The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  * * *

  1 Meretskov was scheduled to deliver an evaluation of the military exercises at the Defense Commissariat January 14. Stalin suddenly telephoned and ordered the discus sions held at the Kremlin a day earlier. Meretskov’s data were incomplete, his notes skimpy and his presentation unavoidably halting. Whether the change of plans was a political trick on the part of Stalin or an intrigue by someone in the Kremlin is not clear. Zhukov was named immediately (January 14) to replace Meretskov, although public announcement was deferred to February 12. (A. I. Yeremenko, V Nachale Voiny, Moscow, 1964, p. 45; Kuznetsov, Oktyabr, No. 11, November, 1965, p. 149; M. I. Kazakov, Nad Kartoi Bylikh Srazhenii, Moscow, 1965, pp. 61-66.) Marshal Bagramyan is mistaken in claiming that the Zhukov appointment was announced in the papers of January 15. His memory seems to have played him a trick. (Bagramyan, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 1, January, 1967, p. 55.)

  2 The earliest published reference to Nazi planning for the war in the East is Haider’s diary entry for July 22, 1940.

  3 Not long thereafter a German reconnaissance pilot made a forced landing just outside Libau Harbor. His plane was towed in, he was given a dinner, his plane was refueled and he was sent off with a hearty greeting—on special orders from Moscow. (Orlov, op. cit., p. 36.)

  4 Churchill drafted a brief, cryptic warning which he wished, conveyed personally to Stalin by Cripps. This was dispatched with covering instructions to Moscow by Eden, a few days after April 3. Cripps did not respond to the instruction until April 12, when he advised London that he had just sent Vishinsky a long personal letter along similar lines. He objected that if he forwarded the message from Churchill it would only confuse matters. After some back-and-forth between Churchill, Eden and Cripps, the message was finally delivered to Vishinsky for Stalin on April 19. On April 23 Vishinsky confirmed that it had been given to Stalin, but nothing further was ever heard of the matter. Whether or not the information got to Stalin, it seems to have gotten to Hitler. A top-secret communication from the German Foreign Office to the German Embassy in Moscow on April 22 reported the contents of Cripps’s communication and said it had been delivered April 11. The Germans must have had a spy in the Soviet Foreign Office or, possibly, in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, which may have been informed of Cripps’s letter. (Churchill, The Grand Alliance, Boston, 1950, pp. 356-361; Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–45, Series D, Vol. XII, p. 604.)

  5 The treaty was signed in Moscow at i: 30 A.M., April 6. The Germans attacked Yugoslavia at 7 A.M., April 6. Possibly in the knowledge that German attack was imminent, the treaty was backdated to April 5. (Henry C. Cassidy, Moscow Dateline, Cambridge, Mass., 1943, p. 10.)

  7 ♦ What Stalin Believed

  WHAT WAS STALIN THINKING DURING THE LONG, COLD Russian spring of 1941, as the intelligence data piled up, as the evidence that his erstwhile partner, Adolf Hitler, was—in contradiction to his sworn pledges—preparing to attack the Soviet Union?

  Certainly, Stalin knew that times were changing, that the heyday of the Nazi-Soviet entente had passed.

  The novelist Ilya Ehrenburg had returned to Moscow from Paris after the fall of France. He was a violent Francophile, and the Nazi rape of France had deeply moved him. He was writing a novel about the French events, called The Fall of Paris. Because of the Nazi-Soviet pact no Moscow publisher would touch it. The censorship would not even clear his chapters for serial publication.

  At his wit’s end Ehrenburg sent a copy of the book to Stalin, hoping that he might get some support. One morning in April his telephone rang. It was Stalin. Ehrenburg was flustered. His daughter’s dog was yapping. He had never spoken to Stalin before. Stalin said, “We’ve never met, but I know your work.” Ehrenburg mumbled, “Yes, I know yours, too.”

  Stalin told him he had read the manuscript and that he would try to help get it through the censorship. “We’ll work together on this,” Stalin said.

  The politically sophisticated Ehrenburg knew that this meant only one thing: war. Stalin was preparing for war with Germany.

  Ten days later Stalin gave a reception in the Kremlin to young officers graduating from the Soviet military and naval academies. It was May 5. He spoke for forty minutes and mentioned the threat of war in serious terms. He indicated he did not believe the Red Army was yet ready to fight the Wehrmacht. “Keep your powder dry,” he said, warning the officers to be prepared for anything.

  One account of the speech quotes Stalin as observing that the next few months would be critical in relations between Germany and Russia and that he hoped to stave off war until 1942. But in 1942, he indicated, war was certain to come. Another account suggested Stalin sought to prepare a “new compromise” with Germany.1

  The next day, May 6, Stalin for the first time in his career assumed governmental office. He became Premier in place of Molotov, who was made Deputy Premier and continued as Foreign Commissar. Stalin ordered certain precautionary steps in this period. Instructions were issued in May for the transfer of a number of reserve forces from the Urals and the Volga region to the vicinity of the Dnieper, the western Dvina and border areas.

  Some Soviet students find in Stalin’s conduct in May contradictory signs: on the one hand he clung to his old dogma that there would be no attack; on the other he began to display concern lest the Germans actually would move against Russia.

  How the situation looked to others may be judged by the tart comment of Aleksandr Zonin, a Soviet naval writer, speaking of the atmosphere of that time:

  “Everything clearly shouted that Hitler soon would break his treaty. It demanded the supercilious blindness of Nicholas I or the pompous naïveté of an actor to insist with confidence that there would be no war, to declare: ‘Be quiet. We will decide, we will announce when the time has come to mow down the weeds.’ ”

  The epidemic of rumors about German attack, the visible evidence along the frontiers of concentrations and overflights, began to affect the morale of the armed forces. The Chief Naval Political Commissar, I. V. Rogov, reported “unhealthy moods” among fleet personnel. Rogov was a strict, demanding man. His nickname was “Ivan the Terrible” (his name and patronymic were “Ivan Vasilyevich,” the same as those of the terrible Czar). He was in the habit of shifting his staff without explanation from one fleet to another, from the Arctic Command to the Black Sea, from the Danube to the Pacific. He arbitrarily promoted men “by two"—two ranks—and demoted them “by two” with equal arbitrariness. His eyes were slightly hooded, and he had heavy black eyebrows. He was suffering from a heart complaint, but none of his associates were aware of this. Now this stern, self-contained, imperious man lacked confidence in what line to take.

  “What are we going to do about all the talk that the Germans are preparing to attack the Soviet Union?” he asked Admiral Kuznetsov. The difficulty lay, of course, in the dichotomy between the rumors and the bland tone of the press. Persons who talked of war were branded “provocateurs” Rogov and Kuznetsov decided to order their political workers to hew to the line that vigilance must be heightened and that Germany was the probable enemy.

  This was done in the navy. But it was not done generally in the military and for an excellent reason. On June 3 a meeting of the Supreme Military Council was convened in Moscow to approve a draft of instructions for the army’s political workers which would emphasize the need of vigilance and the danger of war. Stalin’s close associate, Georgi M. Malenkov, attacked the draft in the sharpest terms, contending that it sought to prepare the troops for the possibility of war in the nearest future. Such a presentation, he said, was entirely unacceptable.

  “The document is formulated in primitive terms,” Malenkov sneered, “as though we were going to war tomorrow.”2

  Stalin supported Malenkov’s opinion, and the instructions were not issued. The official attitude was unchanging: all rumors and reports of war were but a British trick to sow trouble between Russia and Germany.

  The strongest support for the conclusion that Stalin remaine
d confident even on the eve of war in his ability to prevent its outbreak is provided by the fact that on June 6 he approved a comprehensive plan for the shift-over of Soviet industry to war production. This timetable called for completion of the plan by the end of 1942I It was an excellent, detailed schedule, calling for the conversion of large numbers of civilian plants to military purposes and the construction of much-needed defense facilities.

  “Stalin underevaluated the real threat of war against the Soviet Union from the side of Fascist Germany and did not believe in the possibility of attack on the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1941,” the Soviet economist Krav-chenko commented after a careful examination of the Soviet economic military plans of the period. As of June 22, 1941, the Soviet Air Force had on hand only 593 new-model fighters and bombers. Only 594 of the powerful new 60-ton KV tanks and 1,225 of the serviceable new medium T-34 tanks had been put in the hands of the army.3

  “Stalin never believed in the possibility that Germany would attack the U.S.S.R. in June, 1941,” concluded Marshal Andrei Grechko, onetime Chief of Staff.

  On the very day (June 6) that Stalin approved the plan for converting Soviet industry to a wartime basis by the end of 1942, the NKGB put before him an intelligence evaluation that German concentrations on the Soviet frontiers had reached the four-million mark.

  Warnings came from all directions. There were more from London. Lord Cadogan, permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office, on June 10 called in Ambassador Maisky.

  “Take a piece of paper,” Cadogan said, “and write down what I’m going to dictate.” He proceeded to list for Maisky (with dates and military designations) the identity and location of units the Germans had concentrated on the Soviet frontier. Maisky sent the data by urgent cipher to Moscow. The only response Maisky ever got—if it was a response—was the June 13 Tass statement brushing aside rumors of Soviet-German war as a British provocation.

  The Soviet Embassy in Berlin noted a curious and alarming circumstance. Near the embassy on Unter den Linden stood the studio of Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer, the man who took the pictures of Eva Braun. Hoffmann had a display window in which he put up maps of European theaters in which operations were contemplated. In the spring of 1940 he put up maps of Holland and Scandinavia. In April, 1941, it was Yugoslavia and Greece. Toward the end of May a huge map of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, Byelorussia and the Ukraine appeared. The hint was obvious.

  Yet Moscow showed no signs of alarm. Large numbers of Soviet personnel, their wives—even pregnant wives—and children continued to arrive in Germany after June 1.

  The consequences of Malenkov’s intervention against realistic political instructions for the army quickly assumed a sinister aspect. Officers who continued to warn about German attack or speak out on the danger of war were branded as provocateurs. Some were arrested. Others were threatened with arrest.4 Political commissars were sent out from Moscow. They described Stalin as carrying out the most delicate balancing act in order to avoid war. “Stalin,” one said, “can walk so quietly he doesn’t even shake the china.” They referred to Bismarck’s dictum that Germany could not fight a war on two fronts.

  This atmosphere produced disaster. For instance, on the vital Bug River frontier, defended by the Fourth Army, more than 40 German divisions had been identified by June 5. It was known that at least 15 infantry, 5 tank, 2 motorized and 2 cavalry divisions were massing in the direction of Brest-Litovsk. Yet, on June 10, after getting the latest evaluations from Army General D. G. Pavlov at district military headquarters in Minsk, General A. A. Korobkov assured his associates that Moscow did not fear German attack.

  Marshal Ivan K. Bagramyan was then a colonel attachéd to the Kiev Military District and Deputy Chief of Staff. By late May he had intelligence reports that the Germans were moving all civilians out of border areas. On June 6 the Germans replaced their border guards with field troops and put military directors in chargé of all hospitals. An estimated two hundred troop trains a day were arriving at the Ukraine frontier, and the rumble of truck traffic all along the border was sufficient to keep residents from sleeping at night.

  Colonel General M. P. Kirponos, the Kiev commander, ordered some of his troops to occupy sections of the frontier fortifications which had not yet been completed. The move had hardly started when the Chief of Staff, General Zhukov, telegraphed peremptory orders from Moscow: “The chief of NKVD border troops reports the chief of the fortified region has received orders to occupy the forward works. Such action may quickly provoke the Germans to armed clash with serious consequences. You are ordered to revoke it immediately and report specifically who ordered such an arbitrary disposition.” According to one version, this intervention was directly inspired by Police Chief Beria.

  Actually, a good deal was being done in Kirponos’ command to prepare for possible war. Bagramyan had been working since winter on plans for meeting any threat to the Western border. A variant had been approved in early February and sent to the General Staff in Moscow, but delay followed delay and revision followed revision. Not until May 10 was the plan approved by the Kremlin.

  At the same time, on May 5 the frontier districts got new directives about disposition of their forces for defense, providing for concentration of heavy reserves, especially tanks in a deep interior defense region. The Kiev Command was instructed to prepare to receive large reinforcements from the Caucasus, including the 34th Infantry Corps of five divisions, headed by Lieutenant General M. A. Reiter, and three divisions of the 25th Corps. This group was transformed into the Nineteenth Army, and Lieutenant General I. S. Konev was placed at its head. A bit later the district was advised that it would receive the Sixteenth Army headed by Lieutenant General M. F. Lukin from the Trans-Baikal district. It was due to arrive between June 15 and July 10.5

  Did Stalin still believe that Germany was not planning to attack or that, if she did harbor such plans, he could outmaneuver Hitler?

  Admiral Kuznetsov visited the Kremlin June 13 or 14. He saw Stalin for the last time before the outbreak of war. He gave him the latest intelligence evaluations from each fleet, advised him that the Black Sea Fleet was about to begin maneuvers and that the Germans had for all practical purposes abandoned work on the unfinished cruiser Lützow in Leningrad. He submitted a report on the number of German ships in Soviet ports and a chart drawn up by his Chief of Staff showing how quickly these numbers had fallen. Kuznetsov felt that the chart provided dramatic evidence of German preparations for war and of the little time that remained. Should not orders be given to Soviet ships to avoid German waters? Kuznetsov wanted to put the matter to Stalin, but, as he recalled, “it appeared to me that my further presence was clearly not desired.” He left Stalin’s office without a question having been raised about preparing the fleets for action. There was no evidence that his presentation was ever followed up.

  This was the day that Stalin approved publication of the Tass statement implying that rumors of war were a British trick. Kuznetsov believed that Stalin’s intense suspicion of the British (and to a lesser extent of the Americans) blinded him to the validity of the intelligence evaluations he received. Anything that came from Churchill or the British was, Stalin was certain, part of a scheme to draw him into war. Thus, when Ambassador Maisky in London passed on British information about the divisions Germany had concentrated on the Soviet border, Stalin rejected the data. He took the same attitude when Maisky reported on June 13 that the British were ready to send a military mission immediately to Moscow in event of German attack and when Maisky advised on June 18 that Cripps had told him the German attack was imminent and that the Germans now had 147 divisions on the Soviet frontier.

  By curious irony Richard Sorge in Tokyo turned over to his wireless operator the last message he was to send before the outbreak of war on the very day he read in the Japanese press the Tass statement of June 13. Sorge had received a message from Moscow on June 12 strongly doubting the validity of his earlier reports of German preparat
ions for attack. Sorge expressed to a colleague his concern. He wondered whether Stalin could be doubting his information. He dictated a new telegram, saying: “I repeat: nine armies of 150 divisions will attack on a wide front at dawn June 22, 1941.” The message was signed with his customary code name, “Ramsey.”6

  In the opinion of Soviet historians none of the intelligence data altered the fixed opinion of Stalin and his closest associates, Zhdanov, Beria and Malen-kov, that there would be no immediate Nazi attack. Order after order in the last ten days before the war forbade moves along the frontier lest they be interpreted by the Germans as provocations.7

  Not even when German reconnaissance planes accidentally landed at Soviet airports June 19 was Moscow’s evaluation shaken. True, that same day General Kirponos was instructed to advance his command post to Ternopol, closer to the border. The shift was to be made June 22. But no orders came through to move up troops or put planes on the ready.8

  Political workers in the army were briefed to carry out a new line which was said to reflect the intentions of the Tass communiqué. There were three main points: first, talk of war is pro vocational; second, the communiqué proves that there is no disagreement with Germany; third, thanks to Stalin’s policy peace has been secured for a long time.

  These views certainly were shared by both Stalin and Zhdanov. Zhdanov was Chief of the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. The Party line of “No War” was being laid down under his strict guidance.

  Only in the navy did it prove possible to maintain some vigilance. There, due to Kuznetsov and his chief political officer, I. V. Rogov, the line of imminent danger and possible attack by Germany continued to be presented in lectures to the troops.9 But not without repercussions. When the Deputy Political Chief Kalachev lectured along these lines to the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad, a letter quickly turned up in Moscow complaining that the press spoke of peace and Kalachev of war.