Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  On the other side of the frontier there moved into place the largest invasion force ever gathered. Over 3 million men, organized in 146 army divisions, with 14 more Romanian divisions to the south and Finnish forces to the north, all supported by more than 2,000 aircraft and 3,350 tanks, gradually moved to battle stations during June. Behind the frontline units special security brigades, Hitler's equivalent of the NKVD, were organized in four Einsatz-kommandos. Their orders were to root out all political elements hostile to Germany and exterminate them ruthlessly. On the morning of June 21 the code word ‘Dortmund’ was released, signalling an attack at half past three the following morning. Soviet border guards could hear the noise of armour moving into position. Stalin retired to bed at three o'clock in the morning, his eyes still closed to the glaring evidence of catastrophe. Thirty minutes later Russia's war had begun.

  3

  The Goths Ride East:

  Barbarossa, 1941

  We have only one task, to stand and pitilessly to lead this race-battle…. The reputation for horror and terror which preceded us we want never to allow to diminish. The world may call us what it will.

  Heinrich Himmler, April 1943

  On the night that German forces launched the largest and costliest war in history Stalin had little more than an hour of sleep. By the time he was awakened German aircraft had already attacked the major Soviet air bases behind the frontier and were bombing Minsk, Kiev and Sevastopol. At four o'clock in the morning Zhukov already knew that German forces were attacking all along the Soviet western frontier. He was asked by Marshal Timoshenko to telephone their leader at his villa – the so-called nearer dacha at Kuntsevo – outside Moscow. This was an unenviable task. The officer on duty was bleary and unco-operative: ‘Comrade Stalin is sleeping.’ Zhukov was urgent: ‘Wake him up immediately, the Germans are bombing our cities.’ A few minutes later Stalin himself answered the telephone. ‘Did you understand?’ Zhukov asked.1 Silence followed, broken only by the sound of heavy breathing. Finally Stalin regained himself. Zhukov was ordered to assemble the entire Politburo at the Kremlin. Stalin arrived first, driving through Sunday morning streets filled with drunken, slumbering Muscovites.

  Stalin was shocked but he was not, as is often suggested, paralysed by the news. For some time he persisted in his belief that this was a limited act of provocation. When Timoshenko objected that bombing Soviet cities could not be regarded merely as ‘provocation’, Stalin replied that ‘German generals would bomb even their own cities,’ so unscrupulous were they when it came to provoking a conflict. He muttered that Hitler could know nothing about the attacks and that someone should ‘urgently contact Berlin’.2 As his Politburo companions arrived one by one, Stalin addressed them in a slow, faltering voice. He was pale and tired. Molotov was sent off to find out from the German ambassador what German intentions were. Schulenberg was shown into Molotov's office. He stiffly informed Molotov that a state of war now existed between Germany and the Soviet Union. All Molotov could stutter was ‘What have we done to deserve this?’; he hurried back to Stalin's office. The news was received by Stalin with unusual calmness. He ‘sank in his chair and was locked in deep thought’, wrote Zhukov. After a long pause he spoke. ‘The enemy,’ he assured everyone present, ‘will be beaten all along the line.’3

  Zhukov and Timoshenko promised first to halt the enemy and then, warming to the theme, to destroy them, though neither man could have had any illusions about the difficulties they faced. At 7:15 in the morning Stalin issued the first wartime order, under Timoshenko's signature. The German air force was to be destroyed and air attacks launched up to 100 miles into German territory; the army was ordered to ‘annihilate’ invading forces, using any means, but not to cross the frontier with Germany. In the evening Soviet forces were ordered to go over to the offensive against the main axes of German attack and to take the battle onto enemy territory.4 Molotov and Stalin worked on a draft speech announcing the onset of war. Molotov was sent off to read it over Soviet radio at noon. From loudspeakers set up in the main streets of Soviet cities, the people heard the terrible truth. Many were already under attack; refugees were already streaming eastward, the start of a vast exodus of more than 25 million people. Molotov found the words difficult to deliver. He ended on an optimistic, exhortatory note: ‘Our cause is just, the enemy will be smashed, victory will be ours.’ Stalin thought his performance lack-lustre.

  There existed an almost unbridgeable chasm between the confident expectation of victory which Stalin clung to in the first week of the

  Caption

  Map 1 Operation Barbarossa, June–September 1941

  war and the state of utter chaos and demoralization at the front line. The attack was the very opposite of what orthodox thinking in the Red Army had expected. Instead of ten days of initial probing attacks, followed by the clash of the two fully mobilized armies, the entire German force swept forward in the first hours much as German leaders had expected, to all appearances a model of purposeful efficiency pitted against Soviet primitivism. ‘The Russian “mass,”’ wrote a German staff officer, ‘is no match for an army with modern equipment and superior leadershi Most foreign observers agreed. ‘I am mentally preparing myself for headlong collapse of the Red Army and air force, wrote the British politician Hugh Dalton in his diary on the night of the German invasion. British and American military leaders expected German victory in weeks, months at the most.5

  Soviet forces were capable of a great deal more than their enemies and allies supposed. They were the victims not of Bolshevik primitivism but of surprise. So insistent had Stalin been that Germany would not attack in the summer that even the most rudimentary precautions were lacking. Aircraft were lined up in inviting rows at the main air bases, uncamouflaged. At least 1,200 of them were destroyed at sixty-six bases within hours of the war's beginning, most of them on the ground. Many units in forward positions had no live ammunition to issue. The speed of the German advance overwhelmed the Soviet supply system; 200 out of 340 military supply dumps fell into German hands in the first month.6 The army itself was in the midst of a complex redeployment. A fraction of the army was stationed in the forward echelon, another fraction was behind it, far to the rear, and reserves, larger than either of the echelons in front of them, were still further back. Stalin continued to insist on keeping most divisions, approximately 100, stretched out opposite the south-west frontier, to protect the resource-rich Ukraine, even after it was evident that the main route of German advance was further north towards Minsk and Moscow. Many units were in the process of moving to new quarters when the attack came. Most were under strength. In the first days army units were posted to the frontier in almost complete ignorance of the enemy's position. No coherent order of battle could be established. Divisions were sent into the line as they arrived. Without air cover, adequate weapons or intelligence, they were annihilated, often in just a few hours. In the first four weeks of Barbarossa, 319 Soviet units were committed to battle; almost all of them were destroyed or badly damaged.7

  While Soviet units at the front fought in hopeless isolation, their organization and communication systems in tatters, the Kremlin buzzed with urgent activity. After the weeks of vacillation preceding the invasion, Stalin was galvanized into action. Khrushchev later recalled a man who overnight became ‘a bag of bones in a grey tunic’, but the recollections of those who worked with him in the first week of war paint a picture of an energetic man who, though ‘tired and worried’, was consumed with anger – at the Germans, at his colleagues, at the disoriented forces at the front, even at himself. He worked around the clock, involving himself in every decision, large and small – the design of a sniper's rifle, the length of bayonets. He was voracious in his appetite for news, but those around him hesitated to tell him the worst. The military discussions had an air of complete unreality, Stalin urging annihilating attacks, his commanders cautiously painting a picture of continuous retreats.8

  During the first weeks of the war
Stalin finally stepped out of the modest shoes of the Party Secretary to concentrate the supreme direction of the war in his own hands. On June 3 he approved the establishment of a Main Headquarters (Stavka Glavnogo Komandov-aniia). Usually known simply as the Stavka, its name echoed that of the headquarters set up by the Tsar in the previous war. On July 10 he became Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. On July 19 he replaced Timoshenko as Commissar for Defence. On August 8 the Stavka was finally converted to the Supreme High Command, with Stalin at its head. This was a remarkable political revolution. Stalin had always preferred to operate behind the scenes, while public responsibility was given to others. Stalin's motives for seizing the reins at the hour of crisis are still open to speculation.

  In June the Supreme Command was still chaired by Marshal Timoshenko, who had the unfortunate task of trying to interpret the awful news from the front in a form that would bring nothing worse than angry rebukes. Under the circumstances it was perhaps surprising that he survived at all. Stalin was quick to project his own failure onto others. No diploma in psychology was needed to see that Stalin's ferocious anger was fired by his own sense of guilt at so misjudging his fellow dictator.

  Stalin's personal battle with reality reached its climax on June 27. News was filtering in that German forces had reached the Belorussian capital of Minsk, some 300 miles into Soviet territory. Following a tense Politburo meeting, Stalin, accompanied by Beria and Molotov, took the unprecedented step of paying a visit to the Defence Commissariat, where Timoshenko and Zhukov were trying to bring some order to the battered Soviet line. Stalin looked at the maps and reports for himself and could see the truth. An angry exchange followed with Zhukov and Timoshenko, who for once dropped the mask of fear always worn in Stalin's presence. Stalin wanted the truth and got it. He looked around at each of them in the room with evident gloom and stalked out. ‘Lenin founded our state,’ he muttered, ‘and we've fucked it up.’9

  Stalin abruptly stopped ruling. He drove to his dacha at Kuntsevo in the forest of Poklonnaia Gora outside Moscow and stayed there, leaving the Government in abeyance. There are a number of possible explanations for Stalin's behaviour. It may well be that, overcome with nervous exhaustion and despair, he could no longer sustain the charade played out in the first week of war, now that the truth was known. He had refused to face the shock of invasion when it came. A delayed reaction was perhaps inevitable, certainly not surprising. Yet Stalin did little that was not calculated. He avoided any kind of identification with the disaster. Pravda stopped printing his name. The withdrawal may well have been a ploy to see whether his leadership would survive the crisis. The discovery that Stalin was reading a play about Ivan the Terrible at the time has led one biographer to suggest that he was acting out the game once played by his autocratic predecessor, who pretended to be dying to see how his courtiers reacted. On the cover of the play Stalin doodled the words, ‘We'll hold out.’10 If this was Stalin's intention it was a risky game. He could not be certain that he would survive the disaster. As it turned out the gambit, if that is what it was, worked to Stalin's advantage.

  On June 30 the members of the Politburo drew up a plan to create a State Committee for Defence, an emergency cabinet to oversee the whole Soviet war effort. They all agreed that in the country only Stalin had the authority to lead the Committee. At four o'clock in the afternoon they drove out to the dacha to plead with Stalin to return to Moscow and take up the reins once more. According to Anastas Mikoyan, they found Stalin sitting in an armchair in his dining room. Another witness of the bizarre encounter recalled that Stalin was thin, haggard and gloomy. ‘Why have you come?’ he asked nervously. When their mission was explained Stalin looked surprised: ‘Can I lead the country to final victory?’ Voroshilov is reported to have replied: ‘There is none more worthy.’11 Stalin agreed to take up the heavy task. The leadership crisis was past. Stalin became and remained Russia's supreme war leader.

  He returned to the Kremlin on July 1. Two days later he broadcast to the nation for the first time since the onset of the war. It was one of the most important speeches of his life. The delivery was hesitant, interrupted by occasional gulps, as if the speaker were sipping from a glass of water; Stalin had never been a good public speaker. The message was, nevertheless, clear enough. He began by addressing the Soviet people as ‘brothers and sisters’, ‘friends’, words generally foreign to Stalin's public political vocabulary. He explained that Germany had launched an unprovoked attack, and that the Soviet Union had ‘come to death grips with its most vicious and perfidious enemy’. He invoked the great heroes of the Russian past who had fought off one invader after another. Russia's enemies were ‘fiends and cannibals’ but they could be beaten. He appealed to popular patriotism rather than revolutionary zeal. (On June 26 Pravda described the conflict for the first time as a ‘fatherland war’.) He called on ordinary Soviet citizens to undertake a levée en masse, like the great popular mobilization that saved the French Revolution in 1792. If retreats were necessary – they could no longer be disguised from the Soviet public – he promised the Germans a wasteland: ‘The enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, a single pound of grain or a gallon of fuel.’ He finished by reminding his listeners that this was not ‘an ordinary war’, it was total war, ‘a war of the entire Soviet people’, a choice between Soviet freedom or German slavery.12

  To many listeners this must have seemed an unenviable choice, but the response was immediate. Stalin's slow voice gave the Soviet people a reassurance they had lacked in the confused, rumour-filled early days of war. ‘It was the end of illusions,’ wrote the novelist Konstantin Simonov, ‘but nobody doubted his courage and his iron will… What was left after Stalin's speech was a tense expectation of change for the better.’13 The call to establish a popular militia – opolchenie – was answered overwhelmingly. In Leningrad 159,000 joined the volunteers; in Moscow 120,000, organized in a dozen divisions. The volunteers came from every quarter – workers, teachers, students, officials. They received rudimentary training and few weapons. When Khrushchev telephoned Moscow from the Ukraine to ask what the opolchenie should fight with, he was told to use ‘pikes, swords, anything you can make’.14 When the militia units were thrown into defence of the major cities they were wiped out.

  Stalin's speech of July 3 contained not one but two declarations of war. Beside the war on German fascism, Stalin declared war on anyone on the home front who threatened the Soviet struggle. There was no room, he announced, for ‘whimperers or cowards, for panic-mongers and deserters…’ Later in the speech he urged a ruthless fight against ‘disorganization of the rear’, against ‘spies, diversionists and enemy parachutists…’ Here Stalin was on more familiar territory. The terror was not suspended; it was simply redirected. Draconian regulations were introduced. On June 22 martial law was declared throughout the western Soviet Union. A labour conscription law compelled all men between 18 and 45 and all women between 18 and 40 to work eight hours a day constructing rudimentary defences. In all weathers, hour after hour, the conscripts dug anti-tank traps, trenches and artillery emplacements. On June 26 the working day was extended by a mandatory three hours, and all leave and public holidays were suspended.15 Every worker had to be a Stakhanovite. On July 16 Timoshenko's reform of the previous year, which kept the Party out of military affairs, was overturned, and dual command was reintroduced. In August the notorious Order Number 270 was issued, condemning all those who surrendered or were captured as ‘traitors to the motherland’. The wives of captured officers were subject to arrest and imprisonment. Among the first victims was Stalin's own son, Yakov, captured in early July. Shortly after his capture his wife was arrested and spent two years in a labour camp. Stalin refused a German offer to exchange him for a high-ranking German officer. In 1943 Yakov was shot by a guard for deliberately walking into the forbidden perimeter zone of the prisoner-of-war camp where he was held.16

  The wartime terror took an almost inevitable toll among those
officers who had been unfortunate enough to be in command of the zone that was attacked. Senior commanders were arrested, though not all were executed. But the chief culprit in Stalin's eyes was the commander of the Western Army Group, General Dmitri Pavlov, who made desperate but entirely fruitless efforts to hold the Soviet front line together in the first week of the war. The son of a lumberjack, and an NCO from the First World War, Pavlov was one of those who rose rapidly to high command following the purges. He was arrested at the end of June, accused of treason and shot. The commander of the Western Air District, Major General Kopets, saved the NKVD the trouble by killing himself on the first evening of the invasion. Pavlov's place was taken by Timoshenko, who found himself the target of ceaseless intervention from Stalin and other Party leaders desperate for results. After four weeks Timoshenko was suddenly summoned to Stalin's dacha, where he was told that Zhukov was to take his place. Zhukov, who was present, urged Stalin not to change the command at such a critical point, and Stalin obligingly agreed. At almost the same time Zhukov himself clashed dangerously with the politicians. On July 29 he called on Stalin, Malenkov and Mekhlis to outline his plan to abandon the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and withdraw to a defensive line behind the Dnepr River. Stalin told him the idea was ‘rubbish’, and Zhukov angrily asked to be relieved of his post as chief of staff. He might have suffered Meretskov's fate for confronting Stalin or for his ‘defeatism’ in suggesting a withdrawal, but Stalin stuck with Zhukov. He was removed as chief of staff but put in charge of the Reserve front, and he remained a member of the Stavka.17