Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
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On 5 May Stalin replaced Molotov as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars–the equivalent of Prime Minister. He was now for the first time officially head of the state government, as well as the party (as its General Secretary). In reality, the move, made public the next day, was in many ways cosmetic. Though Molotov had previously headed the state government, Stalin’s supremacy had never been in doubt. But by officially taking over, Stalin was now offering reassurance to the Soviet public. He was in total control. The well-being of the country was in the best hands. He knew what to do.
But the move went beyond morale-boosting. Converting Politburo decisions into government decrees, a process necessary to ensure party dominance, had entailed cumbersome formalities. At such a critical time, these were now greatly streamlined.127 At least as important was the impression to be conveyed abroad, most crucially to Germany. At the formal level of diplomacy, Stalin’s lack of responsibility for state government had been something of a complication. Formal negotiations had to pass through Molotov, even though it was obvious that Stalin was really in charge. This complication was now bypassed. It was meant to show the Germans that in negotiations to stabilize relations they could deal with Stalin himself. The German ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, who secretly opposed the looming invasion, correspondingly reported to Berlin his conviction ‘that Stalin will use his new position in order to take part personally in the maintenance and development of good relations between the Soviets and Germany’.128 The Germans soon had reason to be satisfied with Stalin the Prime Minister. He denied rumours of military concentrations on the frontier, resumed diplomatic relations with the pro-German government of Iraq and closed the Norwegian, Belgian and Yugoslav embassies in Moscow–all to appease Hitler.129
On the day that he became the Soviet premier, Stalin gave a major speech in Moscow before hundreds of graduates of the Military Academy, along with the elite of the Red Army, representatives of the Defence Commissariat and General Staff, and important government figures. Unlike Hitler, Stalin seldom gave speeches, even behind closed doors. His previous major speech had been in March 1939, at the 18th Party Congress.130 And, again unlike Hitler, Stalin’s style of speech was calm and measured (even to the point of dullness), the content structured and ordered. But the rarity of his speeches and the gravity of the situation increased the interest, at home and also in Berlin, in what Stalin had said. Little could be known for certain. The newspapers next day carried only a lapidary note of his address.131
In all, an audience of around 1,500 heard Stalin speak for around forty minutes about the great advances achieved in modernizing and building up the Red Army to its current position of strength. He provided an array of impressive figures on the huge improvements in the size and fighting capability of the armed forces and their modern weaponry. Turning to the German army, he attributed the great victories in the west to the ability to learn from earlier failures and the weakness of the French. He was insistent that the German army was not invincible, and, drawing an analogy with Napoleon, that its aim of conquest (which had replaced the earlier one of freedom from the Versailles Treaty) would not be achieved. In the reception that followed, Stalin gave three short toasts. In the third, he corrected an officer who wanted to toast his peace policy. The peace policy had served the country’s defences well, Stalin said. It had been pursued until the army had been rebuilt and given modern weaponry. But now, he declared, the Soviet Union had to move from defensive to offensive operations. ‘The Red Army is a modern army,’ he ended, ‘but a modern army is an attacking army.’132 Some interpreters have seen in these words the aim of launching a preventive attack on Germany, precisely what Nazi propaganda claimed to justify the invasion of the USSR.133 But the brief remarks offered no more than a terse restatement of the long-standing military strategy of converting defence into devastating attack, though it is certainly true that they presented, and were seen to present, a new emphasis upon offence. And they were, as was the main speech preceding the toasts, explicitly aimed at effect. The outright purpose was to instil belief in the Red Army’s fighting capacity, to bolster morale through the confidence exuded at the very top of the Soviet Union. That the speech set the tone for the new propaganda directives for the army and civilian population which were prepared in its aftermath also suggests that the building of morale was its key purpose.134
The speech has been seen as aimed primarily at spreading disinformation abroad. Had that been the case, Soviet intelligence would have been adept at leaking its content. As it was, even the Germans, whose interest in what Stalin had to say was obvious, had to be content with a completely bowdlerized version passed on only a month later by the ambassador in Moscow. Schulenburg, who, at the time it was delivered, had been unable to discover the content of the speech, now provided a wholly misleading version, suggesting that Stalin had emphasized that the Red Army was still weak compared to the Wehrmacht, and had wanted to prepare his audience for a ‘new compromise’ with Germany.135 No accurate version of the speech, it seems, found its way to Berlin, or anywhere else.136 And a deliberate leak stressing the feeble state of the Red Army was scarcely in the Soviet interest. So, for all the speculation, the objective of the speech is best viewed as domestic, rather than external–to shore up the morale and self-belief of the leaders of the Red Army.
It had, however, immediate consequences for the military leadership’s operational planning, which was also most likely affected by the latest comprehensive assessment by military intelligence of the number of German divisions massing on the western borders of the Soviet Union.137 The earlier plans, from September 1940 and March 1941, were now rapidly revised. By 15 May Timoshenko and Zhukov were ready to present the new plan to Stalin.138 Though building directly on the earlier plans, it differed in one striking respect. It now envisaged a major pre-emptive strike, as Zhukov later acknowledged, to forestall the enemy by attacking the German army before it was ready to launch its own offensive. As before, the main directional thrust was towards southern Poland, where the enemy would be destroyed by a ‘sudden blow’ on land and from the air. The advance included the conquest of Warsaw, and subsequently the destruction of German forces in northern Poland and the overrunning of East Prussia.139
The plan has given succour to those anxious to assert that Hitler, as he claimed, launched ‘Barbarossa’ to head off a Soviet pre-emptive strike which was under preparation. But nothing supports such a far-fetched interpretation. The Nazi leadership knew, of course, that they were not invading the Soviet Union to head off a pre-emptive strike. ‘Barbarossa’ had been instigated months earlier, and for aggressive, not defensive, reasons. And the Soviet plan of 15 May provides no ‘smoking gun’.
Certainly, it proposed a pre-emptive strike. In this, it converted the traditional emphasis on the rapid transition from ‘deep defence’ to offence into a stress on attack as a form of defence. Unlike the German fiction of a Soviet threat, the menace from Hitler’s forces was evident to the Soviet military leadership as daily reports of the build-up of troops and violations of the borders for aerial reconnaissance poured in. The idea of the pre-emptive strike contained in the 15 May plan arose directly from the need to protect the Soviet Union, and was inspired by Stalin’s speech ten days earlier. That is, it was an offensive plan born out of defensive necessity.140
Worried as they were by the incessant flow of intelligence reports on troop movements together with indications (if not always consistent) of hostile German intent towards the Soviet Union, Timoshenko and Zhukov nevertheless most probably thought, like Stalin, that the German attack was not imminent. Red Army estimates indicated that the German build-up in the east had not been great in recent weeks, and that a far larger concentration of strength would have to occur before any attack took place.141 And, as the Soviet military leaders were only too well aware, the forces available to the Red Army nowhere approached those required under the 15 May plan, and major deficiencies were still obvi
ous in transport and supplies. The plan also encompassed the construction of huge defensive fortifications, which were nowhere near completion. As a blueprint for action in the near future, therefore, the plan was utterly unrealistic.142 Most probably, Timoshenko and Zhukov had in mind an offensive at some stage in the more distant future, probably at the earliest during the summer of 1942.
In any case, speculation on the possible timing of any pre-emptive strike is fruitless. When Timoshenko and Zhukov presented the plan–still in draft form–to Stalin, he rejected it outright. ‘He immediately exploded when he heard about the pre-emptive blow against the German forces,’ Zhukov reputedly commented at a later date. ‘ "Have you gone mad? Do you want to provoke the Germans?”, he barked out irritably.’ Timoshenko and Zhukov reminded Stalin of what he had said on 5 May. ‘ "I said that in order to encourage the people there, so that they would think about victory and not about the invincibility of the German army, which is what the world’s press is blaring on about”, growled Stalin. And thus was buried our idea for a pre-emptive blow,’ Zhukov concluded.143
An account of the postwar testimony of Timoshenko was equally explicit about Stalin’s reaction. Stalin, in this version, accused both Zhukov and Timoshenko of being warmongers. When Timoshenko referred to his speech of 5 May, Stalin retorted: ‘Look everyone…Timoshenko is healthy and has a large head, but his brain is evidently tiny…What I said [on 5 May] was for the people. Their vigilance had to be raised. And 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.’ Stalin then stormed out, slamming the door.144
Stalin stuck to his policy of non-provocation and playing for time. So keen was he to avoid provoking the Germans that deliveries of raw materials to Germany in line with earlier trade agreements were still being met in full only six days before the Wehrmacht attacked. Even down to the morning of the invasion itself, Soviet goods were being unloaded at stations on the Polish borders.145 About the same time, Lieutenant-General Kirponos, the Red Army commander in Kiev, who had written to Stalin informing him that a German offensive in the near future was more than likely and had moved some units into more favourable defensive positions on the frontier, had his orders countermanded.146 Stalin remained unshaken in his conviction that the Germans would not invade until they had attained victory or a compromise settlement in the west. ‘Hitler and his generals are not so stupid as to fight at the same time on two fronts,’ Zhukov remembered Stalin saying during his angry riposte to the plan. ‘That broke the neck of the Germans in the First World War.’ Again Stalin insisted that Hitler was not strong enough to fight on two fronts and–here wholly misjudging his foe–‘he won’t go in for adventures’.147
Did Stalin miss an opportunity in turning his back on the military plan of 15 May offered to him by Timoshenko and Zhukov? That was not what Zhukov himself later thought. Recalling his own inexperience at the time as chief of the General Staff (a position he had not wanted, aware that his real strength was as a field commander), he admitted that he had been wrong, and that Stalin’s judgement on the plan was correct. Had a pre-emptive strike been attempted, Zhukov adjudged, the consequences for the Soviet Union would have been even more catastrophic. In all probability, he concluded, the Soviet Union would have been quickly defeated, Moscow and Leningrad would have fallen in 1941, and Hitler’s forces would have been in a position to conclude the war successfully.148
While Timoshenko and Zhukov were unsuccessfully trying to persuade Stalin to adopt their modified operational plan, and while frenzied work to build up the Red Army was under way, urgent diplomatic efforts to avoid or at least postpone war continued. Most of these revolved around the German ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, who would be executed by the Nazi regime just over three years later for his association with the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Schulenburg still believed in May 1941 that war could be prevented if the Soviet Union complied with German material and territorial demands. He reported to Berlin his conviction that Stalin had taken over the office of Prime Minister because he had set himself the goal of ‘preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany’.149 And he backed up the conviction by transmitting the Soviet offer of five million tons of grain to be delivered to Germany the following year.150 Naturally, such reports, if ever they reached him, cut no ice with Hitler. But Schulenburg in turn was deliberately fed misleading information from Berlin. He was directed, for instance, to quell rumours, deliberately spread, it was claimed, by the British to stir up conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany. He was told that the rumours of German troop concentrations and impending war were ‘very detrimental to the further peaceful development of German-Russian relations’.151 And during an audience with Hitler himself in Berlin at the end of April, the German dictator had explicitly told him: ‘I do not intend a war against Russia.’152 Schulenburg was sure that Hitler had lied to him. Even so, in the weeks that followed, he conveyed his own belief to Stalin and Molotov that war was not inevitable, reinforcing in their minds the notion that a diplomatic solution might still be possible, and sowing still further distrust of British intentions.153
The distrust was significantly hardened in the wake of Rudolf Hess’s flight into British captivity on 10 May. The British government, itself led by intelligence into believing until early June that German troop movements were designed to force the Soviet leadership into negotiations,154 tried to use Hess’s mysterious arrival to stiffen resistance by instilling fear in Stalin at ‘being left alone to face the music’ and encouraging him to forge an alliance between the USSR and Britain.155 The attempt misfired totally. Instead, it simply shored up Stalin’s paranoia. His immediate reaction on hearing the news of Hess’s flight and capture was, according to Khrushchev, to presume that he was on a secret mission, at Hitler’s behest, to negotiate with the British about ending the war to free Germany for the push to the east.156 But he soon became less certain. Other possibilities implanted themselves in his mind. Soviet intelligence reported rumours offering different interpretations. Ivan Maisky, the long-standing and perceptive Soviet ambassador in London, added to the uncertainty through his reports, since he himself had difficulty in reaching a clear conclusion on the purpose of Hess’s mission. All this contributed to Stalin’s own unease. Unsure whether Churchill’s government was trying to inveigle him into a war against Germany, whether the British and the Germans were about to do a deal to join forces against Bolshevism (as he had always anticipated), or whether Hess represented a faction opposed to a Hitler thought to prefer negotiations with the Soviet Union, Stalin was confirmed only in his belief in the utter untrustworthiness of the British and took all warnings emanating from London to be outright disinformation.157
The rumour and counter-rumour feeding the innumerable intelligence reports were open to different interpretations, some of them playing directly to Stalin’s prejudices. Dekanozov, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, for instance, reported as follows to Moscow in early June: ‘Parallel to the rumours circulating about the imminent war between Germany and the Soviet Union, rumours were spread in Germany of a rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union, either on the basis of far-reaching "concessions” on the part of the Soviet Union’–a long-term lease of the Ukraine was frequently mentioned–‘or on the basis of "division of spheres of influence” and undertakings on the part of the Soviet Union not to interfere in European affairs.’158 The Soviet ambassador was, in fact, unwittingly relaying a piece of deliberate German misinformation.
Making sense of the mountain of conflicting intelligence reports and countervailing rumours was far from straightforward. Timoshenko and Zhukov, certainly, became increasingly anxious as quite specific reports of German troop concentrations poured in. But when, on the night of 11–12 June, they advocated putting the troops on a war footing and moving forces to forward positions to strengthen defensive capacity, Stalin w
as dismissive: ‘I am certain that Hitler will not risk creating a second front by attacking the Soviet Union,’ he declared. ‘Hitler is not such an idiot and understands that the Soviet Union is not Poland, not France, and not even England.’ His anger mounted. He rejected the mobilization and movement of troops to the western borders, fuming: ‘That means war.’ Concealed reinforcements of the western borders were, in fact, now carried out, though within constraints ordered by Stalin to ensure that there could be no sign of provocation.159 The last-minute, improvised mobilization was, in fact, both limited in scope and flawed in execution.160 On 13 June Timoshenko and Zhukov gave orders to the Kiev military district to transfer command headquarters and a number of divisions at night and in total secrecy closer to the Soviet border. This was to be carried out by the beginning of July. In mid-June, according to information given to Stalin by the General Staff, a total of 186 divisions were deployed on the western front, more than half of them to the south-west. Most had been secretly moved there from the interior of the country in preceding weeks.161 But only on 19 June were orders given to start to camouflage aerodromes and other vital installations, and to disperse the aircraft around the airfields. Even now, Stalin was keen to retain secrecy, to avoid any provocation.162
It is hard to imagine that Stalin himself did not by now harbour hidden doubts about his own convictions. He must, in solitary moments, have wondered whether he had not for months been outbluffed by Hitler. During the last weeks before the invasion, he seemed restless and worried, took to drinking more heavily, seeking out company as a diversion, replacing working stints at the Kremlin by lengthy dinners at his dacha.163 However sure he was of his own judgement–and he betrayed no uncertainty to those who saw him regularly at this time–it would have been extraordinary if he had not found cause to worry in the information now showering in from all sides.