Stepan Mikoyan grew up in the Kremlin compound in the 1930s. His father Anastas was a leading member of the Politburo and he himself met Stalin on many occasions. ‘Stalin was by nature very attentive,’ says Mikoyan, ‘and he watched people’s eyes when he was speaking – and if you didn’t look him straight in the eye, he might well suspect that you were deceiving him. And then he’d be capable of taking the most unpleasant steps . . . He was very suspicious. That was his main character trait . . . He was a very unprincipled man . . . He could betray and deceive if he thought it was necessary. And that’s why he expected the same behaviour from others . . . anyone could turn out to be a traitor.’
The later Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev put it this way: ‘All of us around Stalin were temporary people. As long as he trusted us to a certain degree, we were allowed to go on living and working. But the moment he stopped trusting you, the cup of his distrust overflowed.’11 Trotsky, who always felt himself Stalin’s superior, gave this judgement on the new Soviet leader: ‘Being enormously envious and ambitious, he could not help but feel his intellectual and moral inferiority every step of the way . . . Only much later did I realize that he had been trying to establish some sort of familiar relations. But I was repelled by the very qualities that would strengthen him . . . the narrowness of his interests, his pragmatism, his psychological coarseness and the special cynicism of the provincial who has been liberated from his prejudices by Marxism but who has not replaced them with a philosophical outlook that has been thoroughly thought out and mentally absorbed.’12
This, of course, was an underestimation of Stalin. He might not have possessed Trotsky’s charisma, but Stalin was the more politically astute; his combination of natural intelligence, pragmatism, suspicious nature and ruthlessness enabled him to develop an extremely effective way of retaining power: terror. The Nazis took careful note of how, during the 1930s, Stalin eliminated anyone whom he, or his secret police, the NKVD, thought presented the remotest threat.
As a consequence, Stalin specialized in using fear as a factor of motivation. One historian describes it as ‘negative inspiration’ – the idea that his followers had constantly to prove themselves to him.13 It was foolhardy in the extreme to criticize the system in front of him. One young Air Force general boldly stated, at a meeting at which Stalin was present, that the number of accidents in military planes was so high because ‘we are forced to fly in coffins’.14 Stalin replied: ‘You should not have said that, General,’ and had him killed the following day.
From 1937 Stalin presided over the purging of the Red Army. Thousands of its most senior officers were tried and executed in an atmosphere of paranoia. Mark Gallay was a Soviet test pilot who lived through this horror. ‘In 1937 the conditions in our country were oppressive,’ he says. ‘There was the heavy atmosphere of the Stalinist repressions. It concerned everyone: scientists, the military, and amongst the military the Air Force. Suffice to say that, within the space of a few years, the head of the Air Force was changed many times. One after the other, they were repressed and eliminated.’ Gallay explained how he led a ‘dual existence’ during this time. On the one hand he was starting his career, courting his future wife, ‘in the prime of my youth’, someone who would set off for work each day with ‘pleasure’. On the other, as a candidate-member of the Communist party, two or three times a week he would attend sinister meetings. ‘And we tried to pick someone at random from our own milieu and to get him to talk about his links with “enemies of the people”. . . But the vast majority of people were innocent. And at these meetings someone would make a speech. Well, you know, there is a breed of person who likes to give a condemned man that final push. Someone would get up to make a speech because they were forced to do so. The majority maintained a gloomy silence. And they knew that if they voted to exclude someone from the party, he would be arrested that night.’
This charge of ‘enemy of the people’ was an extremely effective device for the security forces; few allegations could appear at first sight more serious, and yet the actual details of the offence remained vague.15 Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, is said to have quoted the theory, which he assigned to Stalin, that ‘an enemy of the people is not only one who makes sabotage, but one who doubts the rightness of the party line. And there are a lot of them among us, and we must liquidate them.’
This policy of terror did not even spare those who were valuable to the military machine. On a ‘dank and cold’ October day in 1937, Mark Gallay arrived at the aerodrome to witness a chilling sight. The tailplanes on the aircraft in front of his hangar were being painted over. Each experimental plane carried the initials of its designer, and now the painters were obliterating ‘A.N.T.’ – the mark of one of the most gifted aero-engineers of the time, Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev. Gallay realized that Tupolev must have been arrested; that the very man who had designed the new warplanes had just become ‘an enemy of the people’.
An insight into the way Stalin wished the secret police to deal with these ‘enemies of the people’ is contained in this instruction sent to local NKVD authorities: ‘The Central Committee . . . authorizes the use of physical coercion by the NKVD beginning in 1937. It is well known that all bourgeois intelligence services use physical coercion of the most disgusting kind against representatives of the socialist proletariat. The question therefore arises why socialist organs should be more humane towards the rabid agents of the bourgeoisie and sworn enemies of the working class and collective farms?’
It is not hard to guess the effect such arbitrary arrests, torture and murder had on the morale of the Soviet military – particularly in areas such as experimental plane design, an environment in which progress can be made only through trial and error. ‘Naturally,’ says Mark Gallay, ‘when the general atmosphere is oppressive, it does not facilitate the flourishing of initiative . . . Under the conditions of the Stalinist terror, everyone was afraid of making mistakes.’
Goebbels recorded Hitler’s view of Stalin’s purges in 1937: ‘Stalin is probably sick in the brain,’ said Hitler. ‘Otherwise you can’t explain his bloody regime.’16 For Hitler himself had practised nothing like this. On the contrary, (as discussed in Chapter Three) when he came to power he had initially worked with the generals who were already in place. Even when, in the late 1930s, he had been presented with an opportunity to remove those military figures who were still not enthusiastic about Nazism, he had merely forced the wavering generals into retirement – they had been given not a bullet in the head but a pension.17
Stalin did more than purge the Red Army to confirm to the Nazis that he was ‘sick in the brain’. Even his own family fell victim to his obsessive paranoia. Two of his brothers-in-law were arrested and shot, two of his sisters-in-law were arrested and imprisoned. A third brother-in-law, Pavel Alliluyev, died of suspected poisoning after going to work in the Kremlin one day in November 1938. ‘That was his character,’ says Kira, Pavel Alliluyev’s daughter and Stalin’s niece. ‘“Stalin” – it means “steel”.’ (Born losif Dzhugashvili, he had adopted a pseudonym, like many Communist agitators, in his case Stalin – ‘of steel’.) As Kira explains, ‘He had a heart of steel . . . It would seem that Stalin had hinted to someone that Papa had to be got rid of because he was continually compromising him [Stalin] by getting him to set people free. And obviously Stalin got fed up with it . . . Of course, he knew that he couldn’t arrest my father. He wouldn’t be able to prove to my mother that he was an enemy of the people. So he got rid of him.’
Kira and her family spent time at Stalin’s dacha in the country, where she marvelled at the other side of his character. ‘He was very fond of my younger brother – he called him “mushroom”, he would sit him on his knee and chat to him affectionately . . . And I could say that I didn’t want to eat something or that I didn’t like something. He’d say: “Leave her alone! If she doesn’t want to, then she doesn’t have to!”’
But after her father’s death, Kira and her mother’s
relationship with Stalin changed. ‘He became very strange. He kept us at a distance. We no longer saw him after 1939 . . . The way we lived after Papa had been poisoned, it was like something out of a Shakespearean tragedy.’ Kira and her mother were both imprisoned, though neither of them could see the reason why. ‘A normal person would think, how is it possible to destroy your own family? But his power was greater than anyone else’s. He was clearly above everyone else. He didn’t see anything around him, he just wanted everyone to say “Yes” to everything he did. Anyone who said “No” or who doubted anything would be made an “enemy of the people”. His enemy . . . My whole life was destroyed. My husband left me because his parents said to him: “They’ll put you in prison too!” I married again but it was too late the second time . . . it was too late to have children. My life was really destroyed. But what should I do about it? I decided to be an optimist. So I go on living. You can’t go back and change things.’
Of course, terrible as these stories of personal suffering are, they would have given the Nazis no concrete reason to be certain that Stalin had so damaged the Soviet Union that the country would collapse under the German attack. Even today there is argument about the extent to which the purges alone harmed the Red Army. For the Soviet military machine was also weakened by its chaotic expansion in the years preceding the war when inexperienced officers were thrust upwards in the hierarchy into positions for which they had little training (a situation, of course, exacerbated by the purges). While during 1937–8 more than 30 per cent of officers were expelled from military service, only in recent years have the original Western estimates of officers arrested during the same period dropped from between a quarter and a half of the total number to well below 10 per cent. But what the argument about numbers fails to do is recognize the harm done to the morale and initiative of the Soviet armed forces by the knowledge that the merest error could result in arrest or even execution.
Indeed, as Hitler and his generals began in the summer of 1940 to assess how the Red Army might fight in the forthcoming war, they had more compelling evidence than knowledge of the purges to make them feel optimistic about the conflict ahead. Nine months before, in November 1939, the Red Army had attacked Finland. Stalin had planned to take the country forcibly into the Soviet Union as the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Republic. On paper the Finns appeared to have little hope. They faced a numerically stronger Soviet force – one estimate says the Red Army had nearly a three-to-one advantage. But it didn’t work out the way Stalin desired. ‘It was a terrifying scene,’ says Mikhail Timoshenko, who fought on the Soviet side with the 44th Ukrainian Division in the Finnish War. ‘It gave you the impression that someone had intentionally sent our people to freeze to death. There was no enemy visible anywhere. It was as if the forest was doing the shooting all by itself.’
The Red Army received a lesson in how a small, motivated and lightly armed force could conduct effective guerrilla war. ‘In small groups, of say 10 or 15 men, the Finns were sneaking up to our bonfires, firing short bursts from their machine guns and then immediately running away again . . . when we sent our men to follow the tracks that we’d observed in the snow, they didn’t return. The Finns lay in wait for them and killed them all in ambush. We realized that it simply wasn’t possible to wage war against the Finns.’ As a result of failures in tactics, leadership, equipment and communications, Timoshenko’s division began to fall apart. By February 1940 they were down to 10,000 men – less than half strength. ‘Personally, I thought that there had been some kind of misunderstanding – the decision made no sense to me. Why had they sent our division there when there was no enemy, when it was so dreadfully cold, when people were freezing to death?’ Out of his regiment of 4000 only about 500 escaped from Finland unharmed. The Soviet system dealt with this failure in a familiar way. The ‘guilty’ commanders were shot. In Timoshenko’s case, both his regimental commander and commissar (see here) were executed. A peace treaty was finally signed with Finland in March 1940. By sheer superiority of numbers the Red Army had gained some territory – but at the terrible cost of 130,000 Soviet dead.
Even a committed Communist like Mikhail Timoshenko realized the message being sent to the Soviet Union’s fellow signatory of the Non-Aggression Pact: ‘The Germans, naturally enough, came to the conclusion that the Red Army was weak. And in many respects they were right.’ The German General Staff examined the Red Army’s tactics in the Finnish War and reached a simple but damning conclusion: ‘The Soviet “mass” is no match for an army with superior leadership.’18
All this goes some way to explain why, on 21 July 1940, nearly two weeks before the major military conference at the Berghof, Hitler went so far as to ask General Alfred von Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), if the German Army could move into action against the Soviet Union that autumn. Jodl rejected the idea of attacking so soon; there wasn’t enough time to complete the necessary planning. Instead, preparations were begun that summer for an attack the following year.
The formal directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union was issued on 18 December 1940. Up to then the codenames Otto and Fritz had been used for the operation, but Hitler now renamed it Barbarossa after the nickname of Emperor Frederick I, who, according to ancient belief, would rise again to aid Germany when the country needed him most.
As 1940 came to an end, all the various strands of Hitler’s thinking must have confirmed him in his view that this giant undertaking was the right way forward. On a practical level, the failure of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain had destroyed any chance of a successful German invasion of England – so how else could Britain and the USA be neutralized except through the elimination of their potential ally on the European continent, the Soviet Union? On a political level, the visit of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin in November 1940 had demonstrated to Hitler the dangerous way in which the Soviet Union wished to exploit the Non-Aggression Pact. Had not Molotov announced that the Soviet Union wanted to annex part of Romania? On an economic level, Germany was hugely dependent on the Soviet Union for raw materials with which to fight the war – suppose at a crucial moment the Soviet Union simply turned off the tap? On an ideological level the Communists were, of course, loathsome to Hitler and the Nazis. Wouldn’t the Führer feel ‘spiritually free’ (as he later wrote to Mussolini) by breaking the Non-Aggression Pact, this marriage of political convenience? On a military level, what more evidence did the German Army need of their own innate superiority than to compare their own swift subjugation of the French with the inability of the Red Army to crush the puny Finns?
Not until the beginning of 1941, after the timing and objectives of Barbarossa had been laid down, were any practical doubts voiced. The head of the Wehrmacht’s Office for Armament Economy, General Thomas, now raised with the High Command some of the difficulties that the German Army would face during the invasion – how would they be supplied with sufficient fuel and provisions inside Soviet territory? At a meeting with Hitler on 3 February, Halder mentioned these problems and suggested ways of overcoming them (the idea that the German Army might ‘live off the land’ and loot the resources of the Soviet Union to augment any deficiencies in supply was optimistically put forward by the Wehrmacht’s central economic agency; see here). A later, more devastating, assessment, again from General Thomas, of the logistical challenge that the German Army would face was probably never even shown to Hitler.
That February another flaw in the invasion plan was discussed, albeit briefly. Barbarossa was not intended to be an invasion of the whole Soviet Union. The Germans would stop at the Ural Mountains, leaving the Soviets to retreat beyond – to the forests and swamps of Siberia. Not even Hitler thought he had the military power at his disposal to march east to the Pacific Ocean. (As Hubert Menzel, a Panzer division officer, put it: ‘This was Blitzkrieg – but without borders.’) Field Marshal von Bock, who was to command Army Group Centre (the military thrust charged wi
th advancing along the central Minsk–Smolensk–Moscow axis), asked how, after the defeat of the Red Army, the Soviets would be ‘forced to make peace’.19 Hitler replied vaguely that ‘after the conquest of the Ukraine, Moscow and Leningrad . . . the Soviets will certainly consent to a compromise’.
Despite all this, the confidence of some in the German High Command remained overweening: ‘The Russian colossus will be proved to be a pig’s bladder,’ said General Jodl. ‘Prick it and it will burst.’ Perhaps Jodl was thinking of the humiliation the generals had suffered when their pessimistic assessment of the German Army’s chances against the French had proved so wrong. This time, the generals would not be accused of being ‘negative’.
During that spring Hitler made changes to the OKH’s three-pronged invasion plan. He thought their emphasis on the need to push on to Moscow was misplaced. Central to Hitler’s conception of the forthcoming hostilities was his belief that this was a new kind of war, a war of destruction, and it was more important that the enemy’s forces be eliminated in vast encirclement battles than that their capital be taken. Hitler’s change of emphasis was accepted without protest. His expectation was clear – the Red Army would be surrounded and eliminated far west of Moscow and then the country would collapse because of the loss of its industrial capacity.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 15