When Hitler began his Balkan campaign early in 1941, Stalin had reason to feel reassured. The Yugoslavs capitulated in April, and Hitler moved against Greece. Hitler’s objective now seemed clear to the Boss: once he had seized Greece he would be able to destroy the British in Egypt and take Suez. Churchill, incidentally, was thinking along the same lines when he pleaded with the United States to come into the war: “I beg you, Mr. President,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “to weigh carefully the serious consequences of collapse in the Near East.… Such a blow could be the end of the British Empire.”
There was yet another proof—an amusing one—that Hitler could not possibly attack the Soviet Union in the near future. In May he was in the Balkans, so an attack could not possibly take place before the end of June. Hitler would then have to be prepared for the Russian winter. One sure sign that the Germans intended to attack so late in the year would be the provision of sheepskin coats. Millions of them would be needed. If Hitler really had decided to attack, he should be treating sheepskin coats as a matter of urgency. That would mean a fall in the price of mutton, and a rise in the price of fleece. Nothing of the sort was reported by Soviet intelligence. All in all, Stalin was entitled to conclude that Churchill was determined to draw the United States into the war by supplication, and Russia by false information.
Why did Hitler, in spite of everything, make the most illogical decision of his life at its most critical moment? To understand, we must forget all the generally received versions.
Vladimir Rezun, an officer in the intelligence division of the KGB, chose to remain in the West in order to publish a discovery which had troubled him all his life. In the Military Academy, Rezun had heard in lectures on strategy that if the enemy is planning a sudden assault he must first (a) concentrate his forces near the frontier and (b) locate his airfields as closely as possible to the front line.
In lectures on military history Rezun heard that Stalin, because he had trusted Hitler, was completely unprepared for war. He had committed a number of very serious mistakes. In particular, he had (a) concentrated his best units near the frontier and (b) located his airfields right on the boundary in occupied Poland. Rezun began studying the question, and was astonished to find that trustful Stalin had stepped up arms production with feverish haste after the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and that on the eve of war he had deployed more and more divisions on his frontier with Hitler. He was following the strategic rules for a surprise attack. What, Rezun asked himself, was the obvious inference? Was it that Stalin was planning to attack Hitler?
HE WAS PLANNING TO ATTACK FIRST
The Boss’s pact with Hitler had indeed been intended to spur him on to fresh conquests. And while Hitler, intoxicated with his victories, was destroying capitalist Europe, the Boss was planning his great about-face: his Great War with Hitler. Once he had won that war he would become the liberator of a Europe bled dry. And its lord and master. First there would be an “All-European Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And later there would exist “only one Soviet nation,” as the poet Kulchitsky had promised.
The Boss had appreciated to the full the importance of Hitler’s emergence for the triumph of the Great Dream.
Ideological preparations were in high gear. Newspapers and films glorified the army. The main play of the prewar season, A Lad from Our Town by Konstantin Simonov, had a military theme. Significantly, the Boss sent both of his sons to army schools. Soldiering became the most prestigious profession. Composers did their socialist duty, and a large number of songs were written about a great war and a speedy victory.
At this time Pravda published a speech made by Baidakov, a famous airman: “What happiness and joy will be seen on the countenances of those who, in the Kremlin Palace, receive the last republic into the brotherhood of all countries in the world. I can picture clearly the bombers reducing the enemy’s factories, railroad junctions, warehouses, and military positions to ruins, the assault planes launching a hail of fire, the landing craft putting divisions ashore.”
On orders from Stalin, work began on plans for the redeployment of the Soviet armed forces immediately after the conclusion of the Non-Aggression Pact. The main concentration of Soviet strength was to be on the western front. In the 1939 “Field Regulations” we read that “the Red army will be the most attack-oriented of all attacking armies ever known.” The army was now training airborne troops in unprecedented numbers. By 1941 Stalin had more than a million parachutists. Y. Chadayev, then chief administrative assistant to the Council of People’s Commissars, tells us in his unpublished memoirs (deposited in the Archive of the October Revolution—we shall return to them in other contexts) that the Boss asked him in 1941 to “produce a summary of decisions on defense and economic matters during the Civil War … [and] kept pestering me, wanting to know how the construction of the new air-raid shelter in the Kremlin was going.” Chadayev answered that “work is going on round the clock, it will be ready in two months.” To which Stalin said, “Take the necessary steps to get it finished earlier.” Hitler, obviously, knew all this. His intelligence service was not idle. Hitler also knew why Stalin had stationed an extremely powerful striking force on the Romanian frontier. He had known all along that Bessarabia was just an excuse. Romania hid Germany’s heart’s blood, its oil. That was the reason for Barbarossa. Neither of these enemies-and-allies, needless to say, ever trusted the other for a moment. But they both knew for sure that neither of them was fully prepared to take the offensive, and both were reassured by this knowledge. To prove that his intentions were peaceful, Stalin showed the Germans his old front-line fortifications. Hitler, however, knew that Stalin’s army was poised on his frontier.
In February 1941 the Boss relocated his command posts. But then in May, as if to ingratiate himself with Hitler, Stalin closed down the embassies of Belgium, Norway, and Greece—countries hostile to Nazi Germany. Yet on May 5, 1941, he said openly, at a graduation banquet for officers at the Red Army Academy, “There will be war, and the enemy will be Germany.” In the same speech he announced that the army had been “radically reorganized and greatly expanded.” He spoke of “three hundred divisions, one-third of them mechanized.” But it is the misfortune of dictators to be told what they want to hear. The Boss did not know that a quarter of the three hundred divisions were not yet up to strength, and that the military schools which he was setting up in such a hurry turned out poorly trained officers.
He explained further in the course of the banquet: “Now that we have reconstructed our army, and more than satisfied its need for the technology of modern warfare, now that we are strong, we must go over from the defensive to the offensive. In conducting the defense of our country we must act by taking the offensive.” Chadayev, who heard it, wrote of this speech that “Stalin’s remark that ‘there is going to be a war’ was omitted from the published text. Pravda published a very laconic report of the speech. A spurious version was put out via the correspondent of the German Information Bureau. In this, Stalin laid special stress on the Non-Aggression Pact, and emphasized that we did not expect to be attacked by Germany.”
Still, in May 1941 a project for the establishment of a Supreme Headquarters was submitted to Stalin. Military training was to be speeded up, and the country put on a war footing under the direction of the General Staff. A Party conference devoted to “defense questions” had been held back in February, and Stalin had proposed a seventeen to eighteen percent increase in industrial capacity. He was thinking of war industry.
“BEGIN IT OURSELVES”
“No, Stalin was not planning an attack on Germany in 1941.” That is the view of D. Volkogonov, author of a book on Stalin. A lieutenant general and eminent Russian historian, Volkogonov was the first person to be permitted to work in all the secret archives. He wrote in an article in Izvestia: “I have before me several documents addressed to Stalin and Molotov. Marshal S. Timoshenko, People’s Commissar for Defense, and G. Zhukov, Chief of the General Staff, su
bmitted an amplified plan, prepared on March 11, 1941, for the deployment of the armed forces of the Soviet Union ‘in the West and in the East.’ It says in this plan that the existing political situation in Europe compels us to pay exceptional attention to the defense of our western frontiers. The military leaders believe that Germany may strike its main blow southeastward, with the primary object of occupying the Ukraine, with an auxiliary offensive against Dvinsk and Riga. On May 4 Timoshenko and Zhukov sent particularly important directions to the commanders of the Western, Baltic, and Kiev Military Districts. Nowhere is there a single word about a strike against the German forces. All the documents call for defensive measures to be taken.” But Volkogonov, a former official of the army’s Political Administration, ought to know the importance of ideological words. “Defense” is an ideological word. In “in-depth language,” as became clear during the Finnish war, “defense” often signified “attack.”
Volkogonov also cited an extraordinary document drawn up by Zhukov, as Chief of the General Staff, for Stalin. The document is dated May 15, 1941: “In view of the fact that Germany at present keeps its army fully mobilized with its rear services deployed, it has the capacity of deploying ahead of us and striking a sudden blow. To prevent this I consider it important not to leave the operational initiative to the German command in any circumstances, but to anticipate the enemy and attack the German army at the moment when it is in the process of deploying and before it has time to organize its front and the coordination of its various arms.” Volkogonov pointed out that Zhukov did not sign the document, and concluded that it was not submitted to Stalin.
I see the situation differently.
The document cited by Volkogonov has been preserved in full and is to be found in the Historical Archive and Military-Memorial Center of the General Staff.
The title of the document is “Reflections on a Plan for the Strategic Deployment of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union in the Event of War with Germany and Her Allies.” It is addressed to Stalin.
The authors devote fifteen pages of text to discussing plans for a surprise attack on Germany. “At present,” they say, “Germany and its allies can field 240 divisions against the USSR.” They therefore suggest “forestalling the enemy in deploying our forces and attacking.… Our armies would be set the strategic objective of smashing the main forces of the German army … and emerging by the thirtieth day of the operation along a front from Ostrolenko to Olomuc.… To ensure the realization of the plan set out above it is necessary (1) to carry out a secret mobilization of our forces, representing it as a call-up of reserve officers for training; (2) to carry out the secret concentration of troops nearer to the Western frontier, on pretense of moving them to summer camps; (3) to bring aircraft in secretly from outlying areas and concentrate them on forward airstrips, and to begin establishing rear services for the air force immediately.”
The main offensive was to be on the southwestern front in the direction of Cracow and Katowice. Its objective was to cut Germany off from its southern allies—Italy, Hungary, and especially Romania, with its oil—the lifeblood of the German war machine.
The document is furnished with detailed maps and diagrams. It was produced and signed in black ink in his own hand by Major General A. Vasilievsky, Deputy Chief of the General Staff. Corrections to the documents were made by the First Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General N. Vatutin. Space was left for the signatures of the Chief of the General Staff, Zhukov, and the People’s Commissar for Defense, Timoshenko. Their signatures are in fact missing. But this does not mean that the document was not submitted to Stalin. What we have here is a typical handwritten rough draft. The master copy was most probably destroyed during one of the routine weedings of the archives: a document containing evidence of plans for a Soviet attack on Germany could obviously not be allowed to survive. But minutely detailed work of this sort on the part of the General Staff could not have been carried out without the Boss’s knowledge. It is significant that according to Stalin’s official engagement book Zhukov, Timoshenko, and Vasilievsky—all three of them—were in and out of Stalin’s office on May 12, 19, and 24. It was, moreover, on May 15, 1941 that units received a directive from the Main Political Administration intended to stiffen morale: “Many political officers,” they were told, “have forgotten Lenin’s well-known statement that ‘just as soon as we are strong enough to defeat capitalism as a whole, we shall take it by the scruff of its neck.’ ” The same directive explained that a false distinction is sometimes drawn between “just” and “unjust wars”: “If a particular country is the first to attack, its war is considered an unjust one, whereas if a country is the victim of attack and merely defends itself, its war must be considered a just one. The conclusion drawn is that the Red army is supposed to wage only defensive war: this is to forget that any war waged by the Soviet Union will be a just one.”
It could not be put more clearly
THE FACE OF THE WAR GOD
Hitler too had decided to make the first move. Knowing that Stalin was planning an offensive and that he discounted the possibility of a German attack, Hitler made an insane decision. In fact, he had no alternative. Stalin might attack tomorrow himself. Counting on the weakness of Stalin’s army, and on the advantage of surprise, Hitler believed that he would win with lightning speed. For only a successful blitzkrieg could save him.
Stalin, meanwhile, still did not believe that Hitler would make such a mad move. Convinced that time was on his side, he went on calmly making ready for his turnaround—the sudden blow of which his generals had written in their “reflections.” But for all his certainty, he grew nervous as the fateful day approached. There were too many reports of German troop movements near the frontier.
He sent up a trial balloon. On July 14 a press release from the official news agency, Tass, stated: “the rumors which have appeared in the British and not only the British press that war between the USSR and Germany is imminent are clumsy propaganda put out by forces hostile to the USSR and Germany.” He waited, but there was no response from Hitler. Meanwhile, members of the German embassy staff were going home. This was the normal leave period, but they seemed to be departing en masse. Again he reviewed the situation, and again he concluded that Hitler could not attack at that time. Summer would soon be ending, and the German army was not dressed for winter. Stalin saw only one explanation: Hitler is obviously scaremongering. Perhaps he’s afraid himself. Perhaps he’s looking for guarantees. Good, let’s give him some, let’s pull back some of our divisions. Then move them up again. His well-drilled high command dared not contradict him. Molotov knew when to argue with the Boss (or rather when he wanted to be argued with). Molotov’s job now was the same as that of the Soviet ambassador in Germany, Dekanozov, and all the other lickspittles—to confirm the Boss’s own thinking.
On June 18 he was passed reports from agents in Germany about the movement of German fighter planes and the appointment of future heads for the Russian territories that would be occupied. His response: “You can tell your sources to go to … !”
It was, however, too much for the Commissar for Defense. Chadayev has quoted Timoshenko as saying in conference that “Germany’s preparations obviously mean that war will begin this year, and soon.” He was told curtly, “Don’t try to frighten us, Hitlerite Germany is simply trying to provoke us.”
While all this was happening, the Boss, as usual, took a hand in everything. A scientific expedition was at work on Uzbekistan. Mikhail Gerasimov, an expert in reconstructing human faces to fit skulls, had suggested opening the sepulchre of Tamerlane, and Stalin had agreed. He wanted to see the great conqueror’s face.
Tamerlane was entombed in Samarkand, in the Guri Emir Mausoleum. When the expedition first started work, the Boss had been told about a local tradition that “the War God’s sleep must not be disturbed.” If it was, disaster would follow; Tamerlane would return on the third day, bringing war. So said the old men in the Samarkand baza
ar. But after seeing Russian saints tipped out of their coffins, churches blown up, and priests murdered, the Boss must have just smiled. He himself was an Eastern god. What were Tamerlane’s bones to him! On the night of June 19–20, 1941, the Guri Emir Mausoleum was floodlit. A news crew was there to film the opening of the tomb. A gigantic marble slab was lifted from it. In the dark recesses of the marble sarcophagus stood a black coffin under a rotting cloth-of-gold baldachin. Tamerlane had died a long way from Samarkand and had been brought back to his burial place in this coffin. An old man who worked in the mausoleum begged them not to open the coffin. They laughed at him. Huge nails were pried from the lid. Gerasimov triumphantly removed Tamerlane’s skull and held it up for the cameraman. The film was rushed to Moscow, and the Boss saw the War God’s skull staring at humankind.
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