Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Some Soviet intelligence agents were also denying that a German attack was imminent. A fog of reports befuddled Stalin’s calculations.9 He made things worse by insisting on being the sole arbiter of the data’s veracity. The normal processing of information was disallowed in the USSR.10 Stalin relied excessively on his personal intuition and experience. Not only fellow politicians but also People’s Commissar of Defence Timoshenko and Chief of the General Staff Zhukov were kept in the dark about reports from embassies and intelligence agencies.11 The Germans took advantage of the situation by planting misinformation; they did much to induce Stalin to believe that a military campaign was not in the offing. Thus Stalin in the early months of 1941 moved along a dual track: he scrupulously observed the terms of his pact with Nazi Germany while telling gatherings of the Soviet political and military elite that, if the Germans attacked, they would be repulsed with ferocious efficiency. He had been taking a massive gamble with his country’s security. Cautious in so many ways, Stalin trusted in his ability to read the runes of Hitler’s intentions without discussing the evidence with anyone else.

  Stalin was shocked by Operation Barbarossa, but Molotov always defended the Boss against the charge that he collapsed under the strain:12

  It can’t be said he fell apart; certainly he was suffering but he did not show it. Stalin definitely had his difficulties. It would be stupid to claim he didn’t suffer. But he’s not depicted as he really was — he’s represented as a repentant sinner! Well, of course, that’s absurd. All those days and nights, as always, he went on working; he didn’t have time to fall apart or lose the gift of speech.

  Stalin’s visitors’ book confirms that he did not lapse into passivity.13 Zhukov too insisted that Stalin’s recovery was swift. By the next day he had certainly taken himself in hand, and over the next few days he seemed much more like his old self. His will power saw him through. He had little choice. Failure to defeat the German armed forces would be fatal for the communist party and the Soviet state. The October Revolution would be crushed and the Germans would have Russia at their mercy.

  On 23 June Stalin worked without rest in his Kremlin office. For fifteen hours at a stretch from 3.20 a.m. he consulted with the members of the Supreme Command. Central military planning was crucial, and he allowed his political subordinates to get on with their tasks while he concentrated on his own. Then at 6.25 p.m. he asked for oral reports from politicians and commanders. Molotov was with him practically the whole time. Stalin was gathering the maximum of necessary information before issuing further orders. Visitors are recorded as having come to him until 1.25 a.m. the next morning.14

  The Supreme Command or Stavka — the term used under Nicholas II in the First World War — had also been established on 23 June. Stalin was initially disinclined to become its formal head. He was not eager to identify himself as leader of a war effort which was in a disastrous condition. So it was Timoshenko who as Chairman led a Stavka including Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Budënny, Zhukov and Kuznetsov. The others also tried to persuade Stalin to permit his designation as Supreme Commander. He refused even though in practice he acted as if he had accepted the post. The whole composition of Stavka was shaped by him,15 and it was noticeable that he insisted that leading politicians should belong to this military body. Not only Molotov but also Voroshilov and Budënny were basically communist party figures who lacked the professional expertise to run the contemporary machinery of war. Timoshenko, Zhukov and Kuznetsov were therefore outnumbered. Stalin would allow no great decision to be taken without the participation of the politicians, despite his own gross blunders of the past few days. He called generals to his office, made his enquiries about the situation to the west of Moscow and gave his instructions. About his supremacy there was no doubt.

  He drove himself and others at the maximum pace until the early hours of 29 June, when Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria were the last to leave him. (V.N. Merkulov, who had headed the state security organisation for several months, had departed some minutes before.)16 At that point he started to behave mysteriously. His visit to the Ministry of Defence two days earlier had been a difficult one. When Timoshenko and Zhukov showed him the operational maps, he was shocked by the extent of the disaster for the Red Army. Having surmounted his bewilderment about Operation Barbarossa on 21 June, he suffered a relapse. Fellow members of the Politburo, Sovnarkom and Stavka had no idea what had happened to him. When calls were put through to the Blizhnyaya dacha, his chief aide Poskrëbyshev claimed not to know where he was. Yet he was indeed skulking at that dacha. Commanders and politicians were left to get on with the war with Germany as best they could. No one outside Blizhnyaya knew whether he was alive or dead.

  The German advance quickened across the Soviet borderlands. Trained by Stalin to accept his whims, his military and political subordinates tried to run their institutions as if nothing strange was occurring. But they worried about doing anything without clearing it with him beforehand. The situation was changing by the hour. Stalin’s sanction had been essential for years and Stavka needed his presence at the centre of things. What was he doing? One possibility was that his morale had fallen so low that he felt incapable of continuing at his post. He had much reason to feel bad about his recent performance. Another possibility is that he was seeking to impress upon his subordinates that, however poorly he had performed, he remained the irreplaceable Leader. Stalin was an avid reader of books on Ivan the Terrible and to some extent identified himself with him. Tsar Ivan had once abandoned the Kremlin and withdrawn to a monastery; his purpose had been to induce boyars and bishops to appreciate the fundamental need for him to go on ruling. After some days a delegation came out to the Tsar to plead with him to return to the Kremlin. Perhaps Stalin was contriving a similar situation.

  The truth will never be known since Stalin never spoke of the episode. His subordinates eventually plucked up courage to find out what was going on. Nikolai Voznesenski, the rising star in state planning bodies, was visiting Mikoyan when a call came through from Molotov for them to join him. Malenkov, Voroshilov and Beria were already with Molotov, and Beria was proposing the creation of a State Committee of Defence. Mikoyan and Voznesenski agreed. This State Committee of Defence was envisaged as supplanting the authority of both party and government and as being headed by Stalin. It was the first great initiative for years that any of them had taken without seeking his prior sanction.17

  The snag was to get Stalin to agree. The group resolved to drive out to Blizhnyaya to put the proposal to him directly. When Molotov raised the problem of Stalin’s ‘prostration’ in recent days, Voznesenski stiffened his nerve: ‘Vyacheslav, you go first and we’ll be straight behind you.’ Mikoyan interpreted this as more than a travelling plan. Voznesenski was saying that, if Stalin could not pull himself together, Molotov should take his place. Arriving at the dacha, they found him slumped in an armchair. He looked ‘strange’ and ‘guarded’, quite unlike the Leader they were used to. ‘Why,’ he muttered, ‘have you come?’ Mikoyan thought Stalin suspected that they were about to arrest him. But then Molotov, his old comrade, spoke for everyone by explaining the need for a State Committee of Defence. Stalin was not yet reassured, and asked: ‘Who’s going to head it?’ Molotov named Stalin himself. Even then Stalin appeared surprised and simply said: ‘Good.’ The ice was melting. Beria suggested that four Politburo members should join him in the State Committee: Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria. Stalin, recovering his confidence, wanted to add Mikoyan and Voznesenski.18

  Beria objected that Mikoyan and Voznesenski were indispensable for work in Sovnarkom and Gosplan. Voznesenski rose angrily against Beria. Stalin was in his element: his subordinates were more interested in arguing with each other than in rivalling him. Agreement to a State Committee of five members was obtained with wide powers for Mikoyan to organise supplies and for Voznesenski to co-ordinate armaments production.19 The decision was confirmed in the press on 1 July.20 And Stalin was back in charge. The sugges
tion that Molotov might be substituted for Stalin could have been the death of all of them; it was kept secret from him. It was anyway an occasion which Stalin was unlikely to forget. Beria believed that sooner or later the visitors to the dacha would pay the price just for having seen him in a moment of profound weakness.21

  On 10 July, after being prodded by Zhukov among others, Stalin allowed himself to be appointed Supreme Commander. He was cautious even about this and the acquisition of the title was withheld from the media for several weeks. His reason for this fumbling was not disclosed and he never discussed it with his intimates. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Stalin had wanted to avoid too close an association in the popular mind with the catastrophe at the front. If the defeats continued, he would make other heads roll. He took even longer to take official charge of Stavka. Not until 8 August did he agree to become its Chairman. Was this yet another sign that he had learned from biographies of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, that real power mattered more than titles? Whatever it signifies about Stalin’s attitude to his image, it is clear evidence that at last he thought that the Red Army had recovered from its disastrous first days in the field against the Germans. The beginnings of an effective defence were being organised, and order and efficiency were replacing chaos: Stalin could at last take the risk of assuming full supreme responsibility; and indeed failure to do so would raise questions about his commitment.

  Someone who paid the ultimate price for annoying Stalin even without having seen him in his depressed mood at the dacha was Western Front commander Dmitri Pavlov. Placed in an impossible situation by Stalin’s military mismanagement before and on 22 June 1941, Pavlov was being made the scapegoat for the German military success. To err is human and Stalin had erred on a stupendous scale. He forgave himself but not others; and when he made a mistake, it was others who got the blame. Pavlov was arrested, tried by court martial and sentenced to death. Quite what Stalin thought he was achieving by this is hard to understand. The sentence was not given wide publicity. Most probably Stalin was just doing what had become his normal practice, and he wanted to keep his commanders in fear of him. But perhaps he also discerned the need to avoid causing a collapse in the morale of the entire officer corps. Hence he opted for compromise. He obtained his victim but refrained from the pre-war scenario of torture, show trial and forced confession. This was little consolation to the hapless Pavlov, but it was the earliest frail sign that Stalin understood the need to adjust his behaviour in the furnace of war.

  Hitler’s Wehrmacht meanwhile continued to rampage deep into Soviet territory. The German strategic plan was to motor across the plains and marshes of the western borderlands of the USSR and, within a few weeks, occupy the main European regions. They seemed about to fulfil every expectation of the Führer. Experienced tank formations rolled over vast territory encountering brave but ineffective defensive operations. Minsk, Belorussia’s capital, fell on 29 June, Smolensk on 16 July. No great urban centre lay between Smolensk and Moscow. Despairing of the existing command on his Western Front, Stalin released Timoshenko and Zhukov to reorganise things on the spot and stiffen resistance. Some deceleration of the German advance was achieved against Army Group Centre. But Panzer formations were simultaneously smashing their way towards Leningrad in the north and Kiev further south. Already all Poland, Lithuania and Belorussia was subject to rule by the General Government appointed by Hitler. It seemed that nothing could save ‘Soviet power’. Operation Barbarossa was undertaken by armed forces which had conquered every country in Europe they had attacked. Over three million men had been amassed for the campaign against the USSR. At Hitler’s disposal were more than three thousand tanks and two thousand aircraft. Security forces followed in the path of their victories: Einsatz-kommandos extirpated all those thought hostile to the New Order. Everything had been planned and supplied to evident perfection.

  Panic seized Moscow and Leningrad as thousands of inhabitants tried to leave before the Germans arrived. The refugees included party and government functionaries. Stalin was merciless. Beria, who had been given general oversight of security matters in the State Committee of Defence, was empowered to set up barrier detachments on the capital’s outskirts and mete out summary justice to those who sought to flee. Strategic dispositions were made as the State Committee established high commands for the North-Western, Western and South-Western Fronts. Stalin’s confidence in military professionalism had not matured. Although he appointed Timoshenko to the Western Front, he stipulated that Voroshilov should head the North-Western Front while Budënny took the South-Western Front.22 Voroshilov and Budënny, his comrades in the Civil War, had won no laurels in the Soviet–Finnish War and yet Stalin stood by them. Party committees and soviet executive committees in the provinces were brought directly under the State Committee’s leadership and ordered to stiffen the spirit of resistance. The conscription of men for the Red Army was to be intensively undertaken. Armaments production had to be boosted, labour discipline tightened and food supplies secured from the villages. How this was done was a matter of indifference to Stalin. He cared only for results.

  An immense number of prisoners-of-war fell into German hands: more than 400,000 Red Army troops were seized in the battle for Minsk alone. The Soviet air force in the western borderlands had been destroyed, mainly on the ground, in the first two days of hostilities. The linkages of transport and communications had been shattered. When Smolensk was occupied, the party headquarters had no time to incinerate its documents. The USSR lost its Soviet republics in the western borderlands as Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were subjected to German rule. The USSR had lost half its industrial and agricultural capacity and almost the same proportion of its population. Morale was low in the unoccupied zones. Civil administration was chaotic. German bombers continued to wreck places of habitation many miles beyond the lines of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In Moscow there was gathering panic. Many government officials tried to flee. Neither Molotov’s speech on 22 June nor Stalin’s eleven days later convinced most people that successful defence was possible.

  Nor did the USSR lack citizens who were pleased with what seemed to be happening. Many in the western borderlands welcomed Wehrmacht troops as liberators. Ukrainian peasants greeted them with the traditional bread and salt. Stalin’s aim to extirpate the possibility of a fifth column by means of the Great Terror proved ineffective. All he had achieved was a stoking up of the fires of embitterment with his rule. The peasantry longed to be freed from the torments of the collective-farm system. They were not the only ones. In towns and cities, especially among people who were not Russians or Jews, there was much naïveté about Hitler’s purposes. This was not surprising since German occupation policy had yet to be clarified, and some Nazi functionaries saw advantage in seeking voluntary co-operation in the conquered regions of the Soviet Union by dismantling the entire order constructed since 1917. Churches were reopened. Shops and small businesses began to operate again. Hitler foolishly overruled any further proposals in this direction. All Slavic peoples were to be treated as Untermenschen, fit only for economic exploitation on behalf of the Third Reich. Wehrmacht and SS were instructed to squeeze labour and raw materials out of Ukraine as if the country was a lemon.

  The war effort in the USSR began to be co-ordinated. Party functionaries were ordered to address factory meetings and to tell the workforces that the Germans were about to be halted. Huge demands were to be made of Soviet citizens. Working hours were lengthened, labour discipline tightened still further. The menace of Nazism would be dispelled. The USSR was going to win and the Third Reich, despite current appearances to the contrary, to lose. The Soviet regime would act as ruthlessly in war as it had done in peace.

  Yet it was difficult to believe the few real optimists. Official spokesmen were assumed to be saying only what they had been ordered to say. The Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow by 21 July. A month of fighting had brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Army Group North was
approaching Leningrad and, with the fall of Moscow apparently imminent, Hitler and his generals began to contemplate switching forces to Army Group South to secure the coming conquest of Kiev. The Soviet refugees streaming into central Russia brought with them tales of German military success which undermined Pravda’s insistence that the Red Army was ceasing to retreat. What Hitler was achieving was what German commanders Ludendorff and Hindenburg had threatened to do if Lenin and the communists had failed to sign a separate treaty at Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. Vast economic resources had come under German occupation for use in the war against the USSR. Evacuation of factories and workforces was attempted on Stalin’s orders; and Red troops and the NKVD, as they retreated, implemented a scorched-earth policy to minimise the benefit to the Wehrmacht. Hitler prepared himself to be master of the East.

  38. FIGHTING ON

  Autumn 1941 was grim for the Russians. The United Kingdom had stood alone against Germany for over a year and now the USSR joined it in even greater peril. The British could not send much aid in finances, armaments or troops. Although the front between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was but one of the fronts in the Second World War, it was at this time virtually a separate war. The front had yet to be stabilised by effective Soviet defence. In October the German forces, having lunged across the plains and marshes to the east of the River Bug, were massing outside Moscow for a final thrust at the USSR’s capital. Critical decisions needed to be taken in the Kremlin. The initial plan was for the entire government to be evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Stalin was set to leave by train — and Lenin’s embalmed corpse, reinfused with chemicals, was prepared for the journey to Tyumen in west Siberia. Moscow appeared likely to fall to the invader before winter. Not since Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 had the Russian capital faced such a plight — and Stalin, unlike Alexander I, could scarcely expect that Hitler would grant him his life in the event of the increasingly probable German victory.