today’s context,” he says, “is that together with a powerful military-industrial base, it is necessary to enhance the real combat capability of the armed forces [whose readiness in 1941 lagged behind the defense potential of the Soviet state].”

Moreover, the first-echelon forces deployed along the western frontier were not carefully prepared for waging “defensist [oboronitel’niye] operations” —an understatement, surely. They were prepared for this neither theoretically nor in practice, Anfilov complains. Had defensist plans been worked up (another admission that Red Army offensism was the strategy’s salient feature), the disaster might have been avoided. The error about defense was compounded by the fact, he continues, that the assumption was made that the enemy attack could be repulsed in a short period of time. After that, it was assumed, offensives could be then waged.

Moreover, the idea that war could be rapidly carried onto the enemy’s own territory was an erroneous idea under the then-prevailing conditions. “All this,” he writes, “had a deleterious effect” on the Red Army’s ability to stop the Wehrmacht’s onslaught. So saying, Anfilov seems tacitly to admit that the Red Army’s offensist military thought contributed to the debacle. Although he does not make this accusation per se—and he has been criticized by other contemporary Russian historians for shying away in his past writings from drawing such a conclusion—he does infer that more attention needed to be paid than was in 1941 to the imperatives and timeworn principles of defense. By implication, then, the first two of Anfilov’s “lessons” seem to signify that the offensism of Soviet military doctrine and operational art contributed to the catastrophe of June 1941 and its aftermath.

SUMMATION

In reviewing all the discussion, especially the most recent writings based on newly opened archives, I have drawn the following inferences—some of which are firm, others, tentative. First, it is clear that on the eve of the German attack of June 22, 1941, the Red Army was designed more for waging offensive rather than defensive war. This strikes a contrast to the usual Soviet propaganda that stressed the seemingly defensist notion that “if attacked, the Soviet Union would repulse the aggressor.” Moreover, the ideology, as we saw, stressed offensism within the fundamental ideological context of destroying capitalism or, as Lenin put it, “taking it by the scruff of the neck” when the Soviets were strong enough to do so. Many other ideologically tinged documents dating from the pre–June 1941 period point in the same direction.

The documents also show that the Soviets intended to carry the war as soon as possible into the territory of the enemy. Perhaps this policy could be construed as a not unusual, even conventional way of thinking about the “next war.” For what country would wish to see an enemy occupy its territory and wreak destruction upon it? Yet the offensist thrust of such declarations cannot be ignored, especially when it is recalled, in addition to the other facts, that Red Army field manuals and its operational art strongly emphasized waging offensive war on its part. This has been recognized, as we saw, by post-Communist Russian historians, including such high officials as former Russian Federation Deputy Defense Minister Andrei A. Kokoshin.

Second, it may be objected that it is not entirely clear what was meant by offensive war, Soviet style. On one hand, the military documents available to date, as we saw, speak of waging counteroffensives or counterattacks as soon as possible after an enemy attack has been launched. Some historians claim that Red Army tactics called for a combination of offense and defense. On the other hand, the Timoshenko–Zhukov memorandum to Stalin of May 15, 1941, goes so far as to commend a surprise attack, or “strike” (udar), even before the enemy can launch one. This strike was to be executed at a time when the enemy would be in the early process of preparing—deploying and concentrating troops—for attack. This adds up to the Soviet tactic of preemption.

Yet the paucity of any further elaboration of this bold offensism, smacking as it does of preventive war, plus the lack of any previous Red Army General Staff recommendations for waging outright preventive war launched from the Soviet side, suggests two possible additional hypotheses: (1) the memorandum was simply an “anomaly” or (2) such deep secrecy surrounded it, for obvious reasons, as well as the follow-up measures to be taken to prepare to preempt the Wehrmacht, that researchers have not yet been able to produce the evidence in undeniable black and white. Meanwhile, some Russian historians suspect that documents are being withheld. Perhaps (3) Stalin and the military did not have time to flesh out their offensist plans and grossly underestimated German willingness or readiness to launch full-scale war by late June 1941.

Nevertheless, what the researchers have produced is a pattern of Red Army deployments and concentration of troops along the Soviet western frontier in spring 1941 that strongly suggests that the General Staff and Stalin were planning eventually to get the preemptive jump on the Wehrmacht. The fact that in addition to Russian historians a number of informed ex–Red Army or security officers make this allegation cannot be ignored. As it turned out, of course, the Germans got the jump on the Soviets.

Here it needs to be said in the strongest of terms that even if such an outright Red Army offensist or preemptive war hypothesis were ever proved in absolutely certain terms, the Germans’ official pretext for Barbarossa—namely, that the Soviets were planning to attack them, which was declared by Hitler himself in his first war speech after June 22, 1941—surely would not thereby be justified. Hitler’s pretext remains a pretext, not a legitimate excuse for attacking the USSR. Hitler had planned his invasion back in mid-1940; he stuck to his plan thereafter no matter what. Furthermore, earlier Hitler writings in any case anticipate the conquest of Soviet Russia.

After June 1940 Hitler had set at least two dates for the assault, dates that were later advanced for technical reasons. Too, there is strong evidence for the fact that no matter how the Soviet–German negotiations had gone in Berlin 1940—and they went badly, angering the German side—Hitler was going to go ahead with his large-scale war against the Soviet Union. So, searching for evidence that Hitler was somehow “driven” to attack the Soviet Union appears to be misguided. In this regard, why, it might be asked, don’t German documents from that prewar June period clearly show any concern in Berlin for Soviet offensist war planning? Or was German military intelligence so poor, as it certainly was, that it did not detect any such planning? Hence, the silence about a planned Soviet preemptive attack (that is, before Hitler used it as a pretext).

Third, it is significant and worth recognizing that a number of “new” Russian historians are opting for the offensist interpretation as to Stalin’s and the Red Army General Staff’s war planning on the eve of Barbarossa. In the meantime, it is unhelpful to assume, as some Western writers have, that these Russian historians take the positions they do, like the notions proffered so vehemently by émigré Viktor Suvorov, because they blindly hate Stalin or for some other reasons unrelated to the facts and documents that they have collected. Note that some of the historians of the offensist persuasion are connected with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Others (unlike the much despised Suvorov) show pro-Soviet tendencies in their interpretations of events. Yet they hew to the offensist thesis concerning Stalin war planning.¹⁵

It behooves Western specialists and observers to pay attention to the Russian historians’ latest findings as well as to their interpretations of their findings. The Russian historians say that they will keep on pressing the authorities for more archives to be opened because, they insist, additional top-secret information from the period of 1939–41 continues to be kept concealed. Specialists in the West should keep a closer watch than they have to date to see objectively what the Russian archivists and historians discover in the future as more documents, it is to be hoped, become accessible to them.

NOTES

The first epigraph is from P. N. Bobylev, “Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano. K voprosu o planirovanii v general’nom shtabe RKKA vozmozhnoi voiny s Germaniyei v 1940–1941 godakh” (“Calling an Early Halt to the Discussion about the Problem in the General Staff of the RKKA on Planning a Possible War with Germany from the Years 1940–1941”), Otechesvennaya Istoriya, no. 1 (2000), p. 59.

The second is from M. I. 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. 387–88. The author is a historian and research fellow on the staff of the All-Russian Scientific-Research Institute for Documents and Archive Affairs (VNIIDAD), founded in Moscow in the Soviet period in 1966. Its foundation had been inspired by the public demand for archive materials following the Twentieth Party Congress to which the then Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, revealed some of the crimes committed under the Stalin regime. VNIIDAD’s present director is Mikhail V. Larin.

Bobylev, “Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano,” p. 44. Bobylev notes the irony of Marshal Zhukov’s parting words in his last series of memoirs, published in 1992, in which he says that it was still necessary for historians of the war to find the “real reasons” for the Soviet failures at the beginning of hostilities in June 1941. “Historians it seems,” observes Bobylev, “were put in difficult straits under Stalin. They were prevented from knowing the true contents of the many prewar meetings that took place between the military and Stalin, and, as the result of such meetings, the most crucial decisions were formulated on preparing the country for a possible near-term war with Germany.”

Gabriel Gorodetsky, who in his writings follows a strictly defensist line on Stalin’s war planning, apparently concurs that Stalin did see the memorandum of May 15. But he insists, without evidence, that Stalin “rejected [it] outright as it jeopardized his attempts to bring about a political solution.” Yet how could such jeopardy occur, one might ask, if the contents of the memorandum were kept top secret? Also, the Soviets had intentionally leaked, selectively, parts of Stalin’s overtly offensist May 5 statements. Gorodetsky adds that, in any case, the Timoshenko-Zhukov memorandum had no expansionist motivations, that its aim was strictly “limited” to preempting a German blow. Yet Soviet military orders rarely if ever carried “ideological” baggage, being confined to strictly military operations. Bobylev notes that the same military officers who drafted the May 15 document conferred with the Leader in Stalin’s office the day before. No stenographic record of the contents of these discussions has yet turned up. But Bobylev believes that it is highly unlikely that the contents of the memorandum, which was issued the very next day, were not discussed or that the memorandum would have been issued if it did not conform to Stalin’s own thinking. Gorodetsky claims that Red Army military deployments and other actions taken after May 1941 displayed a purely “defensive disposition” (Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], p. 241). However, most latter-day Russian military historians with access to the latest archive documents strongly disagree with this notion. They criticize that author for his defensist reconstruction of the actual measures taken by Stalin and the Red Army prior to June 22, which they describe as being of an offensist nature.

A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 god. Dokumenty, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond “Demokratiya,” 1998), p. 219.

Yakovlev, 1941 god. Dokumenty, vol. 2, p. 216.

See Voyenno-Istoricheskyi Zhurnal, no. 2 (1996), p. 2.

Bobylev, “Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano,” pp. 45, 53. Bobylev adds that Stalin was correct in placing the blame on the military for failing to carry out in time the assigned deployments to the western districts. Yet, in reading the issued orders, when dates are given for completion of mobilizations and deployments, the assigned dates fall after June 22. By implication, it seems Stalin resorted to diplomatic stalling tactics vis-à-vis the Germans for this reason. He evidently surmised that his armies were not yet ready to wage war against Germany. Bobylev further notes that on four previous occasions the Wehrmacht was able to preempt its enemies strategically in the field of battle but that this fact seems to have made no impression on the Red Army General Staff: “The absence of such awareness of a foreign state’s past war experience led to the tragedy of 1941” (“Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano,” p. 46). Mel’tyukhov notes that Western scholar Gorodetsky errs in describing the March 11 plan as reflecting a “defensist strategy” (Mif “Ledokola” Nakanunye voiny [Moscow: Progress Akademii, 1995], p. 284). The plan reflected just the opposite, Mel’tyukhov insists (Upushchennyi Shans Stalina, p. 386).

Russian historians V. K. Volkov and L. Ya. Gibianskyi note in their new edited book, Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, that no German sources ever mentioned putative Soviet military offensist indications before June 22,1941 (Vostochnaya Yevropa mezhdu Gitlerom I Stalinym 1939–1941 gg [Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Indrik,” 1999], pp. 262–63). In his diary, Goebbels indicated that Stalin remained “firm” in his commitment of solidarity with Berlin stemming from the Nazi-Soviet agreements of 1939–40.

Bobylev, “Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano,” p. 46.

Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi Shans Stalina, pp. 370–414, in the section entitled ”Soviet Military Planning 1940–1941.”

Bobylev, “Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano,” pp. 51–52.

Segodnya (September 28, 1993), quoted in Bobylev, “Tochku v Diskussii Stavit’ Rano,” p. 53.

Richard W. Harrison, The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas Press, 2001), pp. 265–69. German research indicated that Stalin was testing newfound theories of offensist operations by means of these games. See Ernst Topitsch, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory on the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 71.

See Voyennoye Obozreniye (April 28–May 11, 2000), p. 2. Similar “lessons” are drawn in an article, titled “Uroki Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voini i voyennaya doktrina Rossiiskoi Federatsii,” in Voyennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought), no. 3 (May–June 2000), pp. 34–41. The authors, General Ye. A. Karpov and Colonels G. A. Mokhorov and V. A. Rodin, maintain that neglect of defense and defensive preparations because of the accent on an offensive strategy that bore a “propagandistic character” led to the disaster on and after June 22, 1941. A second article (Makhmut A. Gareyev, “Voyennaya nauka i voyennoye iskusstvo v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine,” Voyennaya Mysl’, no. 3 [May–June 2000], pp. 42–49), in the same number of the General Staff journal, makes similar points. This writer complains that the “idealized cult of an offensive war doctrine” underlay the necessity of making ill-prepared, disastrous retreats. For these errors, the author, a former member of the General Staff after the late 1970s, specifically blames both the Supreme Commander and the General Staff.

A former Red Army colonel, Grigori A. Tokaev, who headed the Aerodynamics Laboratory of the Moscow Military Air Academy before the war, a senior officer in Soviet military administration in Germany, discloses in his book, Stalin Means War (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1951), that it was commonly known among top Red Army officers that Stalin and the General Staff harbored offensist war plans against Germany. However, he says, Stalin had not expected a German attack before “early August,” though German and Soviet schedules were similar in expecting war in 1941. The colonel also claims that Stalin’s urging to Churchill in 1942 of a premature opening of a second front in Europe was a ploy aimed at weakening the Western Allies—Stalin still holding to his long-held notion of fratricidal war between the capitalist powers. If true, one wonders how Stalin could have put such a low price on Lend-Lease aid, which obviously would not have been forthcoming, as it had been since late 1941, with any such severe weakening of the “antifascist coalition” of the USSR and the Western Allies that was formed soon after the German attack on the Soviet Union.

One such historian, M. I. Mel’tyukhov, goes so far as to maintain that if all of Europe had been sovietized, it would have provided much-needed “stability” to the region. Mel’tyukhov, as we saw, documents Stalin’s offensive plans in his book Stalin’s Lost Opportunity, published in 2000. He is a historian connected with one of Russia’s oldest archive/research institutes, VNIIDAD, on Cherkasskyi Square in Moscow.