Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  According to Marshal Aleksandr M. Vasilevsky, Stalin stuck to the erroneous view well into July that the main German target would be Moscow, and so inadvertently made things easier than they needed to be for the attackers.6 Hitler had the initial advantage when he launched Operation Blue on June 28. Wehrmacht leaders wanted an offensive but were skeptical about extending it hundreds of miles to the south. Initially, however, Hitler looked like he had found the magic touch again: the Wehrmacht surprised the Red Army and began chalking up more victories, encircling and capturing tens of thousands. Some cities and towns put up stiff resistance, and Hitler still did not want to get dragged into such battles.

  Nevertheless, on July 23 he issued a revised plan that called for the capture of Stalingrad. Hitler gave Army Group B the “modest” mission of taking the city. Victory there would destroy essential industries and communications systems. Army Group B would then head down the Volga toward Astrakhan. He was supremely confident of a quick victory in the south—with one wing heading off toward Stalingrad, the other driving due south into the Caucasus. Soon it would be possible, he thought, to release troops, who would then be rushed north to Leningrad and finish it off.7

  STALIN MEETS CHURCHILL AND HARRIMAN

  At this juncture Winston Churchill, ever worried about the Soviet ally, felt it was important to reassure Stalin as best he could that the West was not preparing to join Hitler in an anti-Soviet crusade. Churchill flew to Moscow in August 1942 to break bad news, however, that there would be no invasion of Europe anytime soon. Traveling with him was Averell Harriman, FDR’s personal emissary to Churchill.

  The visit came as the German blitzkrieg was in full swing again. Churchill was glum at their meeting and Stalin occasionally quite offensive about the continued absence of a second front. Harriman supported Churchill and tried to keep out of harm’s way.

  Churchill tried to explain the hopelessness of trying an invasion in the west and held out the prospect of one the following year. In the meantime, he said, the British would concentrate on bombing Germany. He described German civilian morale as “a military target. We sought no mercy and we would show no mercy.” The Royal Air Force was trying to obliterate twenty German cities. “If need be, as the war went on,” he said in his memoirs, “we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city.” Stalin smiled and said “that would not be bad.”8

  Harriman concluded of the Soviets: “They were really desperate. Stalin’s roughness was an expression of their need for help. It was his way of trying to put all the heat he possibly could on Churchill. So he pressed as hard as he could until he realized that no amount of additional pressure would produce a second front in 1942. He had the wisdom to know that he could not let Churchill go back to London feeling there had been a breakdown.”9

  At a late dinner on his last night Churchill mentioned the topic of collectivization. He asked Stalin whether “the stresses” of the war had been “as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of Collective Farms?” “Oh no,” Stalin replied, “the Collective Farm policy was a terrible struggle.” Wishing to sound sympathetic, Churchill said he guessed it must have been difficult for him “because you were not dealing with a few score thousands of aristocrats or big landowners, but with millions of small men.” “Ten millions” was how Stalin replied, holding up both hands.

  “It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary for Russia, if we were to avoid periodic famines, to plough the land with tractors. We must mechanize our agriculture. When we gave tractors to the peasants they were all spoiled in a few months. Only Collective Farms with workshops could handle tractors.” There were some peasants who did not want these farms, and Churchill asked rhetorically: “These were what you call Kulaks?”

  Stalin replied in the affirmative but would not mention the dreaded people by name. “Some of them were given land of their own to cultivate in the province of Tomsk or the province of Irkutsk or farther north, but the great bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their laborers.” He added after a long pause: “It was all very bad and difficult—but necessary.”

  Churchill was struck by the thought “of millions of men and women being blotted out or displaced for ever.” In his memoirs he recalled a dictum of Edmund Burke: “If I cannot have reform without injustice, I will not have reform.” Churchill added, perhaps ashamed of his silence: “With World War going on all round us it seemed vain to moralize aloud.”10

  He came away thinking Stalin was his friend, but that benign view was not shared by the entire British delegation, one of whom thought that Stalin was a bit like a python. Another had asked what happened to the thousands of Polish officers taken prisoner in 1939 and was not impressed with the answer that they must have all run away.11

  At their final meeting Churchill mentioned that a “serious attack” was scheduled. It went ahead on August 19 at Dieppe but was doomed to failure. Of the six thousand or so Allied soldiers involved (most of them Canadians), nearly half were killed, wounded, or captured in what turned out to be a fiasco and waste of lives. But the raid demonstrated that a landing in Western Europe would be years away. The French collaborationist leader Pétain was so pleased by the result that he offered troops “to join the Germans in fighting off any future landing attempts.”12

  FALL OF ROSTOV AS THE ANTI-MODEL

  In the meantime, the Germans pressed their advantage. Army Group B moved relentlessly toward Stalingrad, and in July Army Group A fought for the key city of Rostov-on-Don. It was not the walk in the park Hitler seemed to think it would be. The Soviets turned it into a “death trap, the streets tangled with spectacular barricades, houses sealed up into firing-points.” John Erickson’s masterful account notes: “For fifty hours German assault troops fought ferocious battles in each sector of Rostov, and none more fierce than against the NKVD machine-gunners sited on the Taganrog road leading to the bridge.”13

  General Halder grew critical of Hitler, at least in his diary, blaming him when Rostov became “crammed with useless armor.” He (rightly) noted Hitler’s “chronic tendency to underestimate the enemy capabilities” and his growing propensity to explode in “a fit of rage” when things did not go well.14

  The Wehrmacht finally broke through on July 23 and opened the gateway to the south. That was the same day Hitler shifted some forces to drive on Stalingrad, but even with greater strength, taking the mountainous and forbidding Caucasus was a very tall order. It may have been crucial for Germany to gain control of the region because it needed the petroleum resources, but the way the operation was conceived made success impossible. Army Group A managed to cover 350 miles and took the small oil fields at Maykop. However, the Soviets’ standard operating procedure was to destroy anything the enemy might consider valuable, so the Germans could hardly have been surprised to find the production facilities demolished. The next stop for oil fields was Grozny, 200 miles away, and from there, the Germans would have to travel nearly 300 miles, to Baku—across the Caucasus. Army Group A forged on.

  At first glance the June-July offensive looked as though the blitzkrieg was working again, as it swept aside everything in its path. The distances, however, were just too great, the oil fields far beyond reach. The Wehrmacht failed to capture masses of Soviet prisoners, as it had done with ease before and needed to do again in order to win. But this time Stalin authorized retreats, and his troops escaped to fight another day.15

  Halder recorded how the Red Army often fought bravely, and even ferociously. However, in the Soviet newspapers of the day there were hints that the troops lost their nerve and ran away. Press slogans shouted: “Pull yourselves together!” The soldiers in Rostov had supposedly become “panic-stricken creatures.”16

  The story of the cowardice of the Red Army at Rostov appears to have been concocted and spread by the regime to absolve Stalin and top leaders of blame for how the war was going. The alleged slack behavior of troops also provided a justification for introducing b
road changes, beginning with a new emphais on discipline in the armed forces.

  The newspapers published veiled threats like one from a Pravda editorial on July 30: “It is necessary that every soldier should be ready to die the death of a hero rather than neglect his duty to his country. That is the pledge of victory.”The editorial did not neglect to invoke first Lenin, then Stalin: “During the Civil War, Lenin used to say: ‘He who does not help the Red Army wholeheartedly, and does not observe its order and iron discipline, is a traitor….’ At the Eighth Congress of the Party, Stalin said: ‘Either we shall have a strictly disciplined army, or we shall perish.’ Today the officer’s order is an iron law.”17 The Red Star also quoted Lenin, ending with one of his typically bloodcurdling slogans: “He who does not observe order and discipline is a traitor, and must be mercilessly destroyed.”18

  After Rostov, propaganda changed and so did the national mood. Whereas until then the emphasis had been on anti-Nazism and pity for the suffering victims, the new tone was of a country in imminent danger of losing the war. The morale of the armed forces had to be restored, such as by invoking the theme of the personal honor of officers and men. Henceforth, even if they were ordered to retreat, taking a step backward would be a blot on their reputation. The new line was that “the Army itself was largely to blame for what had been happening—and not the government—or Stalin.”19

  Alexander Werth noted in his diary on July 30 that Rostov represented a psychological turning point. Even with the Red Army in retreat, the regime took the unusual step of announcing three new distinctions, named after the legendary military figures Suvorov, Kutuzov, and Nevsky, to be awarded for officers’ bravery under fire.20 Not long afterward, at the battle of Stalingrad, officers’ epaulets were restored to their uniforms, the very symbols of authority that had been torn away by revolutionary troops in 1917 as a sign of the equality of the officers and men. Gold braid was soon added to the officers’ uniforms, supposedly reflecting the fires of Stalingrad.21

  Another way Stalin signaled that the army needed to be criticized and changed was his response to a play, The Front, making the rounds in 1942. The General Staff wanted to repress it for criticizing the Red Army. According to General S. M. Shtemenko, for a time Stalin’s staff officer, the Supremo’s view was for more self-criticism and said the play correctly indicated the “shortcomings of the Red Army.” They had to be acknowledged and eliminated. “This is the only way of improving and perfecting the Red Army.”22

  Political commissars were ubiquitous in the Red Army, and sometimes it was unclear whether the “real” commander was the military man or the commissar. For most of the two decades preceding 1942, the two had shared power. The commissars may have kept up morale, but they detracted from the authority of the officer. This dual command was modified on October 9, in favor of edinonachalie (unified management command) in the hands of the military officer.

  The political commissars were now demoted to the officers’ deputies in the political field. While restricted to matters like political education and welfare issues, they were still capable of dressing down anyone for a hint of disloyalty, and their tasks remained important. As an article in the Red Star put it, the standard of political education would not be diminished. The officers’ job would be to forge men of iron who were “capable of the greatest fearlessness, of the greatest spirit of self-sacrifice in this battle with the hated Hitlerites.”23

  Issues with the commissars persisted, however, and they continued searching out officers and soldiers with faulty pasts and even encouraged attacks on German positions against impossible odds. When these failed, they were perfectly capable of blaming the military men for poor planning and even treason. The reforms suggested that commissars who were up to it should transfer to a military post.24

  The regime remained convinced that “good Communists” made the best and most loyal soldiers. In order to infuse the army with ideology, the Central Committee sought out soldiers to join the Party and facilitated their membership. Party members in the armed forces were encouraged to extend their ideological and political work there, and all commanders were asked to “carry out propaganda work among the soldiers.”25

  In the wake of the Rostov disaster Stalin also issued order No. 00227, mentioned earlier. This was the “not one step backward” decree. One soldier recalled that it was not just the threat of punishment but the situation Stalin conjured up as a prelude to the order that was so striking:

  The people of our country, who love and respect the Red Army, are becoming disappointed in the Red Army, are losing faith, and many of them curse the Red Army for sentencing our people to the yoke of the German oppressors and even retreating into the east. What are we lacking? We are lacking order and discipline in every company, battalion, regiment, division, tank unit, and air squadron. We must introduce the strictest order, initiate an iron discipline in our army, if we wish to save the situation and defend our Fatherland…. We must immediately end all talk of forever being able to retreat, of having a great deal of territory, of our country being big and rich, of having a large population, and of always having grain available. Such talk is not true and is dangerous; it weakens us and strengthens the enemy, because if we do not halt the retreat, then we will lose grain, fuel, metal, raw materials, factories and railways.26

  For many who had negative experiences with the Stalinist regime, such threats only reinforced their disenchantment. But another soldier recorded more positive impressions: “All my life I will remember what Stalin’s Order meant…. Not the letter, but the spirit and the content of this document made possible the moral and psychological breakthrough in the hearts and minds of all to whom it was read… the chief thing was the courage to tell people the whole and bitter truth about the abyss to whose edge we were then sliding.”27

  The Nazi occupation and murderous treatment of prisoners of war contributed to stiffening the backbone of the Red Army. Alexander Werth’s diary entry for August 12, of his conversation with X, likely a high official in the army or defense establishment, went as follows:

  “All things considered,” said X, “the morale in the Red Army still continues to be extraordinarily good. They retreat, not with a sense of defeat, but with terrible bitterness, and a touch of shame in their hearts. But there is much less pessimism, not only in the army, but in the country as a whole, than there was in October 1941. And in spite of the terribly hard conditions in which the people are living, particularly in the evacuation areas, where both food and housing conditions are dreadful.”28

  Werth remembered how much changed after Rostov, in the week before the battle for Stalingrad really got going:

  One can only marvel at the relative calm with which people awaited the Stalingrad battle. For some strange instinct suggested to them that here the supreme test would come; and somehow, during that month of August they had ceased to be panicky—as so many were in July, especially on the day Rostov fell. In the interval something had happened; and that “something” was a combination (a) of far-reaching decisions by Government and High Command; (b) of propaganda; and (c) of the spontaneous realization which was perhaps stronger even than all the propaganda—that this was the “last ditch” and that it was really “Now or Never.”29

  STALINGRAD

  For the Soviets, the fall of Rostov magnified the importance of holding Stalingrad. If the Germans could take that strategic city, they would be able to separate the southern from the central part of the country. Because the Red Army had already forfeited the Don River to German Army Group A, if Army Group B took Stalingrad, the Soviets would lose the Volga, their most important river, one that was used to carry essential materials like oil from the Caucasus. Stalingrad’s very name gave it obvious and perhaps even additional significance.

  Zhukov was appointed deputy supreme commander on August 26. He was still on the western front, but the next day he was in Moscow, where he spoke with Stalin, who was fearful that Stalingrad and the Caucasus were on the verge
of defeat. Zhukov was promptly sent off with a promise that reinforcements would follow.30

  At Stalingrad, the Red Army faced the weaker Army Group B. On July 23, Hitler had decided to shift more troops there and take the city, but Halder noted that they were meeting “a bitterly resisting enemy.”31 Over the next month or so, Army Group B managed to take only 150 miles; this was no “lightning war” but a sign of things to come.32

  German forces were hopelessly strung out from Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, and the Caucasus in the far south. Stalingrad was the fourth major undertaking in the USSR alone. Halder recorded that since the opening of hostilities in the east, the Wehrmacht had suffered 1.6 million casualties, including 336, 349 killed. He knew full well that such losses could not be sustained.33

  Nevertheless, by September 3 the Wehrmacht was within striking distance of Stalingrad, and it looked as if the city would fall unless immediate steps were taken. Stalin was ready to throw troops into the fray, even though, as Zhukov told him, they were almost without ammunition, and had few tanks and little artillery support. The Soviet leader was persuaded to wait until early September, when reinforcements and supplies would be on hand. Zhukov won the gamble because in the meantime the Wehrmacht did not press its advantage.34

  By September 8, Hitler had begun to see what he called World War I conditions. His soldiers were becoming mired in the hand-to-hand combat that the blitzkrieg strategy was designed to avoid.35

  Stalin called Zhukov back to Moscow on September 12, where he was joined by General (later Marshal) Vasilevsky, chief of the General Staff and member of Stavka. These were the two military leaders upon whom Stalin now came to rely. He demanded something bold, and they developed a plan with two components. The first was to continue an “active defense” by engaging the Germans in battles that cost them men and machines.