Stalin (39 page)

The day after the meeting at the dacha, the establishment of the State Defense Committee was announced in newspapers. The fact that the committee’s membership was limited to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov, and Malenkov did not mean that the rest of the Politburo’s top leadership had lost its influence. Mikoyan and Voznesensky had important jobs keeping the economy running. Zhdanov was focused on the defense of Leningrad. Given the critical nature of wartime supply and evacuation, Kaganovich’s responsibilities as railway commissar were pivotal. In February 1942, Mikoyan, Voznesensky, and Kaganovich also joined the committee.
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The establishment of the State Defense Committee was the first in a series of organizational changes that eventually placed supreme leadership in the Soviet war effort in Stalin’s hands. On 10 July General Command Headquarters, which had been headed by Defense Commissar Timoshenko, was replaced with a Supreme Command Headquarters, headed by Stalin. On 19 July the Politburo passed a resolution making Stalin people’s commissar for defense and, on 8 August, supreme commander.
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The customary order was restored. Stalin was once again the sole leader of both the people and the army, decisive and confident of victory. An important milestone in “Stalin’s return” was his famous radio address on 3 July.

Whereas Molotov had gone to the Central Telegraph Building, next door to the Kremlin, to make his nationally broadcast speech of 22 June, Stalin demanded that radio facilities be set up in the Kremlin itself. The telegraph service’s already overwhelmed technical staff had no choice but to comply. Cables were extended to the Council of People’s Commissars building. Stalin read his address sitting at a little table with microphones and a bottle of Borzhomi mineral water.
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From the very start it was clear that the address would not conform to his usual style. “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and navy! It is to you, my friends, that I speak!”
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The speech, different from any other in his career, was long talked about and remembered. Glued to their radios or studying his words in the newspaper, people sought an answer to the most pressing questions: What did the future hold? When would the war be over? Stalin offered little cause for comfort. While greatly exaggerating German losses (“The enemy’s best divisions and the best units of its aviation have been smashed”), he was forced to acknowledge that “This is a matter of … the life and death of the Soviet state, the life and death of the peoples of the USSR.” Ominously, he called on the people to recognize “the full depth of danger that threatens our country,” to organize a partisan struggle in German-occupied territories, to create militia detachments, and to remove or destroy all material resources from territories under threat from the enemy. He used two difficult-to-translate words in characterizing the war:
vsenarodny
(of all the peoples) and
otechestvenny
(domestic or “of the fatherland,” but often translated as “patriotic” in the context of World War II). Anyone listening could draw only one conclusion: the war would be long and hard.

The people and especially the army deserved some explanation for what had gone wrong. They deserved scapegoats, and the search did not take long. The breakdown of Soviet defenses was attributed to missteps under the leadership of General Dmitry Pavlov, commander of the Western Front. He and many of his subordinates were tried and shot. The orders, signed by Stalin, were widely circulated within the army.
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According to Soviet General Staff statistics, between the start of the war and 1 January 1942, 4.5 million members of the Red Army and Navy were killed, wounded, or captured. Of this total, 2.3 million were listed as missing in action or taken prisoner.
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These estimates were probably low. Nevertheless, they show that much of the army that was thrust into battle on 22 June 1941, including a large number of newly formed units, was completely wiped out. The causes of this catastrophe need further study. Clearly they included insufficient war readiness, the massive casualties resulting from the enemy’s use of surprise, and the military and organizational advantages of the Wehrmacht. Despite countless examples of heroism and steadfastness, the Red Army was demoralized. Another important factor was incompetence on the part of the military and political leadership.

Lacking a firm grasp of the situation, Moscow was often too slow in its decision making, and many of its decisions were bad. The links in the chain of command, the General Staff especially, were not fully functional, and it took a long time to establish reliable communication with the forces in the field. “Even the Chinese and Persian armies,” Stalin scolded his subordinates, “understand the importance of communication when it comes to managing an army. Are we really worse than the Persians and the Chinese? How can you manage units without communications? … We can’t stand for this absurdity, this disgrace, any longer.”
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During the early stages of the war, Stalin spent a great deal of time in a special room set up next to his Kremlin office conducting conferences via telegraph. This was a cumbersome means of communication, the main beneficiaries of which are the historians who today have access to tapes of the conversations. The army and the rear were largely managed using plenipotentiary “helpers.” These plenipotentiaries gathered information for Stalin and, with varying degrees of success, helped him deal with the never-ending bottlenecks plaguing transport, industry, and the overall war effort. This system, apparently unavoidable during this time of defeat and disorganization, was extremely inefficient.

Stalin, who had no experience commanding a modern army, did the best he could, relying largely on common sense rather than military science. On 27 August 1941 he sent the Leningrad leadership the following advice on organizing the city’s defenses: “Position a KV tank an average of every kilometer, in some places every 2 kilometers and in some every 500 meters, depending on the terrain. Behind these tanks or between them position other less powerful tanks and armored vehicles. Behind this line of tanks, in back of it, place heavier artillery. Infantry divisions will be immediately behind the tanks, using the tanks not only as a strike force, but also as a shield.”
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To achieve this plan, Stalin was prepared to allocate 100–120 KV tanks, the newest and best heavy tanks in the Soviet arsenal, a mighty force in the right hands.

Stalin’s involvement in tactical actions, sometimes even at the platoon level, shows just how disorganized the military command was.
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The first months of the war offered many painful lessons in the futility of uncoordinated counterattacks. Poorly planned, they often led to huge losses and achieved little. The Red Army’s leaders had scant knowledge of how to thwart an enemy advance or minimize casualties through the use of tactical retreats to positions prepared in advance. Stalin insisted on holding every inch of ground, no matter the cost. Retreat was not allowed until it was too late. The result was the encirclement of Soviet armies and their gradual destruction, one unit at a time.

Seeing battlefield failures left and right often heightened Stalin’s tendency to suspect treachery. Playing up to his suspicions, on 19 August 1941 Georgy Zhukov, then commanding the Reserve Front, sent Stalin the following report: “I believe that the enemy knows our entire defensive system very well, all the operational-strategic alignments of our forces, and knows what capabilities we have at hand. It seems that the enemy has its own people among our very senior officials with immediate knowledge of the overall situation.”
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Ten days later, Stalin himself wrote to Molotov, who was then in Leningrad: “Does it seem to you that someone is intentionally paving the way for the Germans?”
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This paranoia most likely had no serious consequences. Stalin, well aware of how dangerous it would be to start a witch hunt among Soviet generals in the midst of war, limited himself to accusations of cowardice. Few generals were arrested. More often they were deprived of their command or demoted and reassigned.

Intangibles such as patriotic readiness for self-sacrifice and determination to defend the motherland could partly compensate for a shortage of weaponry, battlefield experience, and tactical skill. Heroism and self-sacrifice by Soviet soldiers existed side by side with the demoralization brought on by the overwhelming force of the German assault, and Stalin received abundant evidence of both.
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He believed in the importance of intangibles and attributed the failures of the Red Army to panic, the wholesale surrender of Soviet units, mass desertions, and the absence of a firm command. With shrinking faith in the army’s ability to consolidate its own ranks, when it came time to ensure that his commanders absorbed his own ideas about leadership and discipline, he resorted to tried-and-true methods. In July 1941 he resurrected the institution of the military commissar, loyal and eagle-eyed party representatives who would be assigned to work side by side with every commander at every level.
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The commissars were given vast powers, to be exercised largely through “special” (secret police) departments within the army. According to official statistics, between the outbreak of war and 10 October 1941, 10,201 members of the Red Army were shot, 3,321 of them in front of their units.
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Even these numbers hardly tell the full story of repression at and around the front lines.

To ensure that the troops fought as hard as they could, Stalin made it not only shameful but also illegal to be taken prisoner. The provisions making capture by the enemy a crime were contained in the notorious Order No. 270, issued by Supreme Command Headquarters on 16 August 1941. Judging by its style, the order was mostly (if not solely) written by Stalin. It required that those taken prisoner be killed “by any means, either from the ground or from the air.” The families of commanders who joined the ranks of “malicious deserters” were to be arrested. Families of soldiers who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner were deprived of their government pensions. The order was read out loud in every unit of the army.
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Treating capture as treasonous doomed former Soviet prisoners of war to discrimination long after the war concluded.

Using a combination of threats and promises of reinforcements, Stalin tried to instill in his military the will to be unyielding. On 11 July 1941, when the Germans had reached the outskirts of Kiev, Stalin sent Ukrainian party secretary Khrushchev a telegram that read: “I warn you that if you take even one step toward pulling your troops back to the left bank of the Dnieper and fail to defend the fortified districts on the right bank of the Dnieper, you will all face brutal retribution as cowards and deserters.”
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On 16 July he signed a State Defense Committee order to defend Smolensk to the last. Any thought of surrendering the city was “criminal, bordering on outright treason against the Motherland.”
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Throughout the Battle of Smolensk, which lasted until September, the surrounded Red Army put up a dogged fight, delaying the German advance across the Central Front to Moscow. Hitler’s decision to move a sizable portion of his forces from the Central Front to Ukraine and Leningrad also helped slow the Nazi advance toward the capital. Throughout July and August Stalin continued to hope that Soviet forces would hold the line. Beyond it stood their three major capitals: Leningrad to the north, Moscow in the center, and Kiev to the south. Time was working against the Germans. Fall was coming, with its slushy roads, and the first frosts would not be far behind.

Demonstrating that the Red Army could put up a good fight was important for Stalin’s negotiations with his Western allies, Great Britain and the United States. Right after the German invasion, the leaders of these countries expressed full support for the Soviet people in their fight against the Nazis. Then began the complicated process of working out relations and holding talks about what form support would take. President Roosevelt sent his adviser, Harry Hopkins, to Moscow to obtain firsthand information. Stalin gave Hopkins an exceptionally warm welcome and tried to demonstrate decisiveness and confidence of victory. When their talks were interrupted by an air raid, the Soviet leader brought Hopkins in his own car to the bomb shelter at metro station Kirovskaia, where they were met by bodyguards and Internal Affairs Commissar Beria. One Soviet official left a description of the scene:

[Beria] took Stalin by the arm and tried to bring him down below, making some remark about danger. Stalin responded curtly and rudely, which is how he always spoke when he was irritated: “Get away from me, coward!” … Stalin stood in the middle of the dark courtyard and looked into the black sky at the German plane in the searchlight’s cross beams. Hopkins stood next to him, also watching. Then something happened that did not happen very often during night raids. The German Junker started to fall uncontrollably from the sky—it must have been hit. And just then the anti-aircraft artillery hit a second plane. Stalin said, and the interpreter told Hopkins:

“That’s what will happen to everyone who comes to us with a sword. And anyone who comes in the name of the good will be welcomed as a dear guest.”

He took the American by the arm and led him below.

In such demonstrations of steadfastness, together with the fierce fight put up by the Red Army, the Western allies saw something for which they were ardently hoping: Hitler’s blitzkrieg was being impeded. They could and should help the Russians. On 29 September through 1 October 1941, a conference of the three powers—the USSR, Great Britain, and the United States—was held in Moscow. Britain’s minister of supply, Lord Beaver-brook, led the British delegation, and Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the USSR, acted as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. On the Soviet side, negotiations were conducted by Stalin and Molotov. The Moscow Conference concluded with important specific agreements on assisting the Soviet war effort. The scope of assistance gradually grew. Western tanks and planes supplied through Lend-Lease made a significant contribution along the Soviet-German front. By war’s end, the Red Army was mostly driving American-made trucks. Lend-Lease also played a crucial role in supplying communications equipment, locomotives, railcars, and food to the Soviet Union. “If not for Lend-Lease, victory would have been greatly hindered,” Stalin told Roosevelt during their meeting in Crimea in February 1945.
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