Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Yet the line held. Zhukov, Stavka’s Chief of Staff, was transferred to the field for the defence of Moscow. At the last moment Stalin decided to stay in the capital. While sanctioning the departure of several People’s Commissariats to Kuibyshev, he decided that Zhukov might pull off victory and instructed the leading politicians to remain with him in the capital. He could not have dreamed up a better piece of propaganda. The word got out that the Leader was refusing to forsake the capital. Resistance was going to be shown by everyone from Stavka members down to the ordinary infantryman and factory worker.

  The first test of Stalin’s resolve came towards the end of the year with Stavka’s discussion about deep defence. Zhukov was a natural forward-mover; he was never more content than when organising Red forces to attack the Wehrmacht. But he was also a professional military man. The strategic chances of resisting German forces advancing on Kiev were minimal, and Zhukov — like the other commanders — concluded that the abandonment of the Ukrainian capital would conserve human and material resources which could be used at a later stage in the war. He put this to Stalin at his predictable peril. Stalin was angry. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘could you even think of giving up Kiev to the enemy?’ Still Zhukov stood his ground: ‘If you think the Chief of Staff can’t talk anything but absolute nonsense, he’s got no business here.’1 Nevertheless Stalin stayed with his own impulses and the order was given that Kiev should be defended to the last. Timoshenko, usually timid about offending Stalin, considered withdrawing from Kiev without telling Stalin. (This, obviously, would have been a suicidal measure for Timoshenko.) Attack, attack and attack: this was Stalin’s way to repel the Nazi invasion. So at Stalin’s insistence the armed forces in the capital were ordered to prepare for decisive action. Civilians were told to stay behind.

  The Wehrmacht moved forward. What astounded its commanders were Soviet pluck, determination and flexibility. They had been taught to regard the Russians as Untermenschen but discovered that the peoples of the USSR, including the Russians, were far from being primitives. Stalin would not yet budge on strategy. Abandonment of great cities was anathema to him. He had yet to learn that strategic withdrawal could facilitate an indispensable regrouping. He acted like a military ignoramus just as he had been proved a diplomatic one in mid-1941. Inevitably Kiev fell to the larger and better-organised forces of the Wehrmacht on 19 September.

  The Red Army’s strategic options were few. While the Wehrmacht held the initiative, Stavka had to react to German moves. Commanders were ordered to hold their present positions. Stavka decided which sectors most needed reserves to be rushed to them. While Zhukov worked on a plan of campaign, Stalin harassed his politicians into expanding output for the armed forces. Astonishing feats were performed in the USSR in 1942. The factories and workforces evacuated from the western regions of the USSR were restored to operation in the Urals. Meanwhile the industrial enterprises of central Russia were intensifying activity. The grievous losses of 1941 were being made good. This was done with Stalin’s customary ruthlessness. The slogan ‘Everything for the Front!’ was realised almost to the letter. Industry, already heavily tilted towards military needs before 1941, produced virtually entirely for the needs of the armed forces. Consumer goods ceased to be manufactured. Soviet economic might was so successfully dedicated to the war effort that in the last six months of 1942 it reached a level of production which the Germans attained only across the entire year. The numbers were remarkable. In that half-year the USSR acquired fifteen thousand aircraft and thirteen thousand tanks.2

  The price was paid by other sectors of the economy. Resources were denied to agriculture. As young men were conscripted into the armed forces and young women left for jobs in the factories, conditions on the collective farms sharply deteriorated. Many farms fell out of production or else were run by the labour of women long past their time of youthful vigour. Yet the government procurement quotas were maintained so that the soldiers and workers might be fed. The result was the deeper impoverishment of the countryside. The state administrative order which reported massive achievements in turning out tanks and aircraft was a disaster for agriculture. Stalin’s propagandists — and many later commentators — emphasised that his policies had proved themselves wonderfully in war; they could do this only by keeping silent about farms in the unoccupied regions.

  Yet the patriotic spirit was unquenchable. Propaganda stiffened the resistance by publishing details of German atrocities. Pravda did not become a ‘paper of record’, yet it did not have to concoct falsehoods about the Wehrmacht and the SS. Once the Soviet military resistance began to stiffen, Moscow’s media concentrated effectively on German atrocities. Jews, Roma and communists were being shot out of hand. Murder and pillage were ravaging the USSR’s western borderlands. Although the Germans allowed most churches and some private shops to be reopened in Ukraine, they generally treated the country as a place for plunder. Harvests were routinely seized, and the German occupiers found the collective farms too useful an instrument of grain procurement to be abandoned. Early in Operation Barbarossa there had been debate in Berlin about policies of occupation. Several officials had urged the prudence of seeking to neutralise opposition in the western regions of the USSR by granting economic and social concessions. Hitler quashed this talk. For him, the whole purpose of the invasion was to realise his ideological dream. The Wehrmacht, SS and civilian administration were ordered to treat the Slav Untermenschen as a human resource exploitable to the point of death.

  This apparently had no effect on Stalin. He had failed to anticipate the intensity of Nazi brutality; but even when reports reached him from behind the German lines, he held his tongue about them. He spoke only in general terms about German atrocities (whereas Churchill and Roosevelt emphasised the massive disregard for international laws on war). Stalin himself waged war, as he conducted politics, with his own immense savagery. The NKVD had rampaged across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania killing or arresting whole strata of the population. It was through Operation Barbarossa that for the first time since the Civil War he confronted an enemy as willing as he was to use terror against innocent non-combatants.

  Stalin in any case gave little thought to the matter.3 Calling on his compatriots to fight a bitter war regardless of cost, he had no interest in focusing attention on the horrific strength and ruthlessness of the Wehrmacht. He and Stavka got on with planning, organising and supervising the war effort. They were hard men by any standards. Those communist leaders with a soft side to their thinking — Bukharin, Kamenev, Tomski or Ryazanov — had perished in the Great Terror. There were no such spirits in Stavka or the State Committee of Defence. If any of them had reservations about Stalin’s severity towards his own forces, they kept quiet about them. Both sides in the German–Soviet conflict went at each other without regard to the Geneva Convention. Prisoners-of-war were treated atrociously. Strategy and tactics were developed which spared neither soldier nor civilian. The restraints which characterised the fighting between Germany and the Western Allies never prevailed on the front with the Red Army. Warfare reverted to the colossal brutality last seen in Europe in the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and Stalin was in his element.

  The USSR’s survival of that first terrible winter of 1941–2 seemed a miracle at the time. The USA entered the war against Germany in 1941. Stalin’s Western Allies, despite their public bravado, had not given him much of a chance; and although Washington promised arms and other supplies through the system of Lend-Lease (which postponed any payment till the end of hostilities), little reached the USSR until the later months of 1942. The Soviet Union had had to cope with Nazi Germany on its own, while Hitler could draw upon increasing support from Italy, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

  Sober assessment was less unfavourable to Stalin’s chances. The pre-war analysis, shared in Berlin and Moscow, held that the Germans needed to attack by early summer if they were to conquer. The actual military campaign validated this analysis. The Wehrmacht, af
ter massive advances into the western borderlands of the USSR, was halted outside Leningrad and Moscow; it had failed to overrun the Russian heartland, oil-rich Baku and the Volga transport routes. The USSR retained adequate human and material resources to go on resisting the aggressor. The Wehrmacht operated in bleaker conditions than Hitler had anticipated. The last months of 1941 were bitterly cold. German lines of communication and supply were overstretched: Hitler had not got far enough to have final success but had gone too far to maintain his armed forces in a decent condition. Germany’s military equipment, moreover, had not been built to specifications for the rigours of the Russian winter. The odds began to turn in the USSR’s favour despite the enduring impact of Stalin’s miscalculations about Operation Barbarossa.

  Stalin had gained his second wind even though the immediate situation was deeply discouraging. The Wehrmacht prowled like a panther outside Moscow and Leningrad. Supplies of food in the unoccupied parts of the USSR had fallen by a half as a result of German control of Ukraine. The Don Basin too had been seized, and with it had vanished three quarters of the country’s access to coal, iron and steel. Other metal deposits lay in the territories held by Germany; these included copper, manganese and aluminium. Potential conscripts to the Red Army were reduced by the speed and depth of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In the Soviet-held territories, moreover, there was much chaos. Millions of refugees streamed into central Russia. Trains reached Moscow from the west with wagons piled high with the machinery of factories that had been evacuated.

  The Supreme Commander reverted to instinct. Attack, he insisted to his exhausted generals, was preferable to defence. Even Stalin acknowledged that this was impossible near Moscow and Leningrad. But he thought his maps indicated German weakness in the Don Basin. Generals and commissars warned him that logistics and geography were unpropitious; but they got nowhere. Stalin argued — or rather he assumed and did not care about what others argued against him — that almost any action was better than passivity. In April 1942, as the snow gave way to mud, Stalin overrode Stavka and compelled its military specialists to organise an offensive in eastern Ukraine with the objective of seizing Kharkov. This would be the first serious Soviet counter-attack. It was planned with egregious indiscretion and German intelligence agencies had prior knowledge. The Wehrmacht had made its arrangements and was waiting; it also knew in advance about Stalin’s plan to retake the Crimea. A strategic trap was sprung. Despite the objections from his advisers, Stalin insisted on the offensives and the Red Army drove its tanks straight into the jaws of defeat.

  Hitler had dealt a juddering blow to the Soviet armed forces, and Kharkov stayed in the hands of the enemy. Hitler continued to think in grandiose terms. The war was going well for German forces in north Africa and it was not unreasonable to suppose that the Wehrmacht, coming from the south and the north, would soon overrun the entire Middle East and take possession of its oil. The Japanese, Hitler’s allies, were moving fast down the western rim of the Pacific Ocean. No country could hold out against Japan; the European imperial powers — Britain, France and Holland — were being worsted in the Asian struggle. Hitler confidently chose Stalingrad (formerly known as Tsaritsyn) as his next target.

  Stalin ordered the city to be held at all costs. There is much unwarranted commentary that both he and Hitler exaggerated Stalingrad’s strategic significance. Stalin had been based there for some months in 1918 and his propagandists had treated the Tsaritsyn campaign as crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. Hitler, it is said, was drawn to attacking Stalingrad because the city bore Stalin’s name. Sentiment and symbolism may well have contributed to the German determination to take Stalingrad and the Soviet will to resist. But the primary reason for Hitler’s decision was strategic. Stalingrad lay in an area vital for the logistics of the USSR’s war effort. German control over the mid-Volga region would cut the USSR off from its oil supplies in Baku and Grozny. Its possession would also permit the Germans to break across the Volga to south-eastern Russia and dangerously reduce Moscow’s access to grain and potatoes. The alternative would have been to concentrate on the capture of Moscow so as to dominate the centre of transport and administration for the entire USSR. But Hitler’s decision was sound even if it was not the sole option available to him.

  Germany and its allies started the Stalingrad campaign on 28 June 1942. Quickly they reached and took Voronezh. Then Rostov fell. Stalingrad seemed doomed and a confident Hitler split the attacking forces so as to seize the oil of the north and south Caucasus. The reports to Moscow made painful reading for Stavka. Panic gripped the inhabitants of Russia’s south. To prevent any repetition of the kind of panic which had disrupted the capital in July 1941, Stalin issued Order No. 227, ‘Not a Step Backward!’, on 28 July 1942. Its terms, read out to troops in the field but withheld from the Soviet media, demanded obedience on pain of severe punishment. Retreat, unless it had clear sanction from the Kremlin, was to be treated as treason. Soviet-held territory was to be defended at all costs. ‘Panickers’ and ‘cowards’ were to expect summary treatment: they would either be shot on the spot or transferred to the so-called penal battalions (where they stood little chance of survival). Order No. 227 had been edited and signed by Stalin. No serving soldier was left in doubt of his determination to compel the Red Army to fight without giving an inch.

  Yet when Stalin refused to send reinforcements to Stalingrad, he was not relying on Order No. 227. He was fearful about diverting his reserves from Moscow and Leningrad. German commander Friedrich Paulus’s forces moved unrelentingly on Stalingrad. Stalin turned again to Zhukov. Implicitly he recognised that he had been making misjudgements in Ukraine and southern Russia which at last he called upon his most dynamic officer to rectify. As a reward for his achievements Zhukov was made Deputy Supreme Commander. After a swift visit to the front, Zhukov stood out for a changed set of military dispositions. In particular he called for the dispatch of reserves to Stalingrad. This plan was agreed in September 1942, and Zhukov and the new Chief of Staff Alexander Vasilevski worked out the details with Stalin. Gradually the Supreme Commander was learning how to work with fellow Stavka members. The plan for a wide counter-offensive — Operation Uranus — was elaborated. Reserves were assembled and the defenders of Stalingrad, cut off by the Germans, were ordered to hold out for the duration. Whole districts of the city were reduced to rubble by the constant bombing raids of the Luftwaffe. Vasili Chuikov was appointed the new Soviet commander, but Hitler believed that Paulus would soon have possession of Stalingrad.

  Zhukov and Vasilevski conferred with Stalin and other commanders at each stage of their planning. This was the outcome of Stalin’s growing respect for their professional expertise. Zhukov reported to Stalin on his direct observations near the front. When he made recommendations about operational defects, he had to put up with Stalin expatiating on contemporary warfare.4 Yet generally Stalin behaved himself. He proposed that Operation Uranus should be postponed if preparations were not fully in place.5 This was not a Stalin seen earlier in the war.

  Final decisions on Operation Uranus were taken on 13 November. Zhukov and Vasilevski took comfort from the fact that Romanian rather than German troops would stand across the line of the Soviet advance; they also had numerical superiority in men and armaments. Stalin listened attentively, slowly puffing on his pipe and stroking his mous-tache.6 Members of the State Defence Committee and the Politburo came in and out. The general plan was gone over several times so that all leaders might understand their responsibilities. Zhukov and Vasilevski, while advocating this counter-offensive, reminded Stalin that the Germans would almost certainly transfer troops from Vyazma to strengthen Paulus’s forces. They therefore suggested a synchronised counter-offensive by the Red Army to the north of Vyazma. Stalin gave his consent: ‘This would be good. But who of you is going to take up this matter?’ Zhukov and Vasilevski divided the responsibilities between them, and Stalin ordered Zhukov to leave next day for Stalingrad to oversee the last arrangements
before Operation Uranus. Stalin left the date for the start of the campaign to Zhukov.7 Zhukov and Stalin were almost as confident as they were determined. This time the Germans would be beaten.

  Operation Uranus had initial success on 19 November but then got held up by the German defence. Stalin, according to Zhukov, sent dozens of telegrams hysterically urging his commanders to crush the enemy.8 This was his old way with subordinates: they had to be kept functioning at a frantic pace or Stalin would get angry. Hitler meantime transferred Erich von Manstein, one of his best generals, to break through the Soviet lines around Stalingrad. But Stalin had also learned patience. It helped that the geography of the region was well known to him. This made it less likely that he would impose manifestly impractical ideas. But still Stalin displayed ‘excessive nervousness’ in Stavka.9

  In December 1942 he decided in the State Defence Committee to put Konstantin Rokossovski in sole command of the front. Stalin had until then been exercising a degree of self-restraint at planning sessions, and the surprised Zhukov fell silent. Stalin exclaimed: ‘Why are you keeping quiet? Or is it that you don’t have your own opinion?’ Zhukov, who had spent weeks assembling a command group at Stalingrad, pointed out that these commanders, especially Andrei Yeremenko, would take offence. But Stalin had made up his mind: ‘Now is not the time to be offended. Ring up Yeremenko and tell him the State Defence Committee’s decision.’10 Yeremenko indeed took it badly, but Stalin refused to speak to him. The plan and the personnel were at last in place. The fighting around Stalingrad had reached a peak of intensity. The city had been turned into a lunar landscape; hardly a building remained intact. Ammunition and food were running out. The icy Volga winter made conditions hardly bearable for soldiers on both sides: frostbite and malnutrition affected many of them. Soviet forces, however, were somewhat better supplied than the Germans and their allies. Hitler had failed to remedy the problem of stretched lines of communication. Unmistakably the Red Army had the edge.