The lower ranks of the officer corps suffered less severely. The extent of the manpower losses was lower than most outside observers supposed at the time, though the effect on a military organization in which morale was not high should not be underestimated. The true figures are now available from Russian sources. From 1936 to 1938 a total of 41,218 were purged, but most were dismissed rather than arrested or executed. Of the 34,000 officers sacked in 1937 and 1938 the NKVD arrested 9,500. By May 1940 11,596 officers had been reinstated. As a proportion of the total number of officers these figures are relatively small. Of the 179,000 officers employed in 1938 only 3.7 per cent were still formally discharged by 1940. The net loss in 1937 and 1938, after taking into account new recruits into the officer corps, was approximately 10,000.56
The military purge may have had a rationality all its own in the mind of a Yezhov or a Stalin, but it made little sense in terms of the Soviet Union's military development and international security. ‘This is worse than when artillery fires on its own troops,’ observed General Konstantin Rokossovsky during his two-year imprisonment between 1938 and 1940.57 The purges profoundly affected the perception of Soviet strength abroad, and contributed to the judgement of most German commanders that the Red Army could be beaten. The destruction of the cadres of young officers around the reformer Tukhachevsky is usually taken as evidence that the Soviet Union took a giant leap backward in military effectiveness and levels of military preparedness. This is a superficial conclusion. Plausible though it seems, the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet military position in the late 1930s were not simply the result of the purges.
Any argument which suggests that the purges weakened the Red Army (and Navy) rests on a prior assumption that the pre-purge army must have been a more effective instrument. Such an assumption is clearly open to question. For all of Tukhachevsky's enthusiasm for mass tanks and aircraft, there existed a wide discrepancy between theory and practice. Soviet forces had made poor progress in ‘command and control’, the critical dimension of fast-moving aircraft and tank combat.58 Communications systems were rudimentary or non-existent. Tanks and aircraft were not equipped with radios and could not easily communicate with each other. Commanders had no way of co-ordinating air and ground action, nor of holding a large group of tanks and armoured vehicles together. These deficiencies rendered the concept of ‘deep operations’ almost impossible. At most levels of junior command there existed a lack of flexibility and tactical awareness. German soldiers who watched their Soviet counterparts in training and on manoeuvres were unimpressed by what they saw. ‘The weak point of the army,’ wrote a German army adjutant in 1933, ‘is that all commanders, from platoon to regiment commander, are not yet efficient enough. Most of them are capable of dealing with problems only at the level of a non-commissioned officer.’ The German military attaché in Moscow the same year detected throughout the army ‘a fear of responsibility’.59 Many of those purged after 1937 were men who had little military education and had achieved office on the grounds of their civil war experience.
By the late 1930s there were thousands of younger officers, some of them trained in the military academies, ready to take their place. By 1941 over 100,000 officers were entering the Soviet armed forces each year. The purges certainly removed some men of talent at the top of the military establishment, but it is questionable whether the aggregate effect was to make the average performance of the officer corps much worse than it had been beforehand, or to make the tank and air war any less capable of realization. The army had severe weaknesses both before and after the purges. What made the situation difficult for the army authorities after 1938 was the vast expansion of the Red Army – 161 new divisions were activated between January 1939 and May 1941 – which required more officers than the training establishments could hope to supply, despite vastly expanded training schemes. In 1941 75 per cent of all officers had been in office for less than a year, not because of the purges but because of the creation of many new military units. By then 80 per cent of those officers purged in 1938 had been reinstated.60
Other elements of the Soviet military effort were less affected by the purges. The training schools expanded their intake of new officer trainees. In 1936, 10,500 were drafted from academies and schools, but in 1938 23,000 and in 1939 39,500.61 The technological threshold still moved forward, if slowly. The system of fortifications begun in the 1920s along the whole western frontier – the Stalin Line – continued to be constructed and extended. Most important of all, the modernization and expansion of the Soviet heavy industrial base accelerated, and with it the large proportion allocated to military production. Without the economic transformation, the Red Army would have been a feeble force in 1941, relaying on a vast base of peasant manpower. The industrial changes of the 1930s provided the planners, the scientists, engineers and skilled labour necessary to cope with the demands of total mobilization made after the German invasion in 1941. Whatever the weaknesses exposed by the modernization drive, it is inconceivable that the Soviet Union could have withstood the German attack without it.
The most debilitating effect of the purges was the sharp change they signalled in the balance of power between the military and the politicians. After a decade of attempts by the military to win greater independence from political control, the purges brought back close political supervision and intervention. It may well be that Stalin was motivated by concern over the growing independence of the armed forces and recollections of the imaginary Bonapartist fears of the early 1920s when he decided to turn the terror on the military. In May 1937, as the axe fell on Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov reintroduced political deputies into all units above divisional strength. In August the Main Political Directorate of the Army was placed under the care of Lev Mekhlis, the editor of Pravda, who was instructed by Stalin to ‘bolshevize’ the army. He was typical of the new political soldiers. Energetic, brutal and vindictive, a military ignoramus who thought that he understood war, he became the major figure responsible for instilling a correct Communist outlook in the armed forces. He kept the terror alive in the armed forces by insisting that the political officers in every unit should play a substantial military role, as they had done during the civil war.62
The result was the triumph of military illiteracy over military science, of political conformity over military initiative. It has been estimated that 73 per cent of the political officers had had no military training, yet they were placed even in small military units, down to the level of platoon and company. This stifling of military independence left commanders demoralized and excessively cautious, since anything judged by the political officers to be an infringement of the Party line carried the risk of the Lubyanka, not just for the commander concerned but for his wife and family. Officers were inclined to stick by the rule book. Any talk of ‘deep operations’, or massed tank attack, with its echoes of Tukhachevsky, was by association deemed to be counter-revolutionary. In this sense the purges left an indelible mark on the Soviet armed forces, which were once again, as they were in the early 1920s, officially regarded by the Party as an instrument of the people's revolutionary will. Military professionalism was suspect as ‘bourgeois expertise’. In February 1939, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the Frunze Military Academy, Pravda carried the following editorial:
Military thought in the capitalist world has got into a blind alley. The dashing ‘theories’ about a lightning war, or about small, select armies of technicians, or about the air war which can replace all other military operations; all these theories arise from the bourgeoisie's deathly fear of the proletarian revolution. In its mechanical way, the imperialist bourgeoisie overrates equipment and underrates man.63
After twenty years of Soviet rule the mentality of civil war, of a people armed in the righteous struggle against its class enemies, still dominated the outlook of the political élite, most of whom had experienced it at first hand. Workers and peasants were regarded as soldiers in the war against the counter-
revolution; soldiers were workers and peasants in uniform, the armed wing of the proletarian movement. The legacy of the civil war helps to explain why Soviet society as a whole, civilian and military, was mobilized to fight against German aggression in 1941, but it also explains why that fight when it came was at first so incompetent and costly.
2
The Hour Before Midnight:
1937–1941
My people and I, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack in 1941!
Beria to Stalin, 21 June 1941
In August 1936 the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, took himself off to his retreat in the Bavarian Alps at Berchtesgaden. Perched in his ‘Eagle's Nest’, staring out over his favourite vista of peaks and alpine meadows, Hitler thought about war. The last time he had written anything down about his plans for the future was in 1928, when he dictated a sequel to Mein Kampf that was never published in his lifetime. The book was full of ideas about the necessity of war and economic conquest. But it had been written when Hitler was still a struggling street politician, years from power. In August 1936 he had been ruler of Germany for almost four years. Plans for war took a back seat while the Nazi Party struggled to consolidate its power and heal the economic damage of the slump. But by 1936 war was at the front of Hitler's mind. Hitler rarely set his thoughts down on paper. But on this occasion he wrote a lengthy memorandum on Germany's political and economic situation and the inevitability of war.
The memorandum was shown to only a small circle: the Defence Minister, Werner von Blomberg; the head of the autobahn project, Fritz Todt; and the Nazi politician and Air Force Commander in Chief, Hermann Goering. To others around him he gave only hints that a great war was in the offing, a war that would redraw the map of Europe as the Thirty Years' War had done three centuries before.1 The central argument of Hitler's document was the necessity of war between Marxist Russia and Western civilization. ‘No nation will be able to avoid or abstain from this historic conflict,’ wrote Hitler. He compared the age in which he lived with the crisis of the ancient world when it was overwhelmed by the barbarian invasions, and with the long and violent confrontation between Islam and Christianity. The growing military strength of the Soviet Union he regarded as ‘menacing’; the prospects for the future were grim unless Germany took up the torch of civilization and rode out to slay the Bolshevik dragon. If Russia won the looming historic struggle it would be, Hitler thought, ‘the most gruesome catastrophe which has been visited on mankind since the downfall of the states of antiquity’. The danger had to be confronted: ‘All other considerations must recede into the background.’ ‘I set the following tasks,’ Hitler concluded his document. ‘I: The German armed forces must be operational within four years. II: The German economy must be fit for war within four years.’2
In the autumn of 1936 Goering was appointed head of a Four-Year-Plan organization to create the economic foundation for large-scale war. Two-thirds of industrial investment between 1936 and 1939 was devoted to war-related production. By the spring of 1939 one-quarter of the entire German labour force was working on military contracts. The pace of military expansion, first begun in the late 1920s with Soviet assistance, accelerated. ‘The extent of the military development of our resources cannot be too large, nor its pace too swift,’ Hitler had written in the memorandum. The German army was to be ‘the premier army in the world’.3 No definite plan for war was formulated, like the Schlieffen Plan that had shaped German strategy before 1914, but the memorandum pointed to an ineluctable contest between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was the seed from which grew the bitter struggle of the years 1941 to 1945.
In Moscow the revival of German military power was viewed with genuine anxiety. Relations between the two states had steadily deteriorated since Hitler came to power in 1933. Soviet leaders were more impressed by the central message of Hitler's Mein Kampf than were politicians in the West. At the Congress of Soviets in January 1935 the Soviet Premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, warned delegates that Hitler's stated intention was territorial conquest in the East. When the wealthy American lawyer Joseph E. Davies arrived in Moscow early in 1937 to take up the post of ambassador, he found that all the talk there was of the German threat. Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, explained to him that Hitler was consumed by a lust for conquest and for the domination of Europe.4 It was no accident that Marshal Tukhachevsky and the generals who stood trial beside him were accused of spying for Germany.
The Soviet Union was forced to abandon the isolation of the 1920s. Faced with a hostile Germany in the West and a strongly anti-Communist Japan in the Far East, the Soviet Union began to mend its fences with the Western states, Britain and France. This choice was understandable enough, but it ran entirely counter to the prevailing Soviet view that the West represented the forces of bourgeois imperialism in their most extreme form. Stalin had little time for France, which he regarded as ‘the most aggressive and most militarist' of all the Western states. The League of Nations, set up in 1920 as the instrument for international co-operation and collective security, was dubbed by Stalin as the ‘organizational centre of imperialist pacifism’.5 Now, in the wake of rejection by Germany, Soviet leaders found themselves in the unexpected position of suitor, begging favours from a frosty mistress.
As the price of co-operation the Western states insisted that the Soviet Union display its change of heart publicly by joining the League of Nations. On 18 September 1934 Soviet representatives took their seats on the League Council at Geneva. Further gestures of goodwill followed: Stalin ordered Communist parties everywhere to abandon the revolutionary struggle and to collaborate with ‘progressive’ political forces in a ‘popular front’ against fascism. The Comintern, the international Communist organization set up by Lenin in 1920, toned down its radical language. All the talk now was of democracy, social co-operation and peace. In May 1935 the Soviet Union replaced the lost friendship of Germany with a pact of mutual assistance signed with France. Non-aggression pacts were signed with Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, all states that were to feel the weight of Soviet aggression in a matter of years.
The public face of good-neighbourliness masked a much more cautious and pragmatic attitude. Stalin never lost sight of the prospect of Soviet-German friendship, despite the public posture of hating fascism. In 1937, at almost exactly the time that Stalin's executioners were extorting confessions of spying for Germany from terrorized Soviet generals, secret contacts were made with Goering's Four-Year-Plan organization in Berlin to try to revive Soviet-German trade. The negotiations stumbled on Hitler's refusal in March 1937 to countenance parallel political discussions. To cover his tracks, Stalin had the Soviet negotiators arrested, executed or imprisoned.6 In Berlin the drawbridge was drawn up. The two sides did not talk again until the months leading to war in 1939.
The Soviet Union now entered a new and dangerous phase in its foreign policy. Weakened by the savage purge of the officer corps and the violent effort to transform Soviet society, faced with a rapidly rearming, anti-Soviet Germany, and deeply distrustful of her new imperialist partners, Stalin's revolutionary state was anything but secure. We know little of Stalin's private thoughts from this period. Under Litvinov's influence the Soviet Foreign Commissariat remained rigidly committed to the letter of collective security in the struggle against aggression and fascism. Most foreign observers assumed that this was a front for a more devious and self-interested policy, but the revelations since the 1980s have not yet exposed it, if one ever existed. In the mid-1930s collective security was in Russia's self-interest.
Once the Soviet Union had stepped out of isolation into the European theatre, it at once became embroiled in Europe's problems. European Communists and fellow-travellers (of whom there were a great many in the 1930s), quite innocent about the true nature of Stalin's regime, took up the cause of anti-fascism and loudly trumpeted the heroic achievements of Soviet modernization. Very few of them ever saw t
he Soviet Union; those who did were escorted from model village to model factory, where they met only orchestrated smiles and a terrified loyalty. Among them were to be found the volunteers for the first armed struggle between Communism and fascism, in Spain. When civil war broke out under the Spanish Second Republic in July 1936 the conflict between nationalist and reactionary forces under Franco and the embattled Spanish Popular Front regime of liberals, socialists and Communists quickly became an international issue. The reality of the Spanish Civil War was much more complicated than a crude division between fascism and Communism, but for non-Spaniards the conflict came to symbolize the growing political tensions in Europe. Left-wing sympathizers from all over Europe and America (but not from the Soviet Union) joined the International Brigades which fought alongside the Republican army. Although the Soviet Union formally joined with her new League partners in advocating non-intervention in Spain, Soviet arms and equipment were secretly supplied to the Republican army and air force. But Stalin had other motives for intervening in Spain. Agents of the NKVD, with orders to fight not fascism but ‘Trotskyite accomplices’ and other anti-Soviet Communists, were sent from the Soviet Union. There were Communists of every kind in Spain, from members of the powerful native anarcho-syndicalist movement to Communist defectors from Stalinist terror. The NKVD hunted down and eliminated any who posed a threat to the Moscow line. Even those who had been sent to do Stalin's work in Spain were summoned back to death or imprisonment.
Throughout the 1930s Stalin conducted a shadow war across Europe, exporting terror to reach the other Communist parties of Europe and the Russian émigré communities, right and left, which kept up a ceaseless propaganda war against him. Soviet spies were recruited in every state, even in the heart of the political establishment, driven by greed or idealism or fear. Their methods were the stuff of fiction. In 1937 the head of the Federation of Tsarist Army Veterans in Paris, General Eugene Miller, was kidnapped by the NKVD in an elaborate plot. Two Soviet agents, impersonating senior German officers, collaborated with Miller's assistant, the White general Nikolai Skoblin, who unknown to Miller had been an NKVD agent all along. On 22 September 1937 Miller disappeared in broad daylight on his way to a meeting with Skoblin and the fake German officers. He was taken to the Soviet embassy, drugged, put in a trunk and sent in a Ford truck to the port of Le Havre and on to Leningrad. In Moscow he was subjected to the usual brutalities and shot. Skoblin escaped capture by the French authorities and went to Spain, where his future can only have been bleak, though his exact fate remains unknown. His wife, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, famous among émigré circles for her haunting performances of the folk songs of old Russia, had been for years an NKVD agent. Caught by the French police, she was sentenced to twenty years and died in prison in 1940. According to the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, who was murdered by Soviet agents in Washington the same year, Miller's kidnapping was linked directly with the Tukhachevsky case. Skoblin also had contact with the Gestapo. He was used as the conduit for passing disinformation on to Miller about the Red Army command, which was eventually beaten out of him in Moscow and formed part of the conspiracy case. Krivitsky suggested that Stalin and Yezhov were the authors of the Miller plot, but this has still to be proved beyond doubt.7
Russia's War Page 6