During the second phase of the war, Stalin was not inclined to be hasty in making decisions and usually listened to reports, including upsetting ones, without any sign of irritability, without interrupting, just smoking, pacing, sitting down from time to time, and listening.
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Less and less often he imposed his own solutions to individual questions on Front commanders—attack this way and not that way. Earlier he would impose his way, tell them in what direction and in which specific sector it would be more advantageous to attack or to concentrate forces.… By the end of the war there wasn’t a hint of this.
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Stalin’s new demeanor was largely a result of his growth as a military leader. As the war progressed, he acquired a huge store of both negative and positive experience. “After the Battle of Stalingrad and especially Kursk,” Marshal Vasilevsky wrote, “he rose to the height of strategic leadership. Now Stalin was thinking in terms of modern warfare and grasped all the issues involved in preparing and conducting operations.” This view of Stalin’s new sophistication was shared by many of the military leaders who worked with him during the war.
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Stalin’s focus on the day-to-day details of operations at the fronts allowed him little time to deal with other matters, particularly the economy. Many spheres of socioeconomic life were removed from the dictator’s harsh control as the lines of division among government institutions underwent a spontaneous wartime revision. Under the military dictatorship, at the top of the pyramid was, as always, Stalin, who made decisions either solely or during meetings held either in his Kremlin office or at his dacha. The participants in these meetings included military leaders and the
vozhd
’s closest comrades. The meetings did not fit into any of the orderly categories of government. Depending on their content, decisions made at these meetings, or solely by Stalin, were drawn up and circulated to those charged with carrying them out in the name of one of the top governmental bodies—the Politburo, the Council of People’s Commissars, the State Defense Committee, or the Supreme Command. Meanwhile, many questions having to do with the day-to-day running of the country, including the wartime economy, were being decided without Stalin’s direct involvement. Molotov, for example, was in charge of the SNK (the Council of People’s Commissars) and regularly presided over the decision-making bodies that basically oversaw all aspects of government not directly tied to military operations.
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In December 1942 a new body was established to oversee the work by industry and the transportation sector to meet the needs of the front: the State Defense Committee’s Operational Bureau.
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Led at first by Molotov, as the war wound down, it was taken over by Beria.
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Members of the Politburo and the State Defense Committee also served on these critical managerial bodies, where they had the authority to resolve important issues quickly. Not all of the resolutions produced by these bodies went to Stalin for approval.
In addition to their duties serving on these top government bodies, each of Stalin’s associates had his own individual “portfolio.” As the war persisted, this system of putting members of the leadership in charge of particular areas became embedded. For example, in February 1942, the following purviews were assigned to members of the State Defense Committee: Molotov was placed in charge of the production of tanks, Malenkov of aviation, Beria of armaments, Voznesensky of ammunition, and Mikoyan of supplying the army with food and uniforms.
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These portfolios could change over time. Whatever assignments were given to these top leaders, under the pressures of war and by sheer necessity they operated with significant administrative latitude. What mattered were results. If they met their production targets, they were successful. This system worked, and Stalin had neither the time nor the desire to change it.
The increased autonomy enjoyed by Stalin’s associates inevitably spilled over into the political sphere and affected their interactions with the
vozhd.
As Mikoyan attests, “During the war there was a certain solidarity among our leadership.… Stalin, who understood that during this difficult time an all-out effort was required, fostered an atmosphere of trust, and every member of the Politburo carried a tremendous load.”
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This understanding, of course, did not mean that Stalin’s dictatorial dominance over the Politburo was replaced by oligarchic rule. Stalin set the rules of collective leadership. As the situation stabilized at the front and victory over the enemy approached, there were signs that he intended to do away with the slight liberalizations that circumstances had forced upon him. For Mikoyan, the first such sign was a slap on the wrist he received from the
vozhd.
On 17 September 1944 he sent Stalin a draft resolution on advancing grain to a number of oblasts.
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Although the proposal was rather moderate and did not give the oblasts everything they were asking for, Stalin made a display of his anger, writing onto Mikoyan’s resolution: “I vote against. Mikoyan is behaving in an anti-state manner and is being led around by the oblast committees and is corrupting them. He has completely corrupted Andreev.
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The procurement commissariat should be taken away from Mikoyan and given to Malenkov, for example.”
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The Politburo did so the following day.
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Another sign of coming changes at the top was a shake-up within the military leadership undertaken by Stalin in late 1944. In November the Politburo appointed Nikolai Bulganin to serve as Stalin’s deputy at the defense commissariat and made him a member of the State Defense Committee.
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Bulganin was also given important powers in interacting with the army.
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His expertise lay in civilian affairs, but during the war he served on the councils of a number of fronts, thus acquiring some military experience and even the rank of general. His assignment to the defense commissariat, and the broad powers he was given, could only mean that Stalin was creating a new counterweight to the military, in particular to the deputy defense commissar and deputy supreme commander, Marshal Zhukov. Evidence can be seen in the demonstrative dressing-down given to Zhukov just two weeks after Bulganin’s appointment. In December 1944 Stalin accused Zhukov of exceeding his authority in approving artillery field manuals and issued him a reprimand. The order criticizing Zhukov was circulated to all top military leaders.
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As painful as this lashing out must have been for Stalin’s subordinates, his attacks did little to roil the upper echelons of power or change his relative moderation in dealing with the members of the Politburo or the military leadership. Lower down the hierarchy, however, there was no sense of liberalization. The war lent a certain legitimacy to Stalin’s brutality, especially given the extreme ruthlessness of the enemy. The intensity of state violence during the war years was comparable to that of the Terror. In addition to the general hardships of war, the front suffered (as noted) from executions, anti-retreat units, and penalty battalions, while members of the civilian population suffered arrest, execution, mass deportations, mobilization, and the mass starvation that resulted from forced grain requisitions by the state and the collapse of agriculture in some of the Soviet Union’s most productive areas. While the context of these hardships differed from those experienced in the late 1930s, to those enduring them they must have felt very much the same. As they mounted, just as he had done toward the conclusion of the Terror, Stalin made certain concessions to the populace that cost him little but brought certain tactical advantages.
The best known concession was a reconciliation with religious institutions and the faithful, most important the country’s Orthodox majority. This departure from the anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, from the destruction of churches and the mass executions of clergy members and believers, in favor of the opening of cathedrals and relative freedom of religion, was part of an overall adjustment in official ideology. Russian patriotism was being encouraged before the war, and a revival of images of the heroic past, many placed on a par with the legacy of Bolshevism and the revolution, became more pronounced during the war years.
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Under Stalin’s orders, portraits of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century generals Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov were placed alongside the photograph of Lenin that hung in his office. To medals based on the symbolism of the revolution were added those commemorating Suvorov, Kutuzov, Prince Aleksandr Nevsky, and Admiral Pavel Nakhimov. At the front, those who had fought in World War I were allowed to wear their tsarist medals along with their Soviet ones.
The new attitude toward religion received a stunning stamp of approval in September 1943, when a previously unimaginable meeting between Stalin and the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church was publicly announced. Three metropolitans were brought to Stalin’s Kremlin office during the night of 4–5 September. They talked with the unusually amiable
vozhd
for one hour and twenty minutes.
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After an eighteen-year prohibition, they were granted permission to appoint a patriarch for the Russian Orthodox Church and were even offered the option of using airplanes to bring bishops to Moscow so as to accelerate the selection. Stalin consented to the opening of courses in theology to prepare priests and even proposed organizing theological seminaries and academies. He also supported requests to open new churches and free arrested priests, and he proposed that church leaders improve priests’ material well-being by setting up special food stores and assigning them cars. He gave the future patriarch the gift of a three-story house with a garden in the center of Moscow, formerly the home of the German ambassador, including all its furnishings. After discussing a few more items, Stalin escorted the metropolitans to the door of his office.
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The next day, the meeting with church leaders and the upcoming election of a new patriarch were reported in newspapers.
Historians have made a rather thorough study of the reasons for Stalin’s about-face on religion. Of course the former seminary graduate with the unfinished theological education had no intention of returning to the bosom of the church or asking forgiveness for his sins. Needing to strengthen relations with his allies, he had to respond to the concerns of Western public opinion and influential church circles about the plight of believers in the USSR. Furthermore, the liberation of occupied Soviet territories raised the practical question of what to do about the many churches the Germans had built there. The usual Bolshevik approach of shutting them down was impossible. He needed a reconciliation with the church. Religion had to be put under tight control but not destroyed. Far from the bottom of the list of reasons for this change was Stalin’s awareness of the role religion played in uniting the country, in earning the emotional support of the masses, who had endured terrible trials. Soviet values, force-fed into the minds of millions, could not satisfy the spiritual needs of a huge and ancient people. The goal of achieving a universal vision of the path forward turned out to be unattainable. Stalin’s grasp of this reality brought him one step closer to victory.
THE STAGES OF VICTORY: CRIMEA, BERLIN, POTSDAM, MANCHURIA
The entry of the huge Red Army into Germany was a long-awaited and joyous occasion for the Soviet people and the
vozhd
. The enemy would be finished off in its own den. The time for retribution had come. Such natural and inevitable feelings inspired heroism and self-sacrifice during the war’s final battles, when every Soviet soldier could taste victory and was eager for the final assault. Stalin had every reason to be proud of his army.
One of the Red Army’s most successful operations came in January and February 1945. Taking just three weeks to advance five hundred kilometers from the Vistula to the Oder, the Soviet forces shattered critical Nazi lines of defense. Bridgeheads were created for an offensive against Berlin itself, but several months of bloody battles still lay ahead. The German forces defending their country put up a stubborn resistance and even launched counteroffensives, forcing the Red Army to take heavy casualties. Knowing this, Stalin did not hurry to enter Berlin in February. It would take several weeks to eliminate the threat of German counterattacks against the exposed flanks of the advancing Soviet fronts and to bring in reinforcements. Hard-earned experience had taught him prudence.
The victories of early 1945 had put the Soviet side in a favorable position to negotiate with the Allies on the postwar future. Negotiations first became a practical necessity in late 1944, when the Red Army was advancing through the Balkans and the Western Allies entered France and Italy. In October 1944, Churchill again flew to Moscow to meet with Stalin. The British prime minister raised the question of spheres of influence in Europe, the Balkans in particular. Stalin is unlikely to have been put off by this political cynicism. He agreed that “England should have the right to a decisive voice in Greece,”
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and he was also willing to apportion a Western “share” of influence in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. The presence of the Red Army in these countries (unlike in Greece) had brought them under Soviet control. For Stalin, this control was decisive. The question of Poland, high on the list of diplomatic issues Churchill brought to Moscow, was much more contentious. By the time of Churchill’s visit in late 1944, the USSR had broken off relations with the official Polish government, which had spent the war in exile in Britain, and was promoting a Communist alternative. Britain and the United States did what they could to prevent this outcome. On 1 August 1944, as the Red Army approached, the Polish government in exile organized an uprising in Warsaw with the goal of seizing power in the capital before the arrival of Soviet forces and the pro-Soviet government they were bringing with them. The Red Army, for a variety of reasons, stopped its advance, and the Nazis drowned the uprising in blood. This tragic episode became a source of sharp division between Stalin and his allies, who charged him with intentionally holding back aid to the uprising. This charge was largely just, but Stalin, guided by his own reality, had no intention of relenting. The London Poles had not launched the uprising to help him, so why should he help them?