What Stalin Knew (48 page)

ond Air Fleet, the troops of the Western Front no longer constituted an

effective force.

Minsk fell on June 28, and on June 30 Stalin relieved Pavlov. He was

later arrested and charged with responsibility for the losses suffered by the

front. By July 7 he was undergoing interrogation. Order No. 378, dated

July 6, 1941, for the arrest of Pavlov had been signed by Boris S. Pavlovsky,

deputy chief of the investigative unit of the Third Directorate (Counterin-

telligence) of the Defense Commissariat, countersigned by Timoshenko,

and sanctioned by USSR prosecutor Bochkov. The order stressed Pavlov’s

membership in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Still later, in approving and sign-

ing Pavlov’s death sentence, Stalin directed that ‘‘all that nonsense about

conspiratorial activity be dropped. . . . Then all fronts should be advised

of this sentence so they will know all defeatist behavior will be punished

mercilessly.’’ (This one statement by Stalin makes it obvious that he not

only knew of the arrests and torture but was aware that the routine charges

of conspiracy were fabrications.)12 Pavlov was replaced briefly by An-

drei I. Yeremenko, then by Timoshenko, with Mekhlis as the member of

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223

the front’s Military Council. One of Timoshenko’s first acts was to arrest

other members of the front command as responsible for the catastrophe in

Belorussia.13

One cause of the Western Front’s calamitous defeat was the weakness

of the Northwestern Front, which was formed from the Baltic Special

Military District, encompassing the newly acquired Baltic republics. Fac-

ing the Northwestern Front was Ritter von Leeb’s German Army Group

North. It was strengthened by the attachment of the Third Panzer Group

from Army Group Center. The Germans were stronger than the Soviet

Northwestern Front in personnel, artillery, and tanks. The numbers of

aircraft on both sides were even, but the balance was upset by the losses

suffered by the Soviets. In addition, the Soviet commander of the North-

western Front, Fedor I. Kuznetsov, was a passive individual with relatively

little command experience.14 He had replaced Aleksandr D. Loktionov,

who had been arrested on June 19. Earlier, Loktionov had commanded the

Red Army’s air forces and later had become the first commander of the

new Baltic Special Military District.15 A July 8, 1941, report sent to Stalin

by military counterintelligence stated that ‘‘in the first several hours after

attacks by enemy aircraft, Kuznetsov forbade his aircraft to take off and

destroy the adversary. The result was that units of the front air forces were

late in entering combat, by which time a significant portion of the aircraft

had already been destroyed on the ground.’’ The report concluded that ‘‘the

air units of the Northwestern Front air forces are incapable of active com-

bat operations.’’ The delays were probably due to Stalin’s insistence that

Soviet commanders not provoke the Germans. It seems unlikely that they

would have occurred had an experienced officer such as Loktionov re-

mained in command.16

Pavlov was asked under interrogation: ‘‘Who was guilty of allowing the

breakthrough on the Western Front?’’ He replied that ‘‘the basic reason for

the rapid movement of the German troops into our territory was the ob-

vious superiority of the enemy in aviation and tanks. Besides that, Lithua-

nian troops were placed on Kuznetsov’s [Baltic Special Military District]

left flank and they did not want to fight. After the first pressure on the Bal-

tic left flank, the Lithuanian units shot their commanders and ran away.

That gave German tank units the possibility of striking me from Vilnius.’’17

It was not just the Lithuanian units that created problems for the

Northwestern Front. The populations of the entire Baltic area actively

supported the Wehrmacht, showing German troops the locations of Red

Army positions, with the result that these units were battered by Luftwaffe

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A SUMMER OF TORTURE

ground-attack aircraft. Large numbers of the officers and enlisted men of

the Twenty-second Estonian Rifle Corps deserted to the Germans, making

it impossible for commanders to provide accurate reports of losses. Mass

desertions to the enemy were not confined to the Baltic. The Twenty-sixth

Army of the Southwestern Front reported that after two weeks of combat it

had lost nearly 4,000 of its personnel to desertions, chiefly those of western

Ukrainians. Similar problems existed in the Thirtieth Army of the Western

Front, where many of the troops reported as missing were actually de-

serters of Belorussian nationality. In the same time frame, the 325th Divi-

sion of the Tenth Army purged its ranks of 446 persons of Ukrainian,

Belorussian, and Baltic nationalities.18 So much for the advantages gained

by Stalin from the forcible incorporation of these territories into the Soviet

Union. The attitudes of these people were undoubtedly also affected by the

forced removal of thousands of ‘‘anti-Soviet persons’’ from the Baltic re-

publics in the days just before the German invasion.

The Northern Front, formed from the Leningrad Military District, was

relatively calm because the Finns had not yet declared war on the USSR

even though the Germans were using Finnish territory to launch air raids

and conduct intelligence forays into the Soviet Union. When General

Kiril A. Meretskov, who had been designated the General Headquarters

representative to the Northern Front, arrived in Leningrad on the morning

of June 22, the officers who met him looked glum. The reason, they said,

was ‘‘The war’s started.’’ The military district commander was not there to

greet him, nor did he appear at the meeting that afternoon of the Military

Council of the district. Nevertheless, with Meretskov’s help the council

worked out plans for the defense of Leningrad. On June 23 Meretskov was

recalled to Moscow, having been named a consultant to the Stavka, along

with Marshal Kulik, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and others. This assignment

was evidently a pretext to bring Meretskov back to Moscow because on the

evening of June 24 he was arrested in Stalin’s outer office and taken to the

Liubianka.19 Three months later, after a summer of bitter fighting to hold

back the Germans, fighting in which the experienced Meretskov could not

take part, Leningrad came under a siege that would cost the lives of hun-

dreds of thousands of its citizens.

On August 28, 1941, Meretskov wrote to Stalin from his isolation cell

in the interrogation section of Lefortovo prison asking that he be allowed

to serve in any position at the front. Stalin, knowing that he desperately

needed experienced field commanders, pardoned him and released him in

September 1941. He was the only general officer arrested in the purge

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225

operation of April–June 1941 who survived and held important com-

mands during the war.20

The former chief of the air forces, Lieutenant General Pavel V. Rycha-

gov, had been removed from his post by Stalin in April 1941 and sent to the

General Staff Academy. When war broke out he was on leave at a Sochi

sanitarium; he was recalled to Moscow that day. Upon his arrival on

June 24 he was arrested on the basis of an order signed by Bogdan Z.

Kobulov, deputy narkom for state security. The arrest order was not sanc-

tioned by a prosecutor. Rychagov’s wife, Major Maria Petrovna Nester-

enko, herself a well-known aviator, was also arrested.21 Of Nesterenko it

was said that ‘‘being Rychagov’s beloved wife, she would not have been

unaware of his traitorous activities.’’ Rychagov had fought in Spain as a

volunteer pilot and later commanded the Soviet volunteer air group oper-

ating against the Japanese air force in China. Considering the massive

losses in flight personnel on the first day of the war, an officer with Rycha-

gov’s experience would have made a significant contribution to the Soviet

side had he been free to do so.

When the new commander of the air forces of the Northern Front’s

Seventh Army, Ivan I. Proskurov, arrived in Petrozavodsk, capital of the

Karelian ASSR, on June 23, 1941, the situation was relatively quiet. Fin-

land had not yet joined Germany in attacking the USSR. On June 24,

however, Moscow advised the Northern Front that German and Finnish

troops were now deployed on Finnish territory preparatory to attacks on

Leningrad and the capture of Murmansk and Kandalaksha in the north. To

disrupt these plans, on June 25 Moscow ordered air strikes against eigh-

teen enemy airfields in Finland. A total of 487 sorties were flown, resulting

in the destruction of thirty enemy aircraft on the ground and eleven in

aerial combat. The attacks continued the next day. They evidently provided

the pretext Finland needed to announce that a state of war existed between

Finland and the USSR. Finland’s twenty-one divisions would join the Ger-

mans in an attack on Leningrad from the north.22

In this perilous situation, why did People’s Commissar for State Se-

curity Vsevolod N. Merkulov send a telegram to the NKGB of the Karelian

ASSR on June 27 ordering the immediate arrest and movement to Moscow

of Ivan I. Proskurov, commander of the air forces of the Northern Front’s

Seventh Army, Proskurov, whose service in the Spanish civil war made him

one of the few senior air officers with combat experience against the

Germans?23

The arrests of Meretskov and Proskurov were not decided at the last

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minute. They formed part of a much broader operation by Stalin to rid

himself of a number of senior officers whose independence of spirit and

sense of combat brotherhood he could not tolerate. Stalin knew that he

had to remove them as potential future witnesses to his abject policy of

kowtowing to Hitler. Stalin could not abide criticism in any form, lest it

reveal the truth behind his actions, and these were officers who, unlike the

myrmidons with whom he normally surrounded himself, would always

tell it like it was. They were, for the most part, officers who had served in

Spain as advisers or volunteer pilots. Even after their return from Spain,

they would greet one other with ‘‘Saludo, Companero’’ as they passed in

the corridors of the Defense Commissariat.

While the carnage continued on the battle fronts and the Red Army fell

back in disorderly retreat from the Wehrmacht’s attacks, the brutal inter-

rogations of those arrested in the period from April through June 1941 on

suspicion of espionage or anti-Soviet activity went forward. These were

directed by Lev Yemelyanovich Vlodzimirsky, chief of the Investigative

Unit for Especially Important Cases of the NKVD. Responsibility for this

regime of torture did not, however, begin or end with Vlodzimirsky. It

began at the top with Stalin and continued down through the NKVD/

NKGB chain of command.

Vlodzimirsky reported daily to Beria on his progress. Beria in turn

kept Stalin advised. During the first weeks of the war as one battle after

another was lost, Beria would generally be among the last to leave Stalin’s

Kremlin office, allowing him plenty of time to review cases of special inter-

est to Stalin.24 It has become fashionable among some historians to de-

clare that the wave of arrests and vicious interrogations on the very eve of

the war were Beria’s work and that Stalin was not involved. This is not true.

Beria kept Stalin informed on all matters dealing with the fates of arrested

persons. For example, on January 16, 1940, Beria sent Stalin a list of 457

persons, 346 of whom were to be sentenced to be shot. The remainder were

to receive sentences of not less than fifteen years in the GULAG. On Sep-

tember 6, 1940, Stalin received another list from Beria, this one containing

the names of 537 persons, of whom 472 were to be shot and the remainder

sentenced to terms of not less than fifteen years.25 In each case Stalin

would merely note, ‘‘Received from Comrade Beria.’’ This notation indi-

cated approval.

Did Stalin condone the use of physical torture on these men? The

answer to this question can be found in the testimony of scores of individ-

uals who were investigated in the 1937–38 purges. The late O. F. Suvenirov

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227

lists over 140 officers who testified to the physical torture and beatings

they underwent after their arrest. Their testimony and that of many, many

others confirm Khrushchev’s statement at the Twentieth Party Congress

that ‘‘the confessions of many arrested persons accused of hostile activity

were obtained by means of harsh, inhuman torture.’’26

On November 17, 1938, a joint decree of the Council of People’s Com-