Stalin (40 page)

The USSR’s new allies were clearly worried about the grim situation along the Soviet-German front. Not long before the Moscow Conference, disaster had struck the Southwestern Front, where a ferocious battle was being waged over Kiev. According to Zhukov, in late July he had informed Stalin of the difficult situation and proposed abandoning Kiev and focusing on fortifying the eastern bank of the Dnieper to prevent the Germans from breaking through the Southwestern Front’s right flank. Stalin responded with a gruff refusal, removed Zhukov as chief of the General Staff, and sent him to the Western Front.
⁵⁶
The situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate. In early August the Sixth and Twelfth Armies—approximately 130,000 men—found themselves completely encircled by the Germans outside Uman.
⁵⁷
On 8 August, after an advance by German troops, Stalin summoned the commander of the Southwestern Front, General Mikhail Kirponos, to confer with him via telegraph. He began the meeting in his usual manipulative manner, attributing to Kirponos intentions he had not openly expressed but that might be expected. “We have received information that the front has decided to surrender Kiev to the enemy with a light heart supposedly due to a shortage of units capable of holding Kiev. Is that true?” Kirponos assured Stalin: “You have been misinformed. The Front’s Military Council and I are taking every measure to prevent Kiev from surrendering under any circumstances.”
⁵⁸
Stalin ordered him to stand firm and promised help in a few weeks.

It was obvious that the Soviet armies in the vicinity of Kiev were in danger of being encircled. In early September, the Southwestern Command, with the support of the General Staff in Moscow, proposed that forces be urgently pulled back. Stalin categorically refused. “Just the mention of the harsh necessity of relinquishing Kiev was enough to throw Stalin into a rage and cause him to momentarily lose his composure,” Aleksandr Vasilevsky wrote in his memoirs.
⁵⁹
On 14–15 September, the Germans closed the ring, encircling some 452,700 Soviet troops east of Kiev,
⁶⁰
the worst defeat of the war thus far. On 20 September, Kirponos and the rest of the Southwestern Command were killed in combat. The opportunity to surrender Kiev but preserve the army had been lost. The destruction of this huge force further strengthened the Germans’ strategic advantage.

Historians of every stripe, even those favorably disposed toward Stalin, place most of the blame for this catastrophe on his shoulders. Zhukov claims that Stalin implicitly acknowledged his own guilt. When putting Zhukov in charge of the Leningrad Front in September 1941, Stalin brought up the general’s warning about the threat to the Southwestern Front and said, “Your report to me back then was accurate, but I did not understand it quite correctly.”
⁶¹

Defeat in Ukraine heightened the danger to Leningrad. By 8 September the city was completely surrounded. The following day the Germans launched a new offensive that took the front line to its doorstep. On 11 September Zhukov replaced Voroshilov as commander of the Leningrad Front.
⁶²
As Zhukov later told the writer Konstantin Simonov, Stalin considered the fall of Leningrad inevitable.
⁶³
On 13 September the
vozhd
received the commissar of the navy, Nikolai Kuznetsov, in his Kremlin office, where they discussed scuttling the ships docked in Leningrad if the city was taken. That very day Stalin approved a plan to destroy the fleet.
⁶⁴
Over the next two weeks, fighting in the Leningrad suburbs became particularly brutal. As the Germans fiercely battled toward the city, Soviet soldiers, in a show of mass heroism, fought tooth and nail to repel their attacks. By the end of September the advance came to a halt. The Leningrad Blockade, one of the most horrific chapters in World War II—and one of the most astounding testaments to the fortitude of the Soviet people—began. Over the course of the blockade, hundreds of thousands of civilians died of hunger or German shelling.

Hitler’s hopes of taking Moscow before winter were revived by the destruction of a huge Soviet force in Ukraine, and he reassigned a sizable part of the German Army to the Moscow offensive. On 7 October most of the Red Army’s Western and Reserve Fronts were encircled in the vicinity of Vyazma, and on 9 October the Bryansk Front was also surrounded. The road to Moscow had been cleared. The fighter pilot Aleksandr Golovanov describes how he was summoned to Stalin’s office around this time. He found the
vozhd
alone, sitting silently in his chair with some untouched food before him.

I had never seen Stalin like this. The silence was oppressive.

“A great misfortune, a great sorrow has befallen us,” I finally heard Stalin’s quiet but distinct voice say. “The German has broken through our defenses outside Vyazma.…”

After a pause, either asking me or talking to himself, Stalin said just as quietly:

“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?! …”

He then raised his head and looked at me. Never before or after have I seen a human face express such horrible emotional anguish. We had met and spoken just two days before, but in those two days he had grown extremely haggard.

According to Zhukov, Stalin was suffering from influenza at the time, but staying in bed was not an option. He continued to work, overseeing defensive preparations and the redeployment of all possible reserves to the outskirts of Moscow. As part of this effort, Zhukov was called from the Leningrad Front and put in command of the defense of Moscow. On 8 October Stalin signed a State Defense Committee order to prepare to destroy 1,119 plants and factories in the city and oblast of Moscow.
⁶⁶
On 14 October the Germans captured Rzhev and Kalinin. They were just kilometers from Moscow.

As Mikoyan described it, at nine in the morning on 15 October, members of the top Soviet leadership gathered (Mikoyan mentions Molotov, Malenkov, Voznesensky, Shcherbakov, and Kaganovich). Stalin informed the group that the Germans might soon breach Moscow’s defenses and proposed evacuating foreign diplomatic missions and government offices. According to Mikoyan, Stalin did not want Moscow to be surrendered, even if that meant fighting within the city until reserves capable of expelling the Germans arrived. He himself would remain in the capital as long as possible. At the conclusion of discussions, Stalin signed a State Defense Committee order dated 15 October,
⁶⁷
stating that “Com. Stalin will be evacuated tomorrow or later, depending on the circumstances.”
⁶⁸
Provisions were made. According to Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who was among a small group of General Staff members who remained with Stalin, planes were readied for a last-minute evacuation.
⁶⁹

The decision to evacuate Moscow prompted a brief and frantic effort to destroy or pack up files, followed by a mass exodus, primarily by party and government officials, of which there was no shortage in the capital. Even after the evacuation, “utter chaos reigned” in the Central Committee building: “The locks on many desks and the desks themselves were forced open, and forms and every sort of correspondence were scattered all over the place, including classified papers.… Top secret documents that had been brought to the boiler room to be burned were left in piles, unburned.”
⁷⁰
In the confusion, many officials abandoned the offices and enterprises with which they had been entrusted in order to save themselves, their families, and their property. A line of official vehicles snaked out of the city. There were many cases of theft of government property and valuables. According to official statistics, on 16 and 17 October more than a thousand of Moscow’s Communist Party members destroyed their membership documents.
⁷¹
The flight of government and party officials in combination with rampant rumors provoked a general panic that grew into unrest. According to documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts, this unrest lasted for several days and fell into three main categories. First was the looting of stores and warehouses, especially those stocked with liquor, often accompanied by orgies of drunkenness. Second were attacks, often involving theft, on cars leaving Moscow filled with evacuees and their property. Third were spontaneous protests at factories and plants, including defense production facilities, by workers who had not been paid their promised wages and were upset by rumors that their places of employment were about to be destroyed. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, in many cases workers prevented the removal of equipment and demanded that the factories be cleared of the explosives that had been put in place to destroy them.
⁷²

Most of the top leadership did not leave Moscow on 15 October, as initially planned, and on the following day Stalin summoned a number of his associates to his apartment. Aviation industry commissar Aleksei Shakhurin, who was the first to arrive, describes this meeting in his memoirs. The Kremlin, he writes, looked deserted. The anteroom into Stalin’s apartment was open, and he found the
vozhd
smoking and silently pacing the dining room. There were signs of evacuation preparations, such as empty bookshelves. Stalin was wearing his usual jacket and pants, which were tucked into boots whose creases were riddled with holes. Noticing Shakhurin’s surprise on seeing such boots, Stalin explained that his other footwear had already been removed. Soon Molotov, Malenkov, Shcherbakov, and the others arrived. Stalin did not invite anyone to sit down. Pacing back and forth he asked everyone who arrived the same question: “How are things in Moscow?” Shakhurin reported that at one factory not all the workers had received their pay, that the streetcars and metro were not running, that bakeries and other stores were closed, and that instances of looting had been observed. Stalin responded with the following orders: fly in money using airplanes and fix the situation with public transportation and stores. He tried to calm himself and his comrades: “Well, it’s not too bad. I thought it would be worse.”
⁷³
Over the next few days the situation in Moscow really did stabilize, largely because the mass detention and arrest of “suspicious elements” began after a state of siege was declared on 20 October.
⁷⁴

Stalin’s comment that he had expected worse disorder in Moscow is consistent with his way of thinking. He was undoubtedly worried about the possibility of disturbances. The danger that conflict with a foreign enemy could be used to start a civil war—a formula used by the Bolsheviks in 1917—greatly affected Stalin’s political decision making in the late 1930s. The catastrophic start of the war could only have revived such fears. Yet anti-government and defeatist tendencies did not reach a critical level in the Soviet rear, in large part because of the secret police system put in place before the war. After 22 June 1941 this system was not relaxed; it became, if anything, more ruthless. Nevertheless it would be wrong to attribute political stability solely to repression. A blend of patriotism, growing hatred of the Nazis, a sense of duty, and a tradition of subservience led people to unite in the name of victory. The few large-scale disturbances about which historians have learned more from recently opened archives were mainly caused by the government’s panicked actions and a sense of defenselessness on the part of the population.

While Moscow offers some of the most dramatic examples of unrest, there were others. One well-documented case is the disorder that broke out in Ivanovo Oblast, northeast of Moscow. As the Germans approached, plans were being made to evacuate local textile mills. Rumors spread that the mills would be blown up, that food supplies were being trucked out, and that party and government officials were fleeing the area. Textile workers, fearing that they would be left to starvation and slaughter, erupted in spontaneous uprisings on 18–20 October. They tried to prevent the removal of equipment and beat some plant managers and party activists. Cries could be heard from the crowds: “They’ll take our equipment and leave us without work”; “All the big shots have fled the city and we’ve been left on our own”; “Makes no difference to us if we work for Hitler or Stalin.”
⁷⁵
A combination of persuasion and arrests eventually restored calm. Furthermore, the situation at the front was improving, and it was no longer necessary to evacuate Ivanovo’s textile plants.

By late October, Soviet troops had halted the enemy advance in the Central Direction. In addition to determined fighting by the Red Army, which suffered huge losses, the exhaustion of German troops and the mud and slush of autumn helped bog down the invasion. Urgent measures were now needed to prevent renewed Wehrmacht attacks on Moscow. Stalin was very involved in improving the capital’s defenses, forming new fighting units, and overseeing the production of military hardware, especially tanks and aircraft. In many cases he turned his Kremlin office into a sort of master control center for dealing with logistical questions and overseeing cooperation among enterprises.

He also remained personally involved in the minute planning of combat operations. As in previous months, he closely followed the situation at the front, demanded thorough accounts of operations, and issued detailed orders in a broad array of areas. He was clearly eager to go on the offensive, whether or not the time or resources were available, in the hope that unexpected attacks would put pressure on an enemy that had spread itself thin across a huge front. His commanders did not always agree. In November Zhukov, now commanding the Western Front, objected to one such plan. Stalin demanded that counterstrikes immediately be launched in the areas of Volokolamsk and Serpukhov to disrupt German preparations for offensive action. Zhukov tried to explain that he simply lacked the forces to prepare both a defense and an attack. Stalin brought the argument to a close: “Consider the question of a counterstrike to be settled. Submit your plan this evening.” He then immediately called a member of the Western Front’s military council, Bulganin, and threatened: “You and Zhukov have gotten pretty full of yourselves. But even you can be called to account!”
⁷⁶
The hastily organized offensives achieved little. Zhukov, who was trying to maintain a reserve force capable of dealing with a new German offensive, was probably right.