What Stalin Knew (53 page)

German deception or disinformation program for his refusal to accept

intelligence from his own services that reflected German intentions to

invade and for his insistence that no actions be undertaken by his military

professionals that might provoke the Germans to attack. There can be no

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CONCLUSION

doubt that the German deception effort, led by Hitler himself, was highly

effective. Not only did it mislead Soviet intelligence and diplomacy, but

Hitler appears to have personally reassured Stalin that Great Britain, not

the Soviet Union, was Germany’s principal enemy. While Stalin shared

some of these assurances with his top military leaders, he apparently never

revealed precise details or the extent to which he believed, and indeed

acted on, them in matters vital to his country’s defense. How to explain his

incredible toleration of the yearlong Luftwaffe reconnaissance program

that doomed his air forces to destruction on June 22, 1941, and left his

unprotected troops open to murderous strafing? Or his naïve belief that

the attacks that came at dawn that morning were the work of recalcitrant

Wehrmacht generals acting against Hitler’s wishes? Had Stalin discussed

these questions frankly with his top military leaders, they might have been

able to disabuse him of some of his convictions. But this was not Stalin’s

style. He was convinced that he possessed the only correct information on

German intentions, and he kept it to himself, saying only to his top leaders:

‘‘I have other reports.’’

Leaving aside Stalin’s poor judgment or naïveté in trusting Hitler, an

important reason for the success of German deception lay in the system

Stalin had created. The weight of evidence furnished by the Soviet intel-

ligence and security services and confirmed by the observations of agents

in the railroads and of the border troops was overwhelming. In fact, the

only rational explanation for this information—the massing of bridging

equipment, the equipping of locomotives with devices enabling them to

adapt to the Russian railroad track gauge, the instructions to Abwehr

agents to collect samples of Soviet fuel and lubricants—was the prospect of

an imminent German invasion. If Stalin did not accept this information,

however, it simply could not be acted on. He alone was the final arbiter of

what constituted valid intelligence. Few professional officers would risk

confronting Stalin. The memory of the terror of the 1930s was too recent

and the military leadership at the very top was too aware of the new wave of

arrests taking place during April, May, and June 1941. On the other hand,

individuals such as Berlin military attaché Tupikov and Beria’s friend Am-

bassador Dekanozov persisted in reporting bad news, even knowing Sta-

lin’s likely reaction.

Another aspect of Stalin’s treatment of intelligence was his criteria for

selection of personnel. Over the years he preferred men he could dominate

and rely on to do his bidding not only in intelligence but in the military, the

government, and the economy. Stalin’s preference for keeping around him

CONCLUSION

249

men such as Voroshilov, who feared him and would always defer to him,

was well known. Apologists for the foreign intelligence service of state

security have complained that the service never had an analytic capability.

Its sole function was the collection and dissemination of raw reports to the

leadership. But in its Information Department, Soviet military intelligence

had an analytic component that for some years produced analyses based

on a variety of sources ranging from its own and state security agent re-

porting to overt information derived from foreign periodicals. In July 1940

Stalin fired Ivan I. Proskurov as head of military intelligence. Proskurov’s

independent outlook and determination to tell the truth as he saw it never

endeared him to Stalin. To replace him, Stalin brought in a political gen-

eral, Filipp I. Golikov, who was appointed to ensure that Information De-

partment reports and summaries faithfully mirrored Stalin’s convictions.

Up until the invasion, Golikov manipulated available information in such

a way as to make it appear that the Wehrmacht was still deploying its

forces to attack the British Isles. Golikov himself said in a conversation

with Viktor Anfilov in 1965: ‘‘I admit I distorted intelligence to please Stalin

because I feared him.’’3

Obviously, then, it was Stalin’s insistence on accepting German decep-

tion as truth, his rejection of valid intelligence from his own services, and

his failure to recognize that the warnings from Western powers, them-

selves threatened by Hitler’s aggressiveness, were both accurate and well

intentioned, that led to the debacle of the summer of 1941. Nevertheless,

one might wonder how it was that the Red Army, on whom the Soviet

people had always counted to repel aggression, collapsed so quickly. There

were many reasons: the superiority of the seasoned German forces arrayed

against them, their lack of training, adequate transport, and effective logis-

tics. Overshadowing and aggravating these shortcomings was the uncer-

tainty caused among the military by public pronouncements such as the

June 14, 1941, TASS communiqué that there was no danger of war. Even

more debilitating was the fear and distrust that pervaded Red Army ranks

at all levels. The root cause of this feat was the wave of repression that

engulfed the army in 1937–38, when thousands of experienced officers

perished as enemies of the people.

Beyond Stalin was the system he created. Defenders of his actions in

the purges claim that it was necessary to rid the army of a potential fifth

column. More likely they were motivated by his determination to elimi-

nate anyone who opposed him or might oppose him. As the numbers of

officers lost in this modern inquisition mounted, Stalin drew on the party

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CONCLUSION

for replacements, however green, and urged that junior officers be ad-

vanced regardless of their degree of experience. What he and many of his

closest associates failed to understand was how the purges affected the

spirits of those who survived. The atmosphere of terror paralyzed the will

of even the best of those still serving and affected their performance on the

summer’s battlefields. Stalin seemed as indifferent to this aspect of the

earlier purges as he was to the effect of those conducted during the months

of April, May, and June 1941.4

These later arrests reveal much about Stalin’s modus operandi. Many

of the victims were from the defense industry or from the technical side of

the air forces. They were primarily scapegoats for problems in aviation,

and their purging fit the pattern Stalin had established years earlier to

blame others for problems caused by the furious pace imposed by his

industrialization programs. Most of the other victims, several of whom he

had known well professionally and had personally promoted, were active

air force officers. Many of them had also served in the Spanish civil war.

Their service abroad and their independent ways made them anathema to

Stalin. Moreover, they knew too much about Stalin’s failure to deal with

the German menace. He did not, however, move quickly to eliminate them

as a group. His approach resembled that of a skillful deep-sea fisherman

who, after his strike, plays out sufficient line to persuade his prey that it is

free, continuing until he decides it is time to end the game. So Stalin often

decided to rid himself of an individual but allowed that person to be ap-

pointed to an important position first; then, when circumstances seemed

right, he pulled the line in, that is, had the person arrested. All this under

circumstances that did not point to him as the instigator. Thus, he waited

until Proskurov arrived at his new assignment north of Leningrad to have

him arrested and returned to Moscow arrest even though hostilities with

Finland had just begun in earnest. It was a matter of complete indifference

to Stalin that he had deprived the Northern Front of the one who had met

Germans in air combat in Spain and knew the Finnish theater intimately.

Stalin’s priorities were to get rid of men like Proskurov. What Stalin knew

was that they knew too much.

This record of Stalin’s actions in the prewar period may seem yet an-

other attack on the man and his record. There is no need for such an attack

here: Martin Amis, Miklos Kun, and others have recently undertaken that

task in greater depth and detail.5 The blame for the catastrophe of 1941

falls not only on Stalin but on the system of government by fear that he

created over the years. If action had to be taken on a given problem, it was

CONCLUSION

251

Stalin who had to intervene, threatening punishment. But when, in 1941,

collective farms did not deliver their quotas of serviceable trucks and trac-

tors to newly mobilized Red Army units and tank factories failed to pro-

duce their quotas of new T-34 tanks, Stalin’s threats were to no avail. Fear

had its limits, as Stalin, mesmerized by Hitler’s deceptive tactics, seemed

unable to act.

The late Oleg Suvenirov in the conclusion to his epochal work,
Trag-

edia RKKA, 1937–1938,
asks why no one was punished for committing the

murders of the purges. He points out that the huge losses of 1941–42 were

the direct result of the purges. True, but the struggle to avoid any serious

accounting for those losses and for the mindless terror unleashed by Stalin

continues. On May 29, 2000, for example, the Military Collegium of the

Supreme Court of the Russian Federation decided that a number of Beria’s

henchmen were not guilty of treason. As a result, the death sentences and

confiscation of property pronounced on Pavel Meshik, former interior

minister of the Ukrainian SSR; Vladimir Dekanozov, the minister of inter-

nal affairs of the Georgian SSR; and Lev Vlodzimirsky, the vicious head of

the USSR MVD Investigative Unit for Especially Important Cases were

lifted. They were found guilty only of having exceeded their authority. This

judicial action and the many articles since then by veterans of the security

organs reflect efforts by veterans of the Soviet punitive organs, as well as

recent retirees from the Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence

of the Russian Federation, to demonstrate that they and their predecessors

acted only for the good of Soviet security. They consider this Soviet period

a normal, albeit blemished, era of Russian history that should be honored.

What of the future? The ‘‘victory’’ of President Putin in the 2004 elec-

tions signaled a victory for those who would prefer to forget the crimes of

the past. Moreover, Putin’s reliance on former KGB colleagues to staff key

posts in his government and his actions to bring important media entities

such as television under his control suggest a return to the methods of

yesteryear. An example of the increasingly authoritarian methods favored

by Putin and his associates is the failure of Russian authorities to clarify

the history of the immediate prewar period through the release of perti-

nent archival material. This is a scandal and a disservice to the Russian

people. The Russian government should make the truth available openly

and directly. Historians call on it to do so.

A P P E N D I X

∞

Organization and Functions

of Soviet Military

Intelligence

The two operational departments of Soviet mili-

tary intelligence, East and West, and their subordinate sections responsible for

individual countries, oversaw and directed the work of the RU residencies (
rezi-

dentura
) abroad. Among the important residencies in the East were Tokyo and

Shanghai. There were, naturally, many more under the West Department—for

example, Washington, New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. The officers heading

these components had to become familiar with the military, political, and eco-

nomic situation in the countries concerned. They also had to know the opera-

tional environment facing the residencies, that is, the effectiveness of indigenous

counterintelligence, as well as the backgrounds and degree of access to informa-

tion of agent sources. The ‘‘legal’’ residencies were located within Soviet missions

and consisted of the military and air attachés, plus other officers under various

civilian covers such as TASS, the trade delegation, and components of the embas-

sies.1 The attachés exploited their official positions to elicit information from

other attachés, officials of the host country, and influential citizens. Officers un-

der other legal cover controlled agent sources who were fully aware of their

affiliation with Soviet intelligence. They also handled ‘‘illegal’’ residents, who