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

Preface

The war is going on between two groups of capitalist states (the poor vs. the rich ones in terms of colonies, sources of raw materials, and so on) for a redivision of the world and for world domination! We’re not opposed to the idea of their fighting among themselves very well. Nor would it be bad if by the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries were shattered (in particular that of England). Hitler himself does not appreciate this fact nor does he wish to, but he is demolishing and undermining the capitalist system.... On our part we will maneuver while pitting one country against the other so that they can fight each other all the better. The nonaggression pact to a degree helps Germany. But in the next moment, it batters the other side.

—J. V. Stalin

The animus to write a book about such a controversial issue as Stalin’s war plans 1939–41 arose as Russian archive information on the problem has become increasingly available since the middle and late 1990s. Historians, like me, are learning more than earlier about Stalin’s and the Red Army’s actions on the eve of the German attack against the USSR on June 22, 1941. The disclosures in some cases throw into question the conclusions drawn in the past by former-Soviet as well as foreign historians. These interpretations formed a historiographic consensus that now must be reexamined in the light of new evidence.

Above all, the most sensitive and misunderstood events and plans on the eve of the war need to be clarified. This research involves in particular the strategy Stalin and his generals had designed toward Germany before Hitler ordered his Wehrmacht to launch its large-scale “preventive war” attack in mid-1941. As Russian military historian Pavel N. Bobylev, of the RF Ministry of Defense Institute for Military History, has written: “While earlier discussion of this issue from 1991–1993 permitted a more concrete appraisal than before of Soviet planning for war against Germany, [documents since then] have now led to a deeper understanding of the problem that for so long has been obscured by ideological barriers.”¹ Historian Mikhail I. Mel’tyukhov adds:

The historians’ research conducted in the early 1990s constituted a first step in reviewing the official views of the events on the eve of the war. [Since the mid-1990s] researchers now have access to documents that were once kept secret [that] now demand new conceptions about the participation of the Soviet Union in the events of 1939–1941, a more objective depiction of our country’s history during the period of World War II. [Using the new documents] it is necessary to analyze the diplomatic activity of the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and from 1939 to 1941, to canvas its views toward the advent of the European war [in September 1939], the military preparations undertaken by the USSR as well as the contents of Soviet propaganda.“²

Previous pre-1995 military histories, whether published in Russia or in the West, were thus hobbled, Russian historians note, by a lack of primary-source documentation. Today information has become available, among other places, in the 1998 two-volume compilation of documents titled The Year 1941: Documents.³ Among the Russian resources used in this book are the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF); the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGACPI); the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA); the Russian State Archive on the Economy (RGAE); the Center for the Collection of Contemporary Documents (TsKhSD); and the All-Russian Scientific-Research Institute for Documents and Archive Affairs (VNIIDAD).

Included among such “ideological barriers,” according to Bobylev and other “new-generation” Russian historians, are the “slanted” memoirs of and interviews with such senior officers of the Soviet Army as Marshals Georgi K. Zhukov and Aleksandr M. Vasilievsky. Both were major staff officer figures in the Soviet war, known as the Great Fatherland War, against Germany, 1941–45. It is also true that a conventional interpretation of Stalin’s war plans 1939–41 has congealed among Western historians in ways that have discouraged fresh interpretations of the dictator’s strategy. Complaints about this, in fact, are leveled at Western and former-Soviet historians by some of today’s Russian historians.

When discussing the mistakes made on the eve of the German attack, these officers inevitably indicted Stalin. Yet Bobylev and others observe that Red Army staff officers were not about to shoulder the blame themselves for such a tragedy. Instead, they put the onus on the deceased, de-glorified tyrant, Stalin. As a consequence, many Western historians—writing on the war and relying on the same sources in drawing their conclusions—likewise blame Stalin alone for the many tragic miscalculations. As noted by Bobylev and other Russian researchers, at the same time, it was Stalin who, after all, endorsed the plans—many of which were seriously flawed—when they were submitted to him by General Staff officers such as Generals Zhukov, Vasilievsky, and Kirill A. Meretskov and Marshals Semyon K. Timoshenko and Boris M. Shaposhnikov (their ranks before June 1941). Ultimately, the Soviet dictator must bear the responsibility for approving the mistaken concepts and plans. Yet, as it turns out, it had been an overconfident, miscalculating, and in part sycophantic military that in the main had devised the errant plans and had exaggerated the readiness of the Red Army for combat. Doubtlessly, they were motivated by fear of the dictator, who did not hesitate to purge and spill the blood of his top commanders, often in an arbitrary, unprovoked way. Moreover, the plans submitted to Stalin by his most trusted professional soldiers appealed to the Soviet leader, as cautious as Stalin tended to be, because of their audacity and because of their Bolshevik-style “offensiveness” (нacmynameлЬнocmЬ or nastupatel ‘nost’).

Stalin himself and his military indoctrinators, after all, repeatedly touted “offensiveness” as the Red Army’s most distinctive feature. So wedded were they to this concept of waging offensives on enemy territory and reaping the advantages of surprise attack that they seriously neglected designing necessary defensive (oборонителЬние, or oboronitel’niye) strategies and defense-oriented preparations for the Red Army. This is all but admitted now by contemporary Russian historians and even by some latter-day defense officials (e.g., in a long article appearing in mid-2000 in a major Russian military publication written by the current chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, General Anatoly Kvashnin).⁴ In any case, retreat was out of the question for the mighty, well-motivated Red Army, whose mission was “revolutionary” and “world historical,” not simply traditional war fighting alone based on conventional principles of armed struggle.

Among the several, newly disclosed documents of the last few years up through the year 2000 that call for a reassessment of the conclusions previously drawn in earlier discussions of the prewar period are the texts of Stalin’s address and remarks made to the graduating Red Army military cadets, May 5, 1941; the texts of Red Army strategic plans, in particular that of May 15, 1941, and their later “refinements”; and the telltale orders issued from the General Staff for secret, well-camouflaged deployments of Red Army troops to the Western Front in the run-up to the fatal day of June 22, in which defensive preparations are not even given as one of the Red Army’s main tasks but, instead, in which offensive troop concentrations and tactics are paramount.

The preparation of this book has been further sourced by a comprehensive, well-documented, 600-page study of the pre-June 1941 Red Army, Navy, and Air Force war preparations as canvassed in the new book by Russian military historian, Mikhail I. Mel’tyukhov of VNIIDAD. Together with Bobylev and other “new historians”—whether Russian, French, German, or American—all such historians are cited in the pages that follow.

NOTES

Stalin’s documented remarks in the epigraph are quoted in F. I. Firsov, “Arkhivy Kominterna I Vneshnyaya Politika SSSR v 1939–1941” (”Archives of the Communist International and the Foreign Policy of the USSR 1939–1941”), Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya, no. 6 (1992), pp. 18–19.

1

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), pp. 41–64. Bobylev also takes Viktor Suvorov (Vladmir Bogdanovich Rezun, a Russian émigré living in London) to task for the distortions in his writings of 1989–90, including his 1990 book, The Ice-Breaker Who Started the Second World War? and notes that Suvorov, in any case, was not the first to search for offensism in Stalin’s and the Red Army’s war planning against Germany.

2

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. 7, 9. This book, running 600 pages, is the most comprehensive study to date on the period under examination. Its author is a post-Soviet historian on the staff of the All-Russian Scientific-Research Institute for Documents and Archive Affairs (VNIIDAD), founded in 1966. Mel’-tyukhov has contributed chapters and articles to a number of books and scholarly history periodicals in Russia.

3

A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 God. Dokumenty (The Year 1941: Documents) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond Demokratiya, 1998), 2 vols. Russian historians describe these volumes as crucial in updating discussion of the pre-June 1941 preparations and other relevant events.

4

Anatoly Kvashnin and Makhmut Gareyev, “Sem’ Urokov Velikoi Otechestvennoi” (“Seven Lessons from the Great Fatherland War”), Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozreniye (April 28-May 11, 2000), pp. 1–3.