The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  If this was war, then surely it was limited war. When the Leningrad commanders read the prohibition on flights over Finland, they were dumf ounded. They had already shot down at least one German plane based in Finland.

  Colonel Bychevsky met one of his old Leningrad colleagues, P. P. Yevstigneyev, chief of intelligence, in the General Staff corridor.

  “Have you read the order?” Yevstigneyev asked.

  “I read it,” Bychevsky said. “What do you think, Pyotr Petrovich, will the Finns fight?”

  Yevstigneyev snorted. “Of course they will. The Germans are heading for Murmansk and Kandalaksha. And Mannerheim is dreaming of revenge. Their aviation is already in action.”

  In Moscow Admiral Kuznetsov grew more and more nervous as the hours rolled by. He had two major concerns—possible landing attempts in the Baltic behind the Soviet lines and German air attacks on his Baltic naval bases. And what was most alarming was the silence of the Kremlin. The last communication he had had was Malenkov’s surly call displaying anger and distrust of Kuznetsov’s report of the German attack on Sevastopol. No orders came to Kuznetsov from the Kremlin, none from the Defense Commissar. Although on his own responsibility he had ordered his fleets to oppose the German attack, it was not enough simply to “oppose the enemy.” It was time to direct the Soviet forces to strike counterblows as swiftly and effectively as possible.

  Yet he, the most independent of the Soviet commanders, was not willing to order this on his own responsibility.

  “The fleet could not do this alone,” he noted. “There had to be agreed plans and unity of action by all the armed forces.”

  He knew his fleets were ready; he was confident they would meet the challenge. But what really was going on in Libau, in Tallinn, in Hangö arid throughout the Baltic approaches to Leningrad?

  The morning flowered—beautiful, sunny, fresh. Finally about ten o’clock Kuznetsov could no longer contain himself. He decided to go in person to the Kremlin and report on the situation. He found the traffic light as he drove down Komintern Street. Not too many people in the center of town. Everyone* he thought, was already on his way to the country. A normal peacetime scene. Here and there a fast-moving car, sending pedestrians scurrying with the horn.

  At the Kremlin it was quiet. The flowers, newly set out in the Alexandrin-sky Gardens, blazed with purple and red. The walks had been freshly raked with reddish sand for the benefit of Sunday strollers. Elderly babushkas with their grandchildren were already sunning themselves on the park benches. The guards at the Borovitsky Gate, in their parade white jackets and blue trousers with the wide red stripes, snapped to a salute, glanced into the car and waved it on. The Admiral’s machine speeded up the incline and whirled into the courtyard outside the Government Palace.

  Kuznetsov peered in all directions. No cars. No strollers. No signs of activity. Nothing. One car was coming out. It halted to let the Admiral have the right of way in the narrow drive.

  “Apparently the leadership has met somewhere else,” Kuznetsov decided. “But why hasn’t there yet been any official announcement about the war?”

  Where could the leaders be? What was going on?

  He was still pondering this question when he got back to the Naval Commissariat.

  “Did anyone call?” Kuznetsov asked his duty officer.

  “No,” the officer replied. “No one called.”

  Kuznetsov waited all day. No one called from the government. He did not hear from Stalin. Not until evening did Molotov telephone to ask how the fleet was making out.

  * * *

  1 The navy alert telegram took one to two hours for delivery. The army telegrams probably took longer. The warning did not arrive at Fourth Army headquarters at Kobrin until nearly 5:30 A.M. One source claims the telegrams were sent at 11:45 P.M. but in cipher, which caused further delay. (V. Khvostov, A. Grylev, op. cit.)

  2 The authors of the official fiftieth anniversary volume on the Soviet armed forces make the assertion that commanders of border districts were ordered between June 14 and 19 to put their frontier troops into field dispositions and instructed on June 19 to camouflage airports and military installations. No source for this order is cited nor is a text given. The recollections of field commanders and the operational journals of border units indicate that when efforts were made to move to a higher degree of preparedness on the eve of the war, very sharp, very serious reprimands were forthcoming from Moscow. (V. D. Ivanov, editor, 50 Let Sovetskikh Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR, Moscow, 1967, p. 250.) V. Khvostov and A. Grylev (op. cit.) claim border commands were ordered to field headquarters June 19.

  3 One German Army unit intercepted Soviet field messages saying, “We are being fired on. What shall we do?” Headquarters replied: “You must be crazy. Why is your signal not in code?” (John Erickson, The Soviet High Command, London, 1962, p. 587.)

  4 V. I. Pavlov, who served as Stalin’s principal translator at the Big Three conferences in World War II, accompanied Dekanozov as interpreter. In personal conversation with Dr. Gebhardt von Walther, then a secretary of the German Embassy in Moscow (in 1967 West German Ambassador to Moscow), he still insisted twenty-five years later that the Russians thought the warning by von der Schulenburg was a “blackmail” attempt. Walther, who was present at the Dekanozov–von der Schulenburg talk, recalled that Pavlov telephoned him the day after the fateful interview, asking him “how the conversation should be understood.” Walther assured him the Ambassador’s words should be taken just as they had been spoken. (Walther, personal conversation, June 16, 1967.)

  5 The text is from the German Foreign Ministry files. Hilger is quoted as saying it was not received in precisely this form in Moscow. But no other text has been discovered. (Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, Vol. XII, p. 1063.)

  6 While von der Schulenburg and Hilger were at the Kremlin, Walther gathered up some of the embassy personnel from their homes and brought them to the embassy. He then went to the railroad station to await the arrival of the Trans-Siberian in order to escort the German party from the train to the embassy. While he waited there, an NKVD officer appeared and politely told him that he must return to the German Embassy. Walther did so. The Russians did not even bother to accompany him. The German diplomats in Moscow were treated throughout with complete courtesy. In contrast, the Soviet personnel in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany were subjected to rude and even brutal treatment. (Walther, personal communication, July, 1967.)

  6 ♦ What Stalin Heard

  THE GREAT WHITE MARBLE-AND-GILT HALL OF ST. GEORGE in the Kremlin Palace was thronged with Soviet military men. It was December 31, 1940, and several hundred top army commanders had been meeting in Moscow for the past fortnight, discussing urgent matters. The big question in the minds of all, as General M. I. Kalinin, commander of the West Siberian Military District, recalled, was: Will Germany attack and when can we expect it?

  “It was obvious that the Fascists were in a hurry,” he recalled. “They were doing everything they could to test our strength.”

  Up to New Year’s Eve nothing had been said officially about Germany, but tonight the officers had been told that Stalin would speak. Most of them anticipated he would use the occasion to warn that war with Germany was possible within a few months. This was the gossip as the officers strolled about the parquet floor, looking up at the white marble tablets on which were engraved the golden lists of holders of the St. George’s cross, the highest czarist military decoration, Russian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Although the czarist regime had long since fallen, the names of the great Russian military heroes had remained on the walls without change.

  Suddenly came a stir. Stalin appeared. He walked to the upper end of the hall from the interior reception rooms of the palace and stood there mechanically clapping his hands in the customary Russian way during the prolonged applause. Finally, it died down and the officers waited expectantly. Stalin smiled cryptically. “S novym godom!” he said. “S novym schastyem!— Happy New Year
! The best to you all!”

  He spoke a few more words of formal welcome, then turned the reception over to Marshal Kliment Voroshilov and walked out. Voroshilov offered a slightly warmer New Year’s greeting, and that was all. The reception was over.

  The officers straggled out of the Kremlin into the snowy night puzzled. They returned to the Central House of the Red Army for a rousing celebration, punctuated by more vodka toasts than some of them could remember.

  “Evidently, this isn’t the time to talk about the matter,” Kalinin and his comrades concluded. They asked no more questions. They had long since learned that Stalin was an enigma and that questions were not only futile but often dangerous.

  The military meeting went on until January 7. Lesser commanders then returned to their posts, and a war game was run off between January 8 and 11 for top-ranking officers. This was followed by a conference at the Kremlin on January 13 in which Stalin and the Politburo participated. To this restricted audience Stalin did mention the gathering signs of war but offered no indication of when he thought it might break out. He talked in general terms. He spoke of the possibility of two-front war—with Germany on the west and Japan on the east—for which Russia must be prepared. He thought that the future war would be one of maneuver, and he proposed to increase the mobility of infantry units and decrease their size. Such a war, he warned, would be a mass war and it was essential to maintain an over-all superiority in men and material of two to one or three to one over a possible enemy. The employment of fast-moving motorized units, equipped with automatic weapons, demanded exceptional organization of supply sources and great reserves of material. Some of his listeners were astonished to hear him expound at length on the wisdom of the czarist government in laying in reserves of hardtack against possible war. He praised hardtack highly, called it a very good product, very nourishing, especially when taken with tea.

  Other listeners were deeply disturbed at Stalin’s pronouncement (faithfully approved by the meeting) that a superiority of at least two to one was required for a successful offensive not only in the area of the principal breakthrough but on the whole operational front. The application of such a doctrine would require numbers, equipment and rear support far beyond anything heretofore contemplated. The Soviet commanders agreed that overwhelming superiority was needed in the breakthrough area, but they did not see why such great numerical concentrations were required on the nonactive parts of the front as well.

  They were even more disturbed that the plans and estimates for bringing the Red Army up to strength to meet the German threat were not intended to be completed before early 1942. War might not wait that long.

  The corridors of the Kremlin and of the Defense Commissariat on Frunze Street sputtered with rumors, but the actions flowing from the meeting carried no feeling of crisis or urgency. There was another big shake-up of commands. Marshal Meretskov was replaced as Chief of Staff by General Zhukov, principally because Meretskov made a poor impression at the Kremlin when he gave his report on the war games on January 13.1

  General M. P. Kirponos was shifted from Leningrad to Kiev, and General Markian M. Popov was brought back from the Far East to take Kirponos’ post in Leningrad.

  The great mistake of January, 1941, in the opinion of Soviet marshals who survived the war, was that Stalin simply refused to believe that a German attack was near and therefore did not order the drafting of urgent plans.

  Not that Stalin was lacking concrete evidence of German intentions. It had already begun to pile up impressively. The earliest hint of what the future held may have been a report of the Soviet intelligence agency, the NKGB, to the Kremlin in July, 1940, revealing that the Nazi General Staff had asked the German Transport Ministry to provide data on rail capabilities for movement of troops from west to east. It was at this time that Hitler and the General Staff first began seriously to examine the question of an attack on Russia, and by July 31, 1940, the German planning was in full swing.2

  There is no indication that Stalin or any other high Soviet official paid heed to the early intelligence warnings. Indeed, it was not until after Molo-tov’s frosty conversations with Hitler in Berlin in November, 1940, at which Nazi-Soviet differences over spheres of influence and plans for dividing up the world became obvious, that talk began to be heard among some Soviet military men of a change in relations with Germany which might bring war. Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky, who accompanied Molotov to Berlin, returned convinced that Germany would attack the Soviet Union. His opinion was shared by many of his colleagues. Vasilevsky believed Molotov reported to Stalin the general conviction that Hitler sooner or later would attack and that Stalin did not believe him. Draft plans for the strategic deployment of the Soviet armed forces in case of German attack were twice laid before the Soviet Government by the High Command in the fall of 1940 but were not acted upon. As early as September, 1940, Soviet commanders along the Western Front were talking about Hitler’s “Drang nach Osten” and his habit of carrying around in his pocket a picture of Frederick Barbarossa. War games predicated on a German attack were discussed, but the generals were reprimanded by their political superiors for “Germanophobia.”

  It was not healthy for military men to speak their minds openly about Germany so long as Stalin clung to his conviction that Hitler would respect the Soviet-German pact. Occasionally, after the Hitler-Molotov talks Stalin or Molotov remarked that Germany was no longer so punctual or careful about fulfilling her obligations under the pact. But no serious significance seemed to be attachéd to this.

  Hitler gave approval to Operation Barbarossa, the military plan for attacking Russia, on December 18. At noon the next day he received the new Soviet Ambassador, V. G. Dekanozov, who had been cooling his heels in Berlin, waiting to present his credentials for nearly a month. Hitler received Dekanozov with great courtesy, apologizing that he had been “so busy with military affairs” that he had not had time to meet with him earlier. A week later, on Christmas Day, the Soviet military attaché in Berlin received an anonymous letter, saying the Germans were preparing for an attack on Russia in the spring of 1941. By December 29 Soviet intelligence agencies had in their hands the basic facts about Barbarossa, its scope and intended time of execution.

  Toward the end of January the Japanese military attaché, Yamaguchi, returned to Moscow from Berlin. He gave a member of the Soviet naval diplomatic service his impressions of Germany. The Germans, he said, were extremely dissatisfied with Italy and were seeking another field of action.

  “I do not exclude the possibility of conflict between Berlin and Moscow,” Yamaguchi said.

  This information was reported to Marshal Voroshilov January 30, 1941.

  Before the end of January the Defense Commissariat had become sufficiently concerned to begin drafting a general directive to the border commands and the fleets which would for the first time name Germany as the likely opponent in a future war.

  At about this time the Chief Political Administration of the Army proposed to Zhdanov—who was in chargé of Party ideological work—that they shift the basis of army propaganda to a stronger line. They warned that a mood of overconfidence was being fostered by excessive emphasis on the theme of the “all-victorious strength” of Soviet forces and the constant implication that Russia was too powerful for anyone to attack her. The Political Administration wanted a line emphasizing vigilance, the need for preparedness and the danger of attack. But Stalin categorically forbade this approach for fear it would be regarded by the Germans as Soviet preparation for an attack.

  In the first days of February the Naval Commissariat began to receive almost daily reports concerning the arrival of German military specialists in the Bulgarian ports of Varna and Burgas and of preparations for the installation of shore batteries and antiaircraft units. This information was reported to Stalin February 7. At the same time the Leningrad Command reported German movements in Finland and German conversations with the Swedes concerning transit of their troops.

  About
February 15 a German typographical worker appeared at the Soviet Consulate in Berlin. He brought with him a German-Russian phrase book which was being run off in his printing shop in a very large edition. Included were such phrases as: “Where is the chairman of the Collective Farm?”; “Are you a Communist?”; “What is the name of the secretary of the Party committee?”; “Hands up or I’ll shoot”; “Surrender.”

  The implications were obvious.

  The embassy in Berlin noted that more and more little items were appearing in the German press about “military preparations” on the Soviet side of the German border. Such ominous news releases had preceded the German attacks on Poland and Czechoslovakia.

  There was no sign that any of this intelligence disturbed Stalin’s Olympian composure.

  On Red Army Day, February 23, the Defense Commissariat issued the directive ordered by Meretskov naming Germany as the probable enemy and instructing the frontier regions to make appropriate preparations. However, by this time Meretskov had been replaced as Chief of Staff by Zhukov, and little was done by the new chief to follow the order up. It was decided to organize twenty new mechanized corps and many new air units, but little progress was made because the needed tanks, planes and other material were not available.

  The daily bulletins of the General Staff and of the Naval Staff now began to carry items about German preparations for war against Russia. At the end of February and in early March German reconnaissance flights over the Baltic became an almost daily occurrence. The State Security organs obtained information that the German attack on the British Isles had been indefinitely postponed—until the end of the war against Russia.

  The German flights were so frequent over Libau, Tallinn, the island of Ösel and the Moonzund Archipelago that the Baltic Fleet was given permission by Admiral Kuznetsov to open interdictory fire without warning. Kuznetsov’s directive was approved March 3. On March 17 and 18 German planes appeared over Libau and were fired on. Nazi planes also appeared over the approaches to Odessa. After one such incident Admiral Kuznetsov was summoned to the Kremlin. He found Police Chief Beria alone with Stalin. Kuznetsov was asked why he had issued the order to fire on the German planes. When he attempted an explanation, Stalin cut him off with a stiff reprimand and instructions to revoke his order. He did so on April 1, and the German reconnaissance flights resumed in force. Kuznetsov’s actions had violated orders issued by Beria forbidding border generals or any military units to fire on German planes.3