by Ian Kershaw
Could intervention, as Stimson, Knox, Stark, Morgenthau and others were urging by May 1941, have been a wiser option than the course Roosevelt steered? With an army smaller than that of Holland and no warplanes or ships available, intervention in the spring and summer of 1940 could have been only of symbolic value. The navy was less weak than the army. But it was needed in the Pacific, to deter the Japanese, as well as in the Atlantic, and this was stretching resources. Removal of the fleet, or most of it, to the Atlantic would have sent a clear signal to Tokyo. Earlier expansion in south-east Asia than actually occurred would have been likely, with serious consequences for British defence in the region. Meanwhile, American as well as British shipping would have been prey to U-boat attacks in the Atlantic. It would have done little to help the supply of material resources to Britain. And none of this would have made any difference to the situation in Europe. Nothing the United States could have done would have hindered in the slightest Hitler’s conquest of western Europe.
By spring 1941 the situation had changed. American military strength was growing rapidly as the armaments drive gathered pace. The active help of American naval forces would have significantly reduced British losses in the Atlantic (though the chance capture of a German Enigma coding machine in May and the rapid breaking of U-boat ciphers itself produced a sharp drop in lost shipping over the next six months).263 A naval war with America in the Atlantic was something that at this juncture Hitler was keen to avoid. American belligerency would have sharply increased the apprehension in Berlin about the opening of a second front in the east. But the prospect of Hitler being sucked into what, with luck, would turn into a prolonged, bloody conflict in the east was precisely what the Americans–and the British–hoped would happen. In any case, nothing suggests that Hitler would have been deterred from his intention to destroy the Soviet Union in a swift and devastating surprise attack. In fact, since he reckoned with having two or three years before having to confront the full economic and military might of the United States, he would probably only have felt confirmed in his diagnosis that a quick knockout blow to the Soviet Union, forcing Britain to the negotiating table, was correct.
Intervention, then, would have been of little practical gain in the months between the defeat of France and the opening of ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in altering the course or ferocity of German aggression. What might its consequences have been within the United States? Any attempt to take the country into war would have met with extensive and heated opposition. As opinion polls demonstrated, four-fifths of the population rejected intervention, even in May 1941. So had Roosevelt driven America into war, the result would have been intense disunity and disharmony, the opposite of what took place after December 1941.
However, the question is otiose. At no point did Roosevelt consider taking America into war. Had he attempted it, he would have been reminded swiftly and in the most forceful terms (and not just by isolationists) of his explicit commitment in his Boston speech of October 1940, during his re-election campaign, that he would send no American troops to fight in a foreign war. In any case, quite apart from the state of opinion in the country, he knew full well that he had not the slightest chance of persuading Congress to issue a declaration of war.
The interventionists at home, even among Roosevelt’s closest advisers, and of course many in Britain, were impatient and critical of the American reluctance to enter the war. But the President’s caution, however maddening, was wise. He was successful, above all, in carrying the country with him in his careful steps across the tightrope. When war eventually came–the result of aggression by hostile forces, not any direct action of the President–that would prove vital.
6
Moscow, Spring–Summer 1941
Stalin Decides He Knows Best
You must understand that Germany will never on its own move to attack Russia…If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces without our permission, then bear in mind that heads will roll.
Reported comment of Stalin to his military leaders,
mid-May 1941
‘Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have f——d it up.’1 Stalin uttered his angry expletive in a bleak moment as he and the small group of his closest associates were leaving a fraught visit to the Defence Commissariat, six days after the German invasion on 22 June had caught the Soviet Union astonishingly unawares. It was as close as Stalin came to accepting responsibility for a calamitous error of judgement that saw the German army advancing at breakneck speed over 300 miles into Soviet territory within days, capturing or killing huge numbers of Soviet soldiers, and destroying thousands of tanks and aircraft in the first wave of attack. Whether Stalin’s chief henchmen accompanying him that day–Vyacheslav Molotov (the dour, unbending Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who pedantically corrected comrades referring to him as ‘Stone-Arse’ by saying that Lenin had actually dubbed him ‘Iron-Arse’2), Georgi Malenkov (manager of the Communist Party’s labyrinthine bureaucracy), Lavrenti Beria (the ruthless head of State Security) and Anastas Mikoyan (the foreign trade expert)3–were happy to be included in the collective blame for the disaster that Stalin’s earthy outburst implied is unclear. Molotov, doggedly loyal, was certainly ready to accept collective responsibility, as he continued to do long after the dictator’s death.4 If the others took a different stance, they were wise to keep quiet and not point out what all of them knew only too well: that the crucial decisions that had brought catastrophe to his country had been taken by Stalin and no one else.
Though so many, and from different sides, were warning him in unmistakable terms of the imminence of German attack, even naming the date of the invasion, Stalin had insisted that he knew best. Only five days before the attack a Soviet agent’s report was passed to Stalin by the Commissar for State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov. It warned that military action was imminent. Stalin’s response was: ‘Comrade Merkulov. You can tell your "source” from Ger[man] air force headquarters to go f——his mother. This is not a "source”–it’s someone spreading disinformation. J.St.’5 It was a characteristically abrasive expression of Stalin’s certainty that his own intuition and judgement were right, whatever anyone was telling him. His shock and astonishment on the early morning of 22 June were, then, all the greater, given his earlier self-assurance. But his spontaneous and unique admission six days later of grievous mistakes (if attributed collectively and couched in a crude vernacular) amounted to a tacit acceptance that other policy options had been available that could have avoided the disaster–choices that were not taken.
In retrospect, Stalin’s decision that he knew best–a decision for inaction–in the face of all the warnings of impending grave danger for his country seems one of the least comprehensible of the entire war. That this of all men, the most paranoidly suspicious of individuals, should have allowed himself to be deluded about Hitler’s intentions appears particularly hard to understand. History would surely have taken a different course had Stalin made other choices. But what might those choices have been? On closer inspection, perhaps those choices were less obvious and more curtailed than they seem in hindsight. The story of Stalin’s fateful choice is more complicated than an easy attribution to his arbitrary whim, scarcely credible blindness or stubborn stupidity would permit. This is the story that we now need to unravel. A starting point is how the Soviet Union was ruled, and how decisions were taken in the Stalinist system.
I
By the time Hitler’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 unleashed what would turn into the Second World War, Joseph Stalin, soon to celebrate his sixtieth birthday,6 had been dictator of the Soviet Union for some ten years. In contrast to the precise dating of Hitler’s dictatorship to his accession to power in the dramatic events of late January 1933, Stalin’s autocracy is not attributable to a specific moment or event. It had emerged gradually, though relentlessly, from his membership of a group of leading Bolsheviks subordinate to Lenin to the point where his personal hold on power was u
nchallengeable, unconstrained and utterly decisive in the way the Soviet Union was ruled.
Unlike Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany, which rested on the premiss of obedience to the will of an untouchable and infallible ‘great Leader’, Stalin’s essentially ran counter to the theory of collective government on which Soviet rule had been founded. Lenin, though his primacy had been uncontested, had nonetheless operated a form of collective leadership. Heated disputes over policy within the party leadership were not uncommon, and were accepted by Lenin, in the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin’s own supremacy had arisen out of a bitter internal power-struggle, in which his own mastery of the party’s secretariat and administrative apparatus had proved crucial. For some years, during the first Five-Year Plan to force the pace of collectivization of agriculture and industrial development, introduced in late 1928 and formally adopted in spring the following year, his own position remained one of first among equals in the Soviet leadership. And collective leadership was still upheld as the proper way to govern. Three leading members of the Politburo strongly criticized Stalin in early 1929 for appropriating powers to make decisions that by Bolshevik tradition should have been made collectively by the Central Committee of the party. ‘We are against the replacement of control by a collective with control by a person,’ they declared.7 They were too late. Stalin already controlled decisions, and how they were made. And he did not forget those who opposed him.
Five years later, the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular Leningrad party boss, was a further, vital, staging post on the way to absolute power. That Stalin was behind the murder has never been proved. Probably, it seems, he was not involved.8 But he was certainly the main beneficiary from the elimination of a leading figure in the party seen by some as a potential rival. The Kirov murder appears to have fuelled still further Stalin’s already pronounced paranoid distrust of all around him and morbid fear of attempts to remove him. The assassination marked the beginning of what would eventually develop into an all-out assault on those suspected of being his opponents. Perhaps it worked. For, remarkably, in contrast to a number of known attempts on Hitler’s life, Stalin was never the victim of an assassination plot. Soon, the extraordinary waves of terror unleashed against Soviet citizens would come to know no bounds. Stalin’s usually groundless but uncontrollable suspicions prompted massive and brutal purges that ravaged the ranks of party functionaries, not halting at some of the foremost Bolshevik leaders and former close comrades of Lenin, and decimating, with lasting and fateful consequences, the leadership of the Red Army. Stalin’s own power was enormously strengthened in the process.
The purges–‘the Great Terror’ as they have appropriately come to be known–were unleashed from the top. During 1937–8 Stalin personally approved 383 lists, containing the names of 44,000 victims from the party, government, military, intelligence services and other agencies of the regime.9 This figure was only a fraction of those who were to suffer in the astounding onslaught on his own people. Prominent and long-standing Bolsheviks from the top echelons of the party were among the first victims as Stalin sought to wipe the slate clean of those whose experiences of the ‘glory days’ under Lenin might have stood in the way of his own claim to be his sole and legitimate heir.10 Stalin was reported as saying that it was time ‘to finish with our enemies because they are in the army, in the staff, even in the Kremlin’.11 But the purges were also meant to produce a complete renewal of the party’s cadres at all levels and throughout the Soviet Union. There was no shortage of willing helpers, as rank-and-file party members, whether from careerist opportunism or ideological conviction or both, rushed to denounce old comrades, and even friends and family, handing them over to the tender mercies of the secret police, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).
This body was a vital prop in Stalin’s control of the Soviet regime, and was given special status. Its head was personally responsible to Stalin alone, and its functionaries were very well paid and encouraged in their loyalty by numerous material inducements, as well as threatened themselves with draconian punishment when the corruption and criminality endemic in the organization came to light.12 In July 1937 the NKVD laid before the Politburo its action plan, backed by a huge budget, for the purges. It presented target figures of 75,000 people to be shot and 225,000 to be sent to camps. The plan, approved by the Politburo, turned out to provide only the minimum framework of intended victims. Once unleashed, the purges took on their own momentum as grass-roots activists in the party relished the open licence to wipe out all supposed ‘enemies’ they could lay their hands on and NKVD agents rushed to fill their ‘quotas’. Close to 700,000 people were shot in 1937–8, and more than a million and a half arrested.13
The party cadres were soon able to replenish themselves, and now with out-and-out Stalin loyalists. But for the Red Army, the catastrophe was more lastingly damaging. The purges of the army were driven by the same underlying aim of rooting out all real or imaginary opponents and turning the military, too, into an unquestioning, ultra-loyal vehicle of the political leadership. But whereas new party functionaries could easily be trained, lost military leadership skills and technical abilities could not be replaced overnight. And the losses in such areas were massive. In all, 34,301 officers were arrested or expelled from the armed forces in 1937–8. Some 30 per cent were reinstated by the beginning of 1940. But 22,705 were either shot or their fate remains unknown.14 Higher ranks suffered disproportionately in the ‘decapitation’ of the Red Army.15 Of the 101 members of the supreme military leadership, 91 were arrested, and of these 80 shot. Among them were three out of five of the Marshals of the Soviet Union (the highest military rank), three out of the four army commanders, all heads of military districts, nearly all divisional commanders, all commanders of the air force and two admirals of the fleet.16 Most were victims of absurd, trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity.
The most prominent victim, and the most classic demonstration of the bizarrely self-destructive nature of the military purges, was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most brilliant military strategist in the Soviet Union and the chief advocate and planner of a modernized, well-trained, enlarged, technologically developed military organization. Stalin’s elephantine memory doubtless recalled that, as Political Commissar to the southwestern front in 1920 after the Polish capture of Kiev, he had failed to supply cavalry troops demanded by Tukhachevsky, with disastrous consequences.17 The outspoken Tukhachevsky clashed further with Stalin during the 1930s about the level of political controls on a professionalized military machine. And his relationship with the incompetent Defence Commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a Stalin devotee and close associate, was fraught–more than ever during his brief time as Deputy Commissar of Defence in 1936–7.18 In May 1937 Tukhachevsky was arrested, tortured into a confession of involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet state and executed. Stalin dubbed him a spy, who ‘gave our operational plan…–our holy of holies–to the German Reichswehr’. His wife, daughter and other members of his family were killed on Stalin’s orders, or sent to camps.19
Recovery from such a consciously directed bloodletting of the leadership of the armed forces could not be speedy. Stalin was overheard asking Voroshilov, in charge of defence, in autumn 1938–as Europe was anticipating another war in the near future–whether there were any officers left capable of commanding a division.20 A plan for the reorganization of the armed forces drawn up the previous autumn calculated that they would not be ready for war before the end of 1942.21 The inadequacy of the army was indeed to be revealed in the humiliating campaign of the ‘Winter War’ with Finland in 1939–40. By the summer of 1941, as ‘Barbarossa’ was launched, 75 per cent of field officers and 70 per cent of political commissars had held their posts for less than a year.22 The lack of experience in vital areas of military command was a direct consequence of the purges.
Countless numbers of Soviet citizens, inside and o
utside the party, supported the purges (and became complicit in them), believing they were a legitimate witchhunt to eradicate the ‘enemy within’. Far from undermining Stalin’s support, they enhanced it, though mainly out of awe and fear of their Leader rather than from warm adulation.23 For if mass acclamation was a key prop of Hitler’s power in Germany, terror that potentially posed a threat to each individual, however elevated the status, and the universal fear that ran in its wake, was the basis of Stalin’s. It now provided the platform for the full unfolding of the Stalinist dictatorship–not the fabled ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but the dictatorship of one man.
Remembering the contested route to his later supremacy, and conscious of the theories of collective leadership which his personal rule was negating, Stalin in fact continued in the 1930s to deny that he was a dictator, put his name to decrees alongside co-signatories (and not in first place) and insisted that ‘decisions are made by the party and acted upon by its chosen organs, the Central Committee and the Politburo’.24 But by the time the Second World War began, this had long been the most blatant of fictions.