Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

CODA: LITTLE CORNER, SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1941

The only certain thing is that we face either a battle of global proportions between the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire or the most gigantic case of blackmail in world history.

VILHELM ASSARASSON, Swedish envoy in Moscow, telegram to Stockholm, June 21, 1941¹

Suddenly addressing me with “thou,” he said, “Thou must always keep touch with the Russian emperor; there, no conflict is necessary.”

OTTO VON BISMARCK, recalling the words of a dying Kaiser Wilhelm I²

STALIN PACED AND PACED IN HIS KREMLIN OFFICE, with his usual short steps, gripping a pipe in the hand of his good arm. It was Saturday, June 21, 1941. The night before, he had repaired after midnight to his Near Dacha, in the woods at Kuntsevo, returning to the Kremlin in the afternoon.³ From his office suite on the bel étage of the tsarist-era Imperial Senate, a person could see the whole world—or, at least, Stalin’s world. Over the years, many of the party bosses and industrial managers, military men and secret police, scientists and artists who were granted an audience surmised that he paced to control his explosive emotions or, alternately, to unnerve those in his company. Invariably, he alone was up, trundling back and forth, sidling up to people while they were speaking or just after they had finished, looking them in the eye or the back. Only a few intimates knew that Stalin suffered nearly constant pain in the joints of his legs, which may have been a genetic condition and which the movement partly alleviated.⁴ He also strolled the Kremlin grounds, between the Senate and the Arsenal, usually alone, touching the leaves on the trees and shooing away the black ravens. (Afterward, the guards came and massacred the birds.)⁵ Stalin’s nearly constant motion mimicked his cascading thoughts. For a full year now, essentially since the stunning fall of France to the Germans in June 1940, he had lived in a state of unbearable tension.⁶

Pravda (June 21) reported that Turkmenistan’s Central Committee had just concluded a two-day plenum devoted to cotton. The newspaper also rebuked the Stalingrad Tractor Factory for not producing a single ax or frying pan, of the tens of thousands ordered; exhorted a loss-free gathering of the grain harvest; and remained silent about how the German embassy personnel were being evacuated, along with oil paintings, antique rugs, and silver.⁷ The NKGB, for its part, reported the mass German exodus and that the Italian embassy, too, had received instructions to evacuate.⁸ Intelligence warnings of imminent titanic war were coming from everywhere. The Soviet agent Pavel Shatev (“Costa”), an ethnic Macedonian separatist, reported from Sofia (June 21) that a German emissary had told an official of allied Bulgaria that “a military confrontation is expected on June 21 or 22.”⁹ Zhou Enlai passed on, through Comintern channels, that Chiang Kai-shek “is declaring insistently that Germany will attack the USSR, and is even giving a date: June 21, 1941!” which prompted Dimitrov to phone Molotov that morning. “The situation is unclear,” Molotov told him. “There is a major game under way. Not everything depends on us.”¹⁰

Stalin had eliminated private property and made himself responsible for the Soviet equivalents of Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood all rolled into one, and all rolled into one person, an extreme despotism. He complained of fatigue, especially toward the end of his long workdays, and suffered from insomnia, a condition never acknowledged publicly, but manifest in the now fully nocturnal rhythm of the vast functionary kingdom under him. A tiny group of insiders knew of his infections and multiday fevers. Rumors of various health problems had circulated abroad, and the use of foreign doctors had long ago been discontinued, but a narrow circle of Russian physicians had acquired detailed knowledge of his illnesses and of his bodily deformities, including his barely usable left arm, the thick, discolored toenails on his right foot, and the two webbed toes on his left foot (an omen, in traditional Russia, of Satanic influence). For long periods, Stalin resisted being seen by any doctor, and he had ceased using medicines from the Kremlin apothecary that were issued in his name.¹¹ The household staff had stopped bringing his meals from the Kremlin canteen, cooking them in his apartment and, in his presence, tasting from the plates. All the same, Stalin’s stomach was a wreck. He suffered from regular bouts of diarrhea.¹²

For the fifth consecutive year, since his holiday decision to intervene in Spain, he had no plans to travel to his Sochi getaway. Young Pioneers were departing for summer camps, and a new aquatic center was set to open at Khimki, just outside the capital. Posters advertised the upcoming appearance at Moscow’s Hermitage summer theater of Leonid Utyosov and his jazz band, whose magical tunes the entire country could whistle, from the Baltic to the Pacific.¹³ Stalin paced and paced in his office inside the Imperial Senate, which had been built by the Teutonic empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, for “the glorification of Russian statehood.” A few decades after its opening, in early fall 1812, Napoleon had arrived with his invading forces. The French Grande Armée—full of Western Christian Poles, Italians, and Germans, too—had defecated in the Kremlin’s Orthodox churches and taken potshots at the holy icons. After cunning Russian resistance starved the occupiers, a retreating Napoleon had ordered the Kremlin blown to pieces. Heavy rains doused the fuses, limiting the damage, but explosives destroyed parts of the walls and several towers. The Imperial Senate suffered a fire.

Stalin’s Kremlin, too, had been violated, albeit not in the way that he long feared. Inside, the long, red-carpeted corridors to and from his Little Corner were attended by an army of sentries. “See how many of them there are?” he once remarked to a military commander. “Each time I take this corridor, I think, which one? If this one, he will shoot me in the back, and if it is the one around the corner, he will shoot me in the front.” The commander, Admiral Ivan Isakov, had been born Hovhannes Ter-Isahakyan, an Armenian who shared Caucasus heritage with Stalin but, like everyone else, was dumbfounded by such hypersuspicion.¹⁴ In fact, there had never been a single genuine assassination attempt against Stalin. But the “Man of Steel”—“deeper than the ocean, higher than the Himalayas, brighter than the sun, teacher of the universe,” in the words of the Kazakh national poet—was being stalked from afar by a onetime Austrian corporal and former house painter. The pair offered a study in contrasts: Hitler the undisciplined “artist,” Stalin the trained seminarian; Hitler the anti-Semite German nationalist, Stalin the Marxist-Leninist imperial Russian nationalist. Not just their different personalities, however, but their countries’ very different histories and geographies, and their different systems of rule, had produced clashing geopolitical aims.¹⁵

Hitler had won the Second World War. He had annexed his native Austria, the Czech lands, much of Poland, and a strip of Lithuania, creating the Greater Germany that in 1871 Otto von Bismarck had deliberately avoided forging during the wars of German unification (deeming Austria-Hungary’s existence vital for the balance of power). Hitler’s troops had occupied Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, the Balkans, and northern France. The Führer received obeisance from France’s World War I lion, Marshal Philippe Pétain (now the chief of state of rump Vichy), and other vassals, such as the Conducător of Romania (Ion Antonescu), “His Serene Highness” of landlocked Hungary (Admiral Miklós Horthy), the Catholic-priest ruler of Slovakia (Jozef Tiso), the fascist puppet of Croatia (Ante Pavelić), Bulgaria’s tsar (Boris III), the president of Finland, and the Italian duce, not to mention the generalissimo of Spain. The Führer essentially controlled all of Europe from the English Channel to the Soviet border, for only Sweden and Switzerland remained neutral, and both cooperated with Nazi Germany economically. True, the defiant Brits still refused to come to terms, but London could never overturn Berlin’s continental dominance. And Hitler had the nonaggression pact with Stalin. Would he really gamble and risk all his winnings by attacking? Had not Napoleon tried and failed? In 1812, facing the window before Russian winter, Napoleon had invaded on June 24.

• • •

JUNE 21 COULD scarcely have been more stifling, and Stalin’s top aide, Alexander Poskryobyshev, was sweating profusely, his window open but the leaves on the trees outside utterly still.¹⁶ The son of a cobbler, like the despot whom he served, he occupied the immediate outer office through which all visitors had to pass, and invariably they would spray him with questions—“Why did the Master have me summoned?” “What’s his mood?”—to which Poskryobyshev would laconically answer, “You’ll find out.” He was indispensable, handling all the phone calls and document piles in just the way the despot preferred. But Stalin had allowed Beria to imprison Poskryobyshev’s beloved wife as a “Trotskyite” in 1939. (Beria had sent a large basket of fruit to their two baby girls; he then executed their mother.)¹⁷ Now, Poskryobyshev sat at his desk trying to cool down with a bottle of Narzan mineral water, under a photograph of a youthful Stalin wearing a pointy, red-starred civil war cap. On Stalin’s instructions, at around 2:00 p.m., he phoned General Ivan Tyulenev, head of the Moscow military district. Soon the general heard Stalin’s “muffled voice” asking, “Comrade Tyulenev, what is the situation concerning Moscow’s antiaircraft defenses?” After a brief report, Stalin said, “Listen, the situation is unsettled and therefore you should bring the antiaircraft defenses of Moscow up to 75 percent of their readiness state.”¹⁸

Poskryobyshev thumped the latest intelligence, delivered by field courier, onto Stalin’s desk. Rather than purloined documents, almost all of it was hearsay. From London, Ambassador Maisky, despite having been given British intelligence about German force concentrations (gleaned, unbeknownst to him, from Enigma codebreaking), wrote to Moscow (June 21) that he had told Cripps, “As before, I consider a German attack on the USSR unlikely.”¹⁹ But from Berlin, Ambassador Dekanozov—who also knew the view in the Kremlin and the consequences of contradicting it—was finally reporting, under the influence of the best spies in the Soviet network, that Germany’s actions signaled an imminent invasion.²⁰ Stalin evidently concluded that his Berlin envoy had been fed disinformation by British agents and stated, “Dekanozov is not such a smart fellow to be able to see that.”²¹

From Tokyo, Max Clausen (June 21) radioed yet another message from Sorge, this one composed the day before: “The German ambassador in Tokyo, Ott, told me a war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable.”²² The dispatch gave no start date. For Stalin, the question was not whether war with the Nazi regime was inescapable, but whether it was inescapable this year.²³ Scores and scores of invasion warnings had accumulated on his desk, but just about every reported date—including at least fourteen specific ones—had passed. These ranged from the earliest, such as “March 1941” (transmitted on December 29, 1940), “May 20,” “April or May,” “April 6,” “April 20,” or “May 15 to June 15,” to the more recent: “either in May or after defeating Britain,” “not today or tomorrow,” “May 18,” “May 25,” “in late May,” “summer 1941 before the harvest gathering,” “at the beginning of June,” “no later than June 15,” “around June 15,” “June 15,” and “June 15–20.” The only remaining possibilities were “June 22–25” (reported on June 16) and “June 21 or 22.”²⁴ The invasion window would soon shut; Stalin was virtually home free for another year.

Never mind the secret intelligence: warnings were splashed across the front pages of the global press. But knowing how he himself used newspapers, Stalin took the screaming headlines to be planted provocations. He reasoned that Britain (and the United States) wanted nothing more than for the USSR and Nazi Germany to become embroiled in war—which was true—but as a result, he dismissed all warnings of a German attack. He knew that Germany was experiencing severe shortages—again true—so he reasoned that it needed even more supplies from him, and that a German invasion would be self-defeating because it would put those supplies at risk. He knew that Germany had lost the First World War because it had fought on two fronts—also true—and so he reasoned that the Germans understood that it would be suicidal for them to attack the USSR before defeating Britain in the west.²⁵ This logical reasoning had become Stalin’s trap, enabling the Germans to spread a seemingly all-encompassing explanation for what they could not conceal: their colossal troop buildup. It was supposedly not for war but for extorting Soviet concessions.²⁶ When Stalin intemperately damned his intelligence as contaminated by disinformation, he was spot-on.²⁷ But the despot had no idea which parts were disinformation, and which might be accurate intelligence. He labeled as “disinformation” whatever he chose not to believe.

The Nazis’ brilliant disinformation campaign generated reams of Soviet intelligence reports saying both that war was coming and that there would be blackmail—and if the latter was true, the former need not be. The fake ultimatum became for Stalin the ultimate truth, something that, given his lack of confidence in the Red Army’s prospects against the Wehrmacht, he desperately needed to be true.

Blackmail certainly fit Hitler’s profile. Early on, the British had dismissed the German buildup in the east and the accompanying rumors of a military showdown there as “wishful thinking.” Then they latched on to the Hitler-ultimatum theory, which many British officials did not relinquish even after decrypted Enigma intercepts exposed real-time German war orders. While Göring told his high-placed, notoriously indiscreet British contacts that he had personally drawn up a list of demands to be presented to the Soviets so that Germany could continue the fight against Britain, Goebbels’s men launched rumors that the Führer would soon demand a ninety-nine-year lease on Ukraine.²⁸ Stalin found himself in the reverse of the role in which he had placed Finland in 1939. The crucial difference was that, whereas he had issued his demands to the Finns and sought to negotiate, he was still waiting upon Hitler’s, and Hitler had no intention to negotiate. In the meantime, Germany had attained the buildup necessary for an invasion.

• • •

COLONEL GEORGY ZAKHAROV, a decorated fighter pilot, had been ordered to conduct a full daylight reconnaissance of the border region on the German side, and he reported that the Wehrmacht was poised to invade.²⁹ The NKGB had discovered that German saboteurs brazenly crossing into the USSR had been instructed that “in the event German troops cross the frontier before they return to Germany, they must report to any German troop unit located on Soviet territory.”³⁰ Soviet counterintelligence noted vigorous German recruitment of disaffected Belorussians, Balts, and Ukrainians, who were forming underground groups and engaging in terrorism long after Stalin’s supposed annihilation of the fifth column in the terror. Overburdened Soviet rail lines that were needed to transport troops westward were swamped with tens of thousands of “anti-Soviet elements” being deported eastward from the annexed territories.³¹ On June 21, Merkulov issued an order to Ukraine for a new wave of preemptive arrests to interdict sabotage: “Immediately telegraph by what deadline the indicated operation could be readied by you, and provide an overall orientation about the number of people who could be removed, with a breakdown by categories.”³²

Stalin paced and paced. Actually, it was more like a waddle as he swung his hips around awkwardly, the result of that childhood collision with a horse-drawn carriage. He wore, as ever, his signature baggy breeches, which he tucked into his well-worn black leather boots, as well as matching khaki tunic, buttoned at the top, simple and functional, and different from the bourgeois suits favored by Lenin. The despot’s clothes were martial in look without being an actual military uniform, a style first popularized in Russia by Alexander Kerensky as well as, yes, Trotsky. His former nemesis had survived sixteen years beyond Lenin’s death—an eternity, burning its way into the Little Corner with his acid pen. But what had Trotsky marshaled—a few thousand dispersed followers?—before Stalin’s assassins managed to drive that ice pick through his skull in the run-down Mexican villa?³³ German tanks, warplanes, and pontoon bridges had been advanced into the barbed-wire-protected inner zone of the border, and the barbed wire itself was being removed. The click and whir of German motors resounded across to the Soviet side.

At the centerpiece of the Little Corner, the felt-covered conference table, the despot had held countless sessions devoted to war preparations. “Stalin had an enormous capacity for work,” observed Molotov, who, despite his demotion from head of government, had kept his reserved seat at the table. “If the subject was cannons—then cannons; if tanks—then tanks.”³⁴ He had forced into being upward of 9,000 new industrial enterprises during the three Five-Year Plans, and Soviet military production grew even faster than GDP for a decade.³⁵ He had overseen the formation of 125 new divisions just since 1939, and the Red Army now stood at 5.37 million troops, the largest in the world.³⁶ It had 25,000 tanks and 18,000 fighter planes, three to four times Germany’s stocks. Stalin knew that Germany was underestimating this massive force out of prejudice as well as ignorance, so he had arranged German visits to Soviet aviation and tank factories, and even allowed Göring’s planes nearly unimpeded reconnaissance of Soviet troop concentrations, airfields, naval bases, and fuel and ammunition depots.³⁷ Stalin also had his spies spread rumors that, if attacked, Soviet aircraft would assault Berlin with chemical and biological agents. In Hitler’s shoes, Stalin would have been deterred.

Of course, if your own country really was so well armed, why not let the foolish enemy underestimate you? Because the Winter War with Finland had exposed Soviet military weaknesses not just to Hitler, but also to Stalin.³⁸ The Red Army was still in the middle of its gigantic, protracted, contradictory post-Finland rearmament and reorganization.

Stalin’s early commitment to mass armament production, amid rapid technological change, meant that more than 10,000 Soviet tanks (T-26s and BT-7s) were now too light, while the more advanced, heavier T-34 (45-millimeter-thick armor) and KV (75-millimeter armor) numbered only around 1,800 units. Similarly, the most advanced warplanes (Yak-1, MiG-3, Pe-2) made up just one quarter of the air force.³⁹ Stalin’s war preparations also bore the mark of his executions of thousands of loyal officers, especially top commanders like Vasily Blyukher, whose eye had been deposited in his hand before he died under torture, and the gifted Mikhail Tukhachevsky, whose blood had been splattered all over his “confession” to being a German agent just before Stalin signed the Pact.⁴⁰ Now, 85 percent of the officer corps was thirty-five or under, while those older than forty-five constituted around 1 percent. Fully 620 generals were under forty-five, 393 under fifty-five, and only 63 older than fifty-five. Many had been majors a short time earlier. The Red Army had one officer for every nine soldiers, versus one for every nineteen in Japan and one for twenty-nine in Germany, but Soviet officer ranks were swelled by those in the army’s political apparatus. Of the 659,000 Soviet officers, only around half had completed a military school, while one in four had the bare minimum (a few courses), and one in eight had no military education whatsoever.⁴¹

Lately, the despot’s morose side had gotten the upper hand. “Stalin was unnerved and irritated by persistent reports (oral and written) about the deterioration of relations with Germany,” Admiral Kuznetsov would recall.⁴² Stalin’s face gave away stress—even fear—to the point that he sometimes failed to fill his pipe with the Herzegovina Flor cigarette tobacco that had stained his teeth and mustache yellow. “He felt that danger was imminent,” recalled Khrushchev, the party boss of Ukraine, who was in Moscow until June 20. “Would our country be able to deal with it? Would our army deal with it?”⁴³

• • •

SINCE MAY 1941, nighttime use of electric lighting in the Kremlin had been forbidden. But June 21 was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. At around 5:00 p.m., Stalin ordered Alexander Shcherbakov, party boss of Moscow province and city, and Vasily Pronin, chairman of the Moscow soviet executive committee, to keep all ward party secretaries at their posts.⁴⁴ At 6:27 p.m., Molotov entered the Little Corner, the first visitor, as usual. At 7:05, in walked Voroshilov, Beria, Voznesensky, Malenkov, Timoshenko, Admiral Kuznetsov, and Grigory Safonov, the young deputy procurator general, who was responsible for the military courts on railroads and in the fleets. The discussion apparently revolved around recent developments pointing toward war, versus Stalin’s dread of provocations that might incite it.⁴⁵ Germany had achieved the buildup necessary to attack. Filipp Golikov, of Soviet military intelligence, estimated Germany’s concentration of forces against the USSR at only 120 to 122 of around 285 total divisions, versus 122 to 126 against Britain (the other 44 to 48 were said to be reserves).⁴⁶ In fact, there were around 200 divisions arrayed against the USSR, including 154 German ones—a total of at least 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers and half a million troops from its Axis partners, as well as 3,600 tanks, 2,700 aircraft, and 700,000 field guns and other artillery, 600,000 motor vehicles, and 650,000 horses. The Soviets had massed around 170 divisions, perhaps 2.7 million men in the west, along with 10,400 tanks and 9,500 aircraft.⁴⁷ The two largest armies in world history stood cheek by jowl on a border some 2,000 miles long.

Such immense Soviet troop concentrations testify to both Stalin’s understanding that Germany represented a monumental danger and his misunderstanding of blitzkrieg. But only one of the two vast armies on the frontier had occupied its firing positions.⁴⁸ Stalin had allowed covert strategic redeployments westward and lately had finally yielded to Timoshenko and Zhukov’s insistence that the Red Army commence camouflaging of aerodromes, tank parks, warehouses, and military installations (which in many cases would require repainting).⁴⁹ But he would not permit assumption of combat positions, which he feared would only play into the hands of German militarist-adventurers, who craved war and schemed to force Hitler’s hand, the way they had pushed the Wehrmacht beyond the agreed-upon German-Soviet line in Poland in 1939. Soviet planes were forbidden from flying within six miles of the border. Timoshenko and Zhukov, subject to the despot’s admonitions and the watchful eye of Beria and his minions, made sure that frontline commanders did not cause or yield to “provocation.”⁵⁰ Beria also tasked the assassin Sudoplatov with organizing “an experienced strike force to counter any frontier incident that might be used as an excuse to start a war.”⁵¹

Soviet intelligence was reporting that not just Germany but also Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland were at full war readiness.⁵² But Stalin, having long ago ceded the initiative, was effectively paralyzed. Just about anything he did could be used by Hitler to justify an invasion. On June 20, the head of the Soviet Union’s Riga port had telephoned Mikoyan to report that all 25 German ships docked there were preparing to leave en masse on June 21, without having finished loading or unloading, and had asked whether to detain them. When Mikoyan hastened over to the Little Corner with the news, Stalin had ordered him to let the German vessels go, because if the Soviets detained them, Hitler could regard that as a justification for war.⁵³ While all German vessels departed safely on June 21, a Soviet freighter, the Magnitogorsk, hastily sent a panicked radiogram, not even using ciphers, informing the Baltic Commercial Fleet in Leningrad that it was being prevented from departing the German port of Danzig, without explanation. More than forty Soviet merchant ships were immobilized at German ports.⁵⁴

At 7:00 p.m., Gerhard Kegel (“X”), the Soviet spy in the German embassy, had slipped out for the second time that day to tell his Soviet handler, Leontyev (“Petrov”), that German personnel living outside the facility had been ordered to relocate into it immediately, and that “all think that this very night there will be war.”⁵⁵ At 8:00 p.m., Golikov had a courier dispatched to Stalin, Molotov, and Timoshenko, with this new piece of intelligence in sealed envelopes.⁵⁶ In the Little Corner, Timoshenko, Kuznetsov, Safonov, and Voznesensky were dismissed at 8:15. Malenkov was dismissed five minutes later. Nothing significant was decided.⁵⁷

Zhukov phoned in to report that yet another German soldier had defected across the frontier, warning of an invasion within a few hours.⁵⁸ This was precisely the kind of “provocation” Stalin feared. He ordered Zhukov to the Kremlin, along with the just-departed Timoshenko. They entered Stalin’s office at 8:50, accompanied by the old Stalin crony Marshal Budyonny, a deputy defense commissar.⁵⁹ Whereas the two pince-nez minions Molotov and Beria provided an echo chamber for Stalin’s denials that Hitler was going to attack, the two peasant commanders could see that Germany was coiled to invade.⁶⁰ Still, when Stalin insisted otherwise, they presumed that he possessed superior information and insight. In any case, they knew the costs of losing his trust. “Everyone had in their memory the events of recent years,” Zhukov would recall. “And to say out loud that Stalin was wrong, that he is mistaken, to say it plainly, could have meant that without leaving the building, you would be taken to have coffee with Beria.”⁶¹

Nonetheless, the pair evidently used the latest defector to urge a general mobilization—tantamount, in Stalin’s mind, to war. “Didn’t German generals send that defector across the border in order to provoke a conflict?” Stalin asked. “No,” answered Timoshenko. “We think the defector is telling the truth.” Stalin: “What do we do now?” Timoshenko allowed the silence to persist. Finally, the defense commissar suggested, “Put the troops on the western border on high alert.” He and Zhukov had come prepared with a draft directive.⁶²

Where was the ultimatum? Stalin had continued to try to engage Hitler after the TASS bulletin gambit fell flat. “Molotov has asked for permission to visit Berlin, but has been fobbed off,” Goebbels wrote in his diary (June 18). “A naïve request.”⁶³ Dekanozov had appeared at the German foreign ministry that same day without an appointment, mentioning nothing of a Molotov visit but inducing terror all the same.⁶⁴ “The main political worry here is not to afford Stalin the opportunity for some kind of generous gesture to upend all our cards at the last minute,” state secretary Weizsäcker, Ribbentrop’s deputy, had written in his diary, but then he noted that the inept Soviet envoy had “merely brought up a few current matters of lesser importance.” Weizsäcker had cleverly laid out a map of the Near East, as if Germany’s attention was on British positions. “The ambassador took leave of me without anything whatever having been said about German-Soviet relations.”⁶⁵ On the morning of June 21, Molotov had sent a telegram instructing Dekanozov to hand-deliver an attached diplomatic protest of German border violations to Ribbentrop, and to use it to elicit clarifications.⁶⁶ “Several times that day Moscow telephoned, pressing us to carry out our instructions,” an embassy duty officer recalled. But Ribbentrop had deliberately vanished from the capital and sent instructions to inform Dekanozov that he would be contacted as soon as the Nazi foreign minister returned, whenever that might be. The Soviet duty officer, remaining behind after other employees had departed at around 7:00 p.m., kept calling the German foreign ministry every thirty minutes.

• • •

INSTEAD OF WAITING to see Hitler’s ultimatum, Stalin could have peremptorily declared his response to it. This was the last option he had left, and a potentially powerful one. Hitler feared that the wily Soviet despot would somehow seize the initiative and unilaterally, publicly declare dramatic, far-reaching concessions. Stalin appears to have discussed possible Soviet concessions with Molotov, but if he did, no record survives. Evidently he expected Germany to demand Ukraine, the Caucasus oil fields, and unimpeded transit for the Wehrmacht through Soviet territory to engage the British in the Near East and India. In June, In the Steppes of Ukraine, the procollectivization farce by the Stalin Prize winner Oleksandr Korniychuk, opened in Moscow, as if to signal that those steppes would not be handed over.⁶⁷ The despot used Prague in the Greater Reich and other points to disseminate his own disinformation, which made its way to Berlin, about a supposed split in Soviet ruling circles—Stalin for concessions, military brass for war—and how even if Germany did not attack but proceeded to demand Ukraine, Stalin would be overthrown in a putsch by a “Russian patriotic-imperialist movement” eager to fight, forcing Germany into a two-front war.⁶⁸

Stalin’s disinformation campaign, too, was captive to German disinformation. Unlike Germany’s, it was not based upon genuine insight into his adversary’s thinking.

A cunning despot could have publicly declared his willingness to join the hostilities against Britain, exacting revenge against the great power he most reviled and, crucially, robbing Hitler of his argument that Britain was holding out in anticipation of eventual Soviet assistance. Instead, or in parallel to that, Stalin could have demonstrably begun the withdrawal of Soviet forces back from the entire frontier, which would have struck at the heart of the Nazi leader’s public war rationale: a supposed “preventive attack” against the “Soviet buildup.”⁶⁹

Instead of acting cunningly, Stalin fooled himself. He clung to the belief that Germany could not attack before defeating the UK, even though Britain did not have an army on the continent and was neither defending territory there nor in a position to invade from there.⁷⁰ He assumed that when Hitler finally issued the ultimatum, he could buy time by negotiating: possibly giving in, if the demands were tolerable, thereby averting war, or, more likely, dragging out any talks beyond the date when Hitler could have launched an invasion, gaining one more critical year. Failing that, Stalin further assumed that even if hostilities broke out, the Germans would need at least two more weeks to fully mobilize their main invasion force, allowing him time to mobilize, too. When his spies out of Berlin and elsewhere reported that the Wehrmacht had “completed all war preparations,” he did not grasp that this meant that day one would bring full main-force engagement.

• • •

WORD FROM THE SOVIET embassy in Berlin was that Ribbentrop was still “out of town.” In the Little Corner, while the relatively heated discussion with Timoshenko and Zhukov continued, Molotov stepped out. Stalin had had him summon Schulenburg to the Imperial Senate for 9:30 p.m.⁷¹ The German ambassador arrived promptly, direct from overseeing secret document bonfires at the embassy, on nearby Leontyev Lane. The count had been deeply disappointed that the Hitler-Stalin Pact, in which he had played an important role, had turned out to be an instrument not for a Munich-style territorial deal over Poland to avoid war, but for the onset of the Second World War.⁷² Now he feared the much-rumored German-Soviet clash, and he had gone to Berlin to see Hitler himself and come back empty-handed. In desperation, he had recently sent his embassy counselor, Gebhardt von Walther, to Berlin to try one last time to elucidate the suspected war plans and obtain instructions, but this had failed as well.⁷³ Molotov demanded to know why Germany was evacuating personnel, thereby fanning rumors of war. Why had Germany not responded to the TASS bulletin?

Molotov handed the count the protest detailing systematic German violations of Soviet airspace that had been intended for Ribbentrop, and plaintively told him that “the Soviet government is unable to understand the cause of Germany’s dissatisfaction in relation to the USSR, if such dissatisfaction exists.” He complained that “there was no reason for the German government to be dissatisfied with Russia.” Schulenburg responded that “posing those issues was justified,” but he shrugged that “he was not able to answer them, because Berlin utterly refrains from informing him.” Molotov had gone toe to toe with Hitler in the gargantuan Nazi Chancellery, inducing the Führer’s interpreter to observe, “No foreign visitor had ever spoken to [Hitler] in this way in my presence.”⁷⁴ But now the foreign affairs commissar could merely express, several times, “his regrets that [Hitler’s envoy] was unable to answer the questions raised.”⁷⁵

Molotov shuffled back to Stalin’s Little Corner, a two- or three-minute walk, descending one floor.⁷⁶ Voroshilov, Timoshenko, Zhukov, and Budyonny were still there; Mekhlis arrived. Suddenly, around 10:00 p.m., amid the still suffocating heat, the winds gushed, billowing the curtains at open windows and blowing summer dust on the streets. Then came the thunderclaps. Moscow was struck by a torrential downpour.⁷⁷

Finally, Stalin yielded to his insistent soldiers. Timoshenko and Zhukov rushed out of the Little Corner at 10:20 p.m., armed, at long last, with full-scale war mobilization, Directive No. 1. “A surprise attack by the Germans is possible during 22–23 June 1941,” it stated. “The task of our forces is to refrain from any kind of provocative action that might result in serious complications.” It ordered that “during the night of June [21–] 22, 1941, the firing positions of the fortified regions on the state border are to be secretly occupied,” that “before dawn on June 22, 1941, all aircraft stationed in the field aerodromes are to be dispersed and carefully camouflaged,” that “all units are to be put in a state of military preparedness,” and that “no further measures are to be carried out without specific instructions.” It carried the signatures of Timoshenko and Zhukov. The military men had managed to delete an insertion by the despot that if the Germans attacked, Soviet commanders were to attempt to meet them, to settle any conflict. Still, in Stalin’s redaction, the high alert ordered the military to prepare for war but to avoid it.⁷⁸

Molotov, Voroshilov, and Beria remained in Stalin’s office, departing at 11:00 p.m.⁷⁹ Whether they went together to the Near Dacha for supper, as usual, remains unclear. At some point, Stalin was left alone, and he retired. Timoshenko and Zhukov, meanwhile, had been chauffeured the short distance to the defense commissariat, on the Moscow River embankment. At around 11:00 p.m., Timoshenko summoned Admiral Kuznetsov from the naval commissariat, next door, to hear “very important information.” Kuznetsov arrived to find Timoshenko dictating while pacing, and Zhukov at a desk writing, his tunic unbuttoned. They related that they had been to the Kremlin a second time that night and obtained Stalin’s permission to raise Soviet armed forces to “readiness No. 1.” Timoshenko ordered Kuznetsov’s deputy, another admiral, to run back to naval HQ to radiogram the order to the fleet commands.⁸⁰

In Berlin, Ribbentrop’s deputy, Weizsäcker, finally agreed to receive Dekanozov. It was 9:30 p.m. in Berlin, 11:30 in Moscow. But this time, too, the Soviet envoy had brought no concrete proposals in the form of last-minute concessions. Dekanozov handed the baron the protest of the border violations that Schulenburg had already received from Molotov. “When Herr Dekanozov tried to prolong the conversation somewhat, I told him that since I had an entirely different opinion from his and had to await the opinion of my government, it would be better not to go into the matter just now,” Germany’s state secretary noted of the exchange, which he terminated with the comment that “the reply will be forthcoming later.”⁸¹

• • •

IT BEING SATURDAY NIGHT, Soviet commanders up and down the frontier were hosting ensemble performances (with the exception of the Baltic military district, where the commander ignored admonitions to adopt a stance of nonchalance).⁸² In Minsk, 150 miles east of the border, the Officers’ Club put on The Wedding at Malinovka, a comic Soviet operetta about a village in the Ukrainian steppes during the civil war. The venue was packed. Attendees included the commander of the critical Western military district, Pavlov, his chief of staff, and his deputies. Six German aircraft had crossed the frontier in Pavlov’s region on a recent night. “Never mind. More self-control. I know, it has already been reported! More self-control!” Pavlov was overheard saying on the phone about the reports. As soon as Pavlov put the receiver down and prepared to greet a visitor, the apparatus rang again. “I know; it has been reported,” Pavlov was heard to say. “I know. Those at the top know better than us. That’s all.” He slammed down the phone.⁸³ During the operetta, Pavlov was interrupted in his box by a new report of unusual activity: the Germans had removed the barbed wire from their side of the border, and the sound of motors had grown louder, even at a distance. As he already knew but could do nothing about, an uninterrupted flow of German mechanized columns was moving forward in East Prussia along the Suwałki protrusion. Pavlov remained at the show.

Around midnight, Mikhail Kirponos, commander of the Kiev military district, called the defense commissariat on the high-frequency phone from his field HQ at Ternopol to report that another German had forded a river and crossed the border near Sokal (Ukraine) and said that Wehrmacht soldiers had taken up their firing positions, with tanks at their start lines. Zhukov called the Near Dacha to inform Stalin.⁸⁴ A little after midnight, a train carrying Soviet oil, manganese, and grain crossed the frontier into Greater Germany, its passage observed by waiting German divisions.⁸⁵ At around 1:00 a.m., Timoshenko called Pavlov on the high-frequency phone, evidently with word of Directive No. 1 to assume full combat readiness, and a caution not to succumb to provocation.⁸⁶

Some twelve hours earlier, precisely at 13:00 hours, Germany’s high command had transmitted the password for war, “Dortmund.” That afternoon, Hitler had received Admiral Raeder, Generals Keitel and Jodl, and Albert Speer, then, having already written a few days before to Romania’s Antonescu, who was responsible for Germany’s critical southern flank in the invasion, he composed explanatory letters for Italy’s Mussolini, Finland’s Ryti, and Hungary’s Horthy.⁸⁷ Hitler’s adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, noticed that he was “increasingly nervous and restless. The Führer talked a lot, walked up and down; he seemed impatient, waiting for something.” In his residence in the Old Reich Chancellery, Hitler did not sleep for the second straight night. He took a meal in the dining room. He listened to Les Préludes, the symphonic poem by Franz Liszt. He phoned to summon Goebbels, who had just finished rewatching Gone with the Wind. The two walked up and down Hitler’s drawing room for quite a while, finalizing the timing and content of the Führer’s war proclamation for the next day, about the “salvation of Europe” and the intolerable danger of waiting any longer. Goebbels left at 2:30 a.m., returning to the propaganda ministry, where staff had been told to await him. “Everyone was absolutely astonished,” he wrote, “even though most had guessed half of what was going on, and some all of it.”⁸⁸

Timoshenko’s ciphered radiograms of Directive No. 1 to military districts about advancing to full combat readiness while still avoiding provocations began to go out in the early hours of June 22. Most intended recipients in frontline positions failed to get word. One of Pavlov’s subordinates, Major General A. A. Korobkov, of the Fourth Army, who that evening had watched a performance of Johann Strauss II’s operetta The Gypsy Baron at Korbin, site of his field HQ, was left in the dark: his power and communications lines had been cut. Wehrmacht advance units, many in Red Army uniforms, had already crossed the border and sabotaged Soviet communications.⁸⁹ “The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room,” Hitler had told one of his private secretaries. “One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.”⁹⁰

• • •

STALIN’S REGIME HAD REPRODUCED a deep-set pattern in Russian history—a country that considered itself a providential power with a special mission in the world, but that substantially lagged the other great powers to the west, a circumstance that time and again induced Russian rulers to turn to the state for a forced modernization to overcome or at least manage the power asymmetry. This urgent quest for a strong state had culminated, once more, in personal rule. Under Stalin’s regime, both the apocalyptic bloodshed and the state’s capacity to summon resources and popular involvement intensified, a consequence of the violent mass era that slightly predated but was blown open by the First World War, the heady promises of Marxism-Leninism, and Stalin’s personal qualities. His despotic power derived not just from his control over the formidable levers of Leninist dictatorship, which he built, but from the ideology, which he shaped. His regime proved able to define the terms of public thought and individual identity, and he proved able to personify passions and dreams, to realize and represent a socialist modernity and Soviet might. With single-sentence telegrams or brief phone calls, he could spur the clunky Soviet party-state machinery into action, invoking discipline and intimidation, to be sure, but also emotionally galvanizing young functionaries who felt close personal ties to him, and millions more who would never come close to meeting him in person. Stalin was a student of historical forces, and of people, and his rule enabled those who came from nothing to feel world historically significant.

Stalin’s regime was not merely a statist modernization, but a purported transcendence of private property and markets, of class antagonisms and existential alienation, a renewal of the social whole rent by the bourgeoisie, a quest for social justice on a global scale. In worldview and practice it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, gaslighting itself. In administration it constituted a crusade for planning and control that generated a proliferation of improvised illegalities, a drive for order, and a system in which propaganda and myths about the “system” were the most systematized part. Amid the cultivated opacity and patent falsehoods, even most high officials were reduced to Kremlinology (rumors, parsing of “signals”). The fanatical hypercentralization was often self-defeating as well, but the cult of the party’s and especially Stalin’s infallibility proved to be the most dangerous flaw of his fallible rule. The superhuman resolve that he had demonstrated in launching and carrying through collectivization was, it turned out, accompanied by a surprising brittleness, which was exposed in his reaction to the criticism that the violent upheaval and famine sparked. Stalin became haunted not by the peasants’ horrors under collectivization but by the party criticism of him regarding those horrors, which would become the dark spur of his mass murders in the wanton terror, made possible by Bolshevism but driven by him. The pandemonium of widespread accusations of treason that he fomented reflected not reality or even potential threats, but his own demons. The flip side—his fantasies of a cleansing cadre renewal via promotion of new people—did little to quell his anxieties, partly because of their glaring difficulty assimilating the Short Course he produced expressly for them.

By inclination, Stalin was a Russian nationalist in the imperial sense, and anti-Western, the core impulse of long-standing Russian-Eurasian political culture. Initially, the ambitious Soviet version of the quest to match the West in order to preserve Russia’s anti-Western identity had increased the country’s dependency on the superior West. But after wholesale technology transfer, Stalin’s regime went on, at high cost and low efficiency, to develop sophisticated military and related industry to a degree unprecedented for even a military-first country. Geopolitically, however, whereas tsarist Russia had concluded foreign alliances for its security, the Soviet Union sought or could manage only nonaggression pacts. The country’s self-isolation became ever more extreme. One flanking power, Japan, had spurred Stalin’s no-holds-barred militarization, and after years of timid responses, he had finally decided to rebuff the challenge of this island power by flaunting the USSR’s better-armed and better-commanded land forces in a border war. The other flanking power, Germany, presented an incalculably greater challenge, given the geography, Germany’s military strength on land, and the special qualities of its ruler. Stalin insisted on calling fascism “reactionary,” a supposed way for the bourgeoisie to preserve the old world.⁹¹ But Hitler turned out to be someone neither Marx nor Lenin had prepared Stalin for.

A lifelong Germanophile, Stalin appears to have been mesmerized by the might and daring of Germany’s parallel totalitarian regime. For a time, he recovered his personal and political equilibrium in his miraculous Pact with Hitler, which deflected the German war machine, delivered a bounty of German machine tools, enabled the reconquest and Sovietization of tsarist borderlands, and reinserted the USSR into the role of arbitrating world affairs. Hitler had whetted and, reluctantly, abetted Stalin’s own appetites. But far earlier than the despot imagined, his ability to extract profit from the immense danger posed by Hitler to Europe and beyond had run its course. This generated unbearable tension in Stalin’s life and rule, yet he stubbornly refused to come to grips with the new realities, and not solely out of greed for German technology. Despite his insight into the human psyche, and demonic shrewdness, Stalin was blinkered by ideology and idées fixes. Churchill controlled not a single division on the Soviet frontier, yet Stalin remained absolutely obsessed with British imperialism, railing against the Versailles order long after Hitler had shredded it. He also obsessed over supposed secret British negotiations behind his back with Hitler.⁹²

For Hitler, the 1939 Pact with the USSR was nothing more than what the 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany had been for Lenin: a distasteful necessity, which, with luck, would not endure very long. Lenin’s luck had been delivered by imperial Germany’s idiotic precipitation of American entry into the First World War; Hitler’s came from his own audacity and the mistakes of his slow-to-react, divided foreign adversaries. The alliance system had not caused the First World War, but the absence of alliances helped cause the Second. A debate continues over the possibility of a genuine Western-Soviet military alliance to deter and, if necessary, defeat Germany in the 1930s, including the logistical difficulties for any combined military action posed by recalcitrant Poland and Romania. But logistics can always be managed when the will is there. Sir Stafford Cripps, the maladroit, well-intentioned British ambassador, grasped that German-Soviet relations were precarious, but he could bring neither his own government nor the Soviet Union anywhere near a British-Soviet rapprochement. Given the profundity of mutual distrust between London and Moscow, only an unequivocal perception by both of the urgency of state survival could have made a bilateral alliance possible, and even then, only for a time. Of course, survival was precisely what was at stake.

Hitler’s racial, Social Darwinist, zero-sum understanding of geopolitics meant that both the USSR and Great Britain would have to be annihilated in order for Germany to realize its master race destiny. To be sure, in the immediate term, he thought in terms of domination of the European continent (Grossmacht), which required Lebensraum in the east. But in the longer term, he foresaw domination of the world (Weltmacht), which would require a blue-water fleet, bases rimming the Atlantic, and a colonial empire in the tropics for raw materials. That was incompatible with the continued existence of the British empire, at least in its present form. Hitler thus put himself in front of a stark choice of either agreeing to deepen the Pact with Stalin, to take on Britain now, which meant conceding at least a partial Soviet sphere in the Balkans and on the Black Sea—on top of the Soviet sphere in the Baltics—or, alternately, freeing himself from the infuriating dependency on Moscow to take on Britain later. In the end, military circumstances helped determine the sequencing: Hitler did not possess the air or naval capabilities or the depth of resources to prevail militarily over island Britain; he did command the land-based wherewithal to attempt to smash the USSR.

A commitment to a prolonged contest for supremacy with Britain, which Hitler expected to be aided more and more by the vast resources of the United States, made quick annihilation of the Soviet Union an absolutely necessary prelude.⁹³ Moreover, even though Hitler and the German high command knew the Soviet Union was not poised to attack, the invasion amounted to a preventive war all the same in his logic, for the Soviet Union was only getting stronger, and might itself attack at a time it deemed more advantageous. And so, while pushing Japan to attack British positions in East Asia, he had offered the British government a version of the pact he had concluded with Stalin, in order to violate the latter, and he seemed dumbfounded that the British government did not accept.⁹⁴ The Nazi leader had grasped his foe’s imperial mind-set, and he was sincere when promising that, in exchange for a free hand on the continent, he would keep Britain’s empire intact for now (its destruction, in any case, would redound to others besides Germany in the short term). He continued to hold out hope that Britain, patently weak militarily on land and therefore unable to defeat him, would see “reason.” But Hitler had failed to grasp Britain’s long-standing preference for a balance of power on the continent.⁹⁵ He did, however, perceive far more common interest between London and Moscow than either of them saw themselves.

During the all-out preparations for blitzkrieg against the USSR, Hitler continued to order that resources be devoted to preparing for a long naval and air war against the UK and the United States. May–June 1941 was the blackest period yet for Britain: its ships were being sunk and its cities bombed, while its position in the Balkans had been lost to Nazi domination. After German paratroopers had captured Crete, in late May 1941, the British position seemed grievously imperiled. Eleven days before the scheduled launch of the Soviet invasion, Hitler had dictated a draft of Directive No. 32, “Preparations for the Time After Barbarossa.” It envisioned subdivision and exploitation of Soviet territories, as well as a pincer movement against the Suez Canal and British Near East positions via Bulgaria-Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran-Iraq-Syria; the conquest of Gibraltar, northwest Africa, and the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands, to eliminate the British in the Mediterranean; the building of coastal bases in West and possibly East Africa; and the creation of a German base in Afghanistan for seizing British India.⁹⁶ Had Hitler thrown all his might into this “peripheral strategy” rather than invading the USSR, Britain might not have survived.⁹⁷ The war with the Soviet Union would have gone ahead at some point, but with Britain knocked out of the picture. There would have been no British beachhead to assist an eventual U.S.-led Allied landing in Western Europe.⁹⁸

• • •

HITLER, ONE SCHOLAR HAS REMINDED US, cannot be explained in terms of his social origins or his early life and influences, a point that is no less applicable to Stalin.⁹⁹ The greatest shaper of Stalin’s being was the building and running of a dictatorship, whereby he assumed responsibility for Russia’s power in the world. In the name of socialism, Stalin, pacing in his Kremlin office, had grown accustomed to moving millions of peasants, workers—whole nations—across a sixth of the earth, on his own initiative, often consulting no one. But his world had become intensely constricted. Hitler had cornered the Soviet despot in his own Little Corner.

Stalin’s dealings with Hitler differed from British appeasement in that he tried significant deterrence as well as accommodation, and he took as much as he gave. But Stalin’s policy resembled British appeasement in that he was driven by a blinding desire to avoid war at all costs. He displayed strength of capabilities but not of will. Neither his fearsome resolve nor his supreme cunning—which had enabled him to vanquish his rivals and spiritually crush his inner circle—were in evidence in 1941. He shrank from trying to preempt Hitler militarily and failed to preempt him diplomatically.¹⁰⁰ In the end, however, the question of who most miscalculated is not a simple one. “Of all the men who can lay claim to having paved the way to the new Reich,” meaning his Reich, Hitler liked to say, “one figure stands in awe-inspiring solitude: Bismarck.”¹⁰¹ Bismarck, of course, had built his chancellorship on avoiding conflict with Russia. When the bust of Bismarck was transferred from the old German Chancellery to Hitler’s new Nazi Chancellery, it had broken off at the neck. A replica was hastily made, aged by soaking in cold tea. The omen of Bismarck’s broken neck was kept from the Führer.¹⁰²