Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  With the knowledge of the unfolding disaster on the western front pressing down on him from all sides, Stalin left the Kremlin for his dacha in the early hours of June 29. It was as if the captain left the bridge, because a full twenty-four hours passed before anyone could figure out where he was, and even then callers were told he was not taking visitors.

  Was this some kind of test to see who wanted to succeed him? Was he having a nervous breakdown? Was he trying to replicate the strategy of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century? Ivan had withdrawn to a monastery to show his rivals how they needed him, and eventually they came on bended knee to plead with him to return to the Kremlin.9

  Stalin left the yes-men to their own devices, but no one dared take the helm. Lavrenti Beria, leader of the terror and the only one who did not fear arrest, came up with the idea of the new State Committee of Defense (GKO), which would streamline the bureaucracy. He, Molotov, and several other Politburo members decided to seek Stalin’s approval and in the night of June 30 drove out to his dacha. Stalin was depressed and half expected they would force him out. He said letters from citizens had rebuked him, and “maybe some among you wouldn’t mind putting the blame on me.” But his entourage was still far too cowed to think such things.10

  Some who were there remembered Stalin suggesting they had let Lenin down. Beria’s son recalled hearing his father talk about the scene at the dacha. Beria focused on Stalin’s face so as “not to miss any of his expressions or gestures. It was obvious that he expected that anything could happen, even the worst. When Molotov told him that Malenkov and I proposed to form the GKO and make him its chairman, the tension left his eyes.” Beria’s son recalled: “When he referred to those memorable hours my father always said to his colleagues: ‘We were witnesses to Stalin’s moments of weakness and he will never forgive us for that. Don’t forget it.’”11

  The GKO had five members. With the exception of Voroshilov, whose failures in the Finnish Winter War had led Stalin to fire him as defense commissar, the others were politicians—Beria, Molotov, and Malenkov. Stalin’s confidence was at an all-time low, and he had to be persuaded to lead the GKO.

  STALIN’S CALL TO HIS SOVIET “BROTHERS AND SISTERS”

  On July 1, Stalin appeared again in the Kremlin and on July 19 took over as commissar of defense. On August 8 he allowed himself to be “appointed” by the Supreme Soviet as the verkhovnyi glavnokoman-duyushchii—supreme commander of the armed forces, or Supremo. At the same time Stavka was changed into the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, shortened to the Supreme Command Headquarters.

  All these ad hoc measures showed how the country was ill prepared for the war. The career officer General Dmitri Volkogonov concedes that in the first eighteen months the Germans took around three million prisoners, or an astounding 65 percent of the Soviet armed forces.12 In the first week of the war “virtually all of the Soviet mechanized corps lost 90 percent of their strength.”13 As whole divisions disappeared, the Kremlin was left trying to figure out what happened. Nevertheless, in the end, the Soviets proved able to mobilize far more men (and many women) than the Germans and easily gained numerical superiority.

  The Soviets had the T-34 and KV-I tanks with a 76 mm gun whose range was greater than anything the Germans had, and were so heavily armored that they were all but impenetrable by enemy tanks. The Germans’ initial success was due not to their technical superiority but to surprise and their ability to make good use of what they had, combined with Soviet disorganization. The Red Army failed to fashion its heavy tanks into compact “fists” to break through German lines, but they got a baptism of fire and eventually beat the Germans at their own game.14

  Once he recovered from his loss of confidence, Stalin’s immediate priority was not just to stop the bleeding but to pull the country together. On July 3 he addressed the nation on the radio for more than half an hour. The speech began with words never heard before from the haughty “leader.” Many were struck by the opening phrase: “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!” He underlined the gravity of the situation but admitted no mistakes. He explained away the Germans’ advance by saying they had been fully mobilized and the Red Army was not. Was it wrong to have the nonaggression pact with Germany? he asked rhetorically. Certainly not, he said; any peace-loving country should do the same thing, even if the people on the other side happen to be scoundrels. He also saw prudence in the pact because it won the Soviet Union a year and a half to prepare. He maintained that Germany did not really have the advantage: what they gained militarily they lost in showing themselves as treacherous Fascists. Any “short-lived military gain is only an episode.”

  Stalin declared that the nation was engaged in an ideological war against “German Fascism.” The people had to support the troops and recognize “the immensity of the danger that threatens our country. They should abandon all complacency, all thoughtlessness, all those moods associated with peaceful constructive work which before the war were so natural, but which are fatal today when war has fundamentally changed everything.”

  He ended by calling on the people “to rally round the Party of Lenin and Stalin, and round the Soviet government for the selfless support of the Red Army and Navy, demolish the enemy, and secure victory. All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to victory!”15

  Erskine Caldwell, an American writing for the New York Times, heard the speech in a plaza near Red Square. Men and women held their breath. The “silence was so profound” that twice during the speech when Stalin paused for a drink, it was possible to hear the sound of water poured into a glass. One woman said: “He works so hard I wonder when he finds time to sleep. I am worried about his health.” Caldwell said nothing about any cheering, but there was a grim realization of the road ahead, together with a feeling of assurance about Stalin’s iron will.16

  TRYING TO AVERT COMPLETE DISASTER

  Stalin’s speech demanded a scorched-earth policy, reminiscent of what the Russians did against Napoleon’s invasion, whereby everything that could not be taken away with the retreating forces was to be destroyed. Stalin had already ordered that factories and some twenty million people be moved away from the front to areas beyond the Ural Mountains. In fact, as early as 1928, the Soviets had been locating armaments factories east of the Urals out of fear of an attack from the west.

  Alexander Werth’s classic account suggests the “transplantation of industry in the second half of 1941 and the beginning of 1942 and its ‘rehousing’ in the east, must rank among the most stupendous organizational and human achievements of the Soviet Union during the war.” In early July it was decided which industries to move and which to convert from peace to war use. By November 1,523 enterprises, including large armaments factories, were disassembled piece by piece, shipped on the shaky Soviet transportation system, and reassembled under adverse conditions. It was impossible to get everything up and running again, but by and large the operation was a great success.17

  The Soviets were able to produce more tanks, artillery pieces, aircraft, and other weapons in the second half of 1941 than they did in the first half of the year. In 1942 they increased production of the feared T-34 and KV-I tanks almost fourfold and nearly doubled the number of aircraft. There was not only a quantitative increase, but the factories turned out the latest models.18

  This massive effort was the key to survival, and it was accomplished despite acute labor shortages. On June 26, 1941, a seven-day workweek, and a longer working day, were introduced, and by year’s end everyone in the armaments industry had been declared a “mobilized person”—making it almost impossible to change jobs. On February 23, 1942, the entire urban population capable of work (men from ages sixteen to fifty-five, women from sixteen to forty) was essentially conscripted, and in the early spring the measure was applied to rural areas.

  The Red Army was still retreating, but it was fighting, and Stalin wanted to
encourage bravery. On July 5 he introduced special awards, including the Hero of the Soviet Union. He told the Propaganda Department to remember Lenin’s call about “the Socialist Fatherland in danger.”19 But he was also vehement about punishing cowardice and mere incompetence.

  TERROR IN THE RANKS

  Soviet practice tolerated no such thing as a mistake, the big exception being Stalin himself. When something went wrong in the military, someone had to be punished. It has been estimated that nearly one hundred officers above the rank of colonel, including three marshals of the Soviet Union, were “repressed,” that is, arrested, imprisoned, and shot, in 1939–53. There were times, such as on October 28, 1941, when Stalin dropped even the appearance of a court-martial and ordered twenty-five senior officers shot.20

  Terror was used as well against someone like General Pavlov, who was blamed for the early setbacks. He was forced into “confessing” his part in a plot to “open the front to the enemy.” He repudiated this confession at his “trial” and said defiantly: “We are here in the dock not because we committed crimes in time of war, but because we prepared for this war inadequately in peacetime.”21

  On July 15, Stalin and Lev Mekhlis (head of the army’s Political Department) decreed that all units be purged of what were called “unreliable elements.” Numerous such orders followed, all focusing on the officers and men who were captured or thought to have run away. If there was no such thing as a mistake, there were also no miracles whereby troops encircled by the Wehrmacht managed to escape and return to the Soviet lines without losing their honor. That scenario was declared to be a fable, and these escapees and the formerly “encircled” were to be “welcomed back with an execution order…by way of settling accounts with the traitors who had opened the front to the enemy.” Such “unreliable elements” were shot in the tens of thousands.22

  Mistrust, suspicion, and doubts about the staying power of troops deepened the more the front lines buckled against the German assault. On August 16, the Supreme Command Headquarters issued the notorious order No. 00270 against generals and other officials, including NKVD detachments, on the western and southern fronts for becoming encircled and taken prisoner. This behavior was branded “despicable cowardice” and a crime. Stalin dictated the order, which concludes as follows:

  I order that:

  anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter, whose family is to be arrested as the family of the breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot;

  those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines. And those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance;

  bold and brave people should be promoted more actively. This order is to be read to all companies, squadrons, batteries.23

  By the time order No. 00270 was issued, an estimated 1.5 million men had been taken prisoner. Despite the dire threats, by mid-October the number that had surrendered doubled to over 3 million, and by the end of the year the figure had reached an astonishing 3.8 million.24

  There has been some conjecture about the extent of the enforcement of the stringent new rules against deserters or others who broke rank. Alexander N. Yakovlev, among other things the president of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression in Moscow, concluded that during the war at least 994,000 Soviet servicemen and women were convicted by military tribunals alone. Of that number, 157,000 were to be shot, the equivalent of fifteen full divisions. He concludes that “more than half the sentences were handed down in 1941 and 1942.”25 The main “crime” was that they had broken out of encirclement or escaped a prisoner-of-war camp. Around 400,000 of all those subjected to military “justice” were sent to “punitive battalions” and told that if wounded their “debt had been paid in blood.”26 As of December 27, 1941, any escapees or suspect enlisted persons were held in special NKVD camps. The families of this wide array of people were subjected to various deprivations, punishments, and incarceration.

  Above and beyond the official statistics, however, many were shot out of hand for suspected desertion, straggling, or showing up (even wounded) at a hospital without their weapons. Officers had the right to shoot for suspected insubordination, cowardice, or anything they considered “criminal.” There is no way of knowing how many were killed, their individual fates consumed in the fires of war. Special “blocking units,” two hundred strong, followed closely behind advancing troops to stop anyone trying to run away from the fighting.27 There is anecdotal evidence that many infantrymen and others were shot in the back, but there is no way even to estimate the fatalities.28

  The figures for 1941 and 1942 mentioned of those caught up in the wheels of justice likely include those sentenced under order No. 00227, also known as the “Not one step backward” order. Dictated by Stalin, it was issued on July 28, 1942, and designed to terrorize troops into fighting on. The measure was dropped in October, but it sent a shiver through the military as it threatened draconian punishments for retreating.

  Some officers and men were sentenced to serve in strafnyi, or penal battalions. In addition, deserters and stragglers or released Gulag prisoners were allowed to serve in them. The units were sent to the most dangerous parts of the front and were usually destroyed by enemy fire immediately. Estimates of the number of men who were convicted and sentenced to serve in these units—called by one writer a “delayed death sentence”—have been put as high as 1.5 million, but there are no statistics on the numbers killed.29

  As the Germans retreated in 1944, the Red Army liberated some Soviet prisoners of war. They were under suspicion and often charged with desertion or some other offense. The officers among them were assigned to special “assault battalions.” Whatever their previous rank, they had to serve as privates. They could atone for their guilt by serving until decorated, wounded, or killed. An estimated twenty-five thousand officers died in this way.30

  The Main Political Directorate of the Red Army was kept fully informed on the enforcement of these measures. After the war such orders were swept under the rug so as not to damage Stalin’s image or that of the heroic Red Army. But at the time Stalin was constantly on the phone to frontline commanders demanding to know why, if there was any retreat, they were not enforcing the dreaded orders.

  Daily reports had to be submitted to Moscow from every political administration at all levels of the army. Typical was the following one from mid-1942: “Between August 1 and 10, 2,099 men were seized by blocking units, of whom 378 were trying to run from the field of battle, 713 had escaped encirclement, 94 were cases of self-mutilation, and the remaining 914 were absent from their units. Of those seized, 517 have been sent to penal companies, III to special camps, 82 to dispatch points, 104 were arrested, and 83 have been shot in front of the ranks for cowardice, panic-mongering and self-mutilation.”31

  Despite the harsh punishments, desertion was and remained a chronic problem for the Red Army. It was pronounced at the beginning of the war, and even in 1944–45. It was necessary for the Germans to capture 4,692 American, British, or French soldiers before they found a single deserter. In that period one in every sixteen Soviet prisoners was a deserter. In other words, “there were 330 Soviet deserters to every one deserter from the armies of the Western powers.”32

  After some battles, especially in the early going, Soviet troops were totally routed and disorganized. Timoshenko told Khrushchev that this was also the case in the civil war. The only option was to set up mobile kitchens “and hope the soldiers would return when they got hungry.” They would slowly straggle back, and the officers would then try to reorganize them.33

  The interviewees for the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System after the war said that what changed most people’s minds to fight the Germans, rather than to surrender, was not love of Communism, much less
loyalty to Stalin, but the barbaric treatment meted out by the Germans. One of the veterans said he had defended, but was dispirited to see, that at the first appearance of the Germans, the political commissars ran off. He let himself be captured, along with his entire regiment: “I thought that the Germans would free the people of Communism. In time, I came to reject this idea because the Germans killed the Jews and the Commissars…. They treated nationalities as though we were like Communists, despite the fact that we surrendered voluntarily. After three months I was freed and went back to the village where I was born. There I began to hate the Germans. If I had to do it over, I would have fought to the last cartridge I got.”34

  A classic study of German policy strongly suggests that a “skillful effort to win over the population, civilian and military alike, to oppose the Soviet regime could have yielded substantial, and during the first months of the war perhaps decisive, results.”35 The problem was that Hitler wanted not only to eliminate “Jewish Bolshevism” but to divide and conquer the Soviet Union as a whole. This was a view that was widely shared by a great many of those involved in Operation Barbarossa. They took it as almost self-evident that they should not extend a hand to the conquered peoples, not encourage their sympathies in any way.36

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  BETWEEN SURRENDER AND DEFIANCE

  The attack on the Soviet Union made such immediate and rapid progress that victory looked only days away. Winston Churchill was concerned that Stalin might be “compelled to sue for peace,” as he told his War Cabinet on August 16.1