Despite the energy put into this buildup, progress was slow. There are well-known examples from the tank and aviation industry. Of the 25,000 tanks in the Soviet arsenal as of June 1941, only 1,500 were of modern design, and only a quarter of Soviet military aircraft was new.
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This is not to say that the remaining tanks and planes were useless. It does, however, show that the job of modernizing the Soviet military was far from complete. The leadership knew this.
Stalin had a much better understanding of the problems plaguing the Soviet military economy than do today’s proponents of the preventive war theory, who focus exclusively on munitions-industry production statistics. The army and munitions industry were part of a huge socioeconomic machine with myriad interdependent parts. There was a limit to how much could be spent on the military buildup, especially as the prewar years coincided with yet another slowdown in the Soviet economy, associated with an imbalance between investment and resources. Such crucial resources as metal and electricity were in short supply, and the diversion of so much investment toward military production meant cutting the already scant resources put toward meeting the basic needs of Soviet citizens. Prices and taxes were rising, most of the population was getting by on a meager ration, and in some rural areas there were signs of famine. In late 1939 a ban was placed on the sale of flour and bread in the countryside. Hungry peasants rushed to cities and towns to buy these items, which were in short supply there too. The leadership in Moscow was inundated with desperate pleas for help. In February 1940, a woman wrote from the Urals, “Joseph Vissarionovich, something really terrifying has begun.… I’ve so wasted away I don’t know what will become of me.” Someone in Stalingrad wrote to the Central Committee that “We don’t have time to sleep anymore. At two in the morning people begin lining up for bread, and by five or six there are already 600–700–1,000 people standing outside the stores.… You might be interested to know what they’re feeding workers in the cafeterias. What they used to give to swine they now give to us.”
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The country’s top leadership was fully aware of the situation. The Politburo made repeated attempts to address the shortages, giving priority to major cities and industrial enterprises. The food crisis exacerbated the problems of employee turnover and absenteeism that had always plagued the Soviet economy. As the country mobilized for war, harsh measures were introduced to combat these problems. On 26 June 1940, as France was succumbing to the Nazis, the USSR enacted a new law lengthening the workday and work week and making it a crime to be late or to leave one’s place of employment without permission. Soviet peasants had lost their freedom of movement long ago. Now factory and office workers lost theirs. In the year between the enactment of this law and the start of war, it was used to convict more than three million people.
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Of them 480,000 served prison terms up to four months.
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The rest, though not imprisoned, were forced to perform compulsory labor for up to six months. The convicted were often allowed to remain at their jobs, but a significant share of their meager pay was deducted, condemning them and their families to hunger.
Such extreme laws and the declining standard of living took a toll on Soviet society, whose suffering only increased Stalin’s deeply ingrained fear of a fifth column. Whereas the purges of the prewar years had been targeted primarily at the western areas recently annexed by the USSR, Stalin now began to worry, and with reason, that people throughout Soviet society could prove disloyal to him in time of war. Too many had suffered at the hand of the government; too many had starved or eked out a meager existence. The propagandistic claims of monolithic unity at both the front and the rear were intended for the people, for foreign enemies, and for gullible posterity. Stalin was not among the gullible.
Soviet propaganda described the Red Army as the people’s own flesh and blood, and it was. Within the Red Army, the unique features and contradictions of the Stalinist system were manifested in concentrated form. Between January 1939 and June 1941 the Soviet armed forces more than doubled in size. This rapid increase came with the same fundamental problem that plagued Stalinist “leaps forward” in general, especially the rapid industrialization of the early 1930s. Ambitious attempts to calculate exactly what equipment—even what entire factories—had to be purchased from the West failed miserably. Young, untrained Soviet workers produced defective products, damaging factory equipment in the process. Stalin’s understanding of the complex interdependence between technical and social progress was expressed in the updating of the slogan “Cadres solve everything!” to “Technology solves everything!” The rapidly growing Red Army needed not only to be armed but also trained. It is difficult to say which was the harder task.
Between 1937 and 1940, the Soviet officer corps grew more than two and a half times. As a result, a sizable proportion of commanders lacked the requisite knowledge and experience. During the war Stalin reproached one of his generals for the quality of army officers: “You in the military in your time ruined the army by sending all sorts of junk into academies and administration.”
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As usual, he was blaming others for problems that were primarily his fault. It was on his initiative that in the 1930s, tens of thousands of commanders, men who would have been capable of serving their country with distinction, were fired, sent to the camps, or shot for political reasons. But the damage to the Red Army was not measured only in numbers. Until the outbreak of war (and to a lesser extent even during it), repression had distorted the decision-making process, including promotions, making it possible for time-serving incompetents, skilled primarily in expressions of loyalty, to make successful careers. It also discouraged a commander’s most important quality—a willingness to take the initiative—and instead encouraged excessive caution. As was well known from anti-wrecking campaigns, repression subverted the authority of those in charge and undermined discipline. The problems of rule breaking and drunkenness that had always plagued the Red Army were magnified.
The Soviet leadership could see that there was trouble within the army. The clearest signal was the Winter War with Finland. The unexpected foiling of the Red Army by an incomparably weaker enemy dealt the Soviet military’s reputation a stunning blow that could not have come at a worse time. After the peace treaty was signed, Stalin conducted a review to determine what had gone wrong. Countless deficiencies in the arming and training of soldiers were discovered, along with problems in the command system. Stalin removed his old friend Kliment Voroshilov from the post of people’s commissar for defense and replaced much of the military’s leadership. These changes brought little improvement. In April 1941, approximately one year after the shake-up, the Politburo looked into accidents in military aviation. It turned out that even in peacetime, an average of two to three planes was lost in accidents every day. Furious, Stalin placed all the blame on the air force leadership.
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On the very eve of war, a new wave of arrests roiled the military command.
Stalin did not allow his focus on the Red Army to distract him from keeping an eye on his adversary’s forces. The ruthless efficiency of the Wehrmacht was extremely alarming. Delegations of Soviet weapons experts who visited German munitions plants under a Soviet-German cooperation agreement returned home with glowing reports. Delegation members were unable to hide how impressed they were and wrote of the huge successes of the German weapons industry. In keeping with the Russian saying “Fear has big eyes,” Soviet intelligence and the military and economic leadership constantly exaggerated the enemy’s strength. In 1940 the new people’s commissar for airplane production, Aleksei Shakhurin, reported to Stalin that Germany’s aviation industry had twice the capacity of its Soviet counterpart. The reports Stalin received from his intelligence agencies significantly exaggerated both the potential of German industry and the size of its armed forces.
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As a result of these overestimates, the enemy looked much more imposing that it actually was.
The sources of Stalin’s prewar anxiety are a huge subject that cannot be fully addressed within the scope of this book. Clearly, he had good reason to fear war with Germany. One way he may have reacted to this fear was with a desire (which many believe he felt) to delay the start of war in order to give the Soviet Union time to strengthen its military capabilities and hope that international events would take a favorable turn. He certainly had reason to hope that war would be delayed. One of the most convincing reasons was the idea that Hitler would not be so foolhardy as to mire his forces on two fronts by engaging the Soviet Union while he had Great Britain and the increasingly active United States threatening his rear. Stalin was not alone in this line of reasoning. Hitler, fully aware of how much sense this theory made, took care to exploit it. Secure in the knowledge that he was preserving the element of surprise, he did indeed take the risky plunge of engaging enemies on two fronts—largely because his enemies saw such a move as an impossibility. Nazi propaganda spread disinformation to perpetuate this mistaken idea. Stalin wound up the victim of his belief in Hitler’s instinct for self-preservation.
A few peripheral factors strengthened Stalin’s faith that Hitler would not hurry to attack the USSR. For one, Soviet-German economic cooperation was thriving. Soviet exports were feeding Germany’s appetite for raw materials. Goods imported into Germany from three different countries traveled across Soviet territory, so war with the USSR would undermine some of Germany’s important economic ties. The intelligence reports reaching Stalin’s desk were contradictory. His predisposition to believe Hitler would not attack soon influenced his intelligence agencies, who preferred to tell Stalin what he wanted to hear. Such a cause-and-effect sequence is hardly unique in world history.
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Stalin’s reaction to a 17 June 1941 intelligence report claiming that an attack was imminent is well known. Just days before the actual invasion, he wrote to the state security commissar, “You can send your ‘source’ from German aviation headquarters back to his f**king mother. This is disinformation, not a ‘source.’”
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Even if Stalin may have been correct in this case, clearly reactions like this frightened intelligence officials and discouraged them from speaking up, rendering them much less effective. It was safer to say what Stalin wanted to hear or be silent, and those in charge of the country’s security and military readiness increasingly opted for safety. Stalin got what he wanted. He alone had the right to an opinion. Everyone waited to see what the dictator had to say, hoping he knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, he did not.
PATIENT NUMBER 1
The summoning of the doctors to the near dacha on the morning of 2 March 1953.
Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov returned to their homes, leaving Stalin on the couch without medical attention. Perhaps out of fear, or perhaps out of unspoken ambivalence toward his recovery, Stalin’s comrades rejected the idea that they were facing a medical emergency. After Malenkov and Beria checked on the
vozhd
and found him sleeping, they proceeded to dismiss what the bodyguards had told them about his symptoms. Had he really had some sort of fit? The bodyguards were not doctors. Their imaginations could have been playing tricks on them. His colleagues probably also remembered that Stalin had recently accused his own doctors of being murderers. Who would take responsibility for calling a doctor (or summoning a murderer, as the
vozhd
might see it) unless he were absolutely sure one was needed? A simple need for emergency medical care was transformed into a multidimensional political problem.
Stalin’s bodyguards spent the remainder of the night in a state of anxiety. No doubt worried that they could be held accountable if Stalin died, they again asked for guidance from above and reported that things did not seem right with the boss. This time the four comrades decided to send a team of doctors to the dacha. Before doing so, however, they convened the Bureau of the Central Committee Presidium
1
so that the summoning of medical luminaries would look like a collective decision by the party leadership. Should Stalin recover, his anger would fall on everyone at once. On the morning of 2 March the doctors arrived at Stalin’s bedside.
The renowned Soviet cardiologist Aleksandr Miasnikov, one of the medical experts summoned to attend Stalin, gives a detailed description of the visit in his memoirs. “The diagnosis,” he wrote, “was clear to us, thank God: hemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain caused by hypertonia and atherosclerosis.”
2
The doctors gave Stalin generous doses of various stimulants but without any real hope of preventing death. From a medical perspective, his condition was no mystery. An autopsy confirmed the initial diagnosis, revealing a large cerebral hemorrhage and severe damage to the cerebral arteries due to atherosclerosis.
3
Stalin had been a sickly old man. He would have turned seventy-five later that year.
In totalitarian regimes, too much depends on the personality of the dictator. From the time he came to power, Stalin’s health was a topic of worldwide interest. During his lifetime there was periodic speculation in the Western press that he was ill or even near death. People in the Soviet Union whispered similar rumors. Scholars and commentators looked to Stalin’s physical and mental health as possible keys to understanding his personality and the brutality of his dictatorship. For a long time speculation surrounding Stalin’s health was based on unfounded assumptions. Only recently have we gained access to Stalin’s surviving medical records and testimony by the doctors who monitored his health and examined him after his death.
The only one of the Jughashvilis’ three children to live to adulthood, the future dictator suffered a variety of ills growing up. At an early age, Ioseb came down with smallpox, which left his face permanently pockmarked. He also had a bout of malaria.
4
Then, through some sort of accident, the details of which have never been clear (some say he was hit by a horse-drawn carriage), he severely injured his left arm. The injury caused his arm to atrophy, giving him problems for the rest of his life. In 1898 Ioseb wrote to the rector of the Tiflis Theological Seminary asking to be excused from a reexamination “due to a disease of the chest that has long plagued me and that grew more severe during examinations.”
5
He sought to be released from police custody in October and November 1902 because of his “predisposition toward pulmonary consumption” and worsening cough.
6
Apparently his juvenile tuberculosis eventually abated, and he did not show signs of the disease later in life.