Authors: Harrison Salisbury
In the opinion of Soviet historians none of the intelligence data altered the fixed opinion of Stalin and his closest associates, Zhdanov, Beria and Malen-kov, that there would be no immediate Nazi attack. Order after order in the last ten days before the war forbade moves along the frontier lest they be interpreted by the Germans as provocations.
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Not even when German reconnaissance planes accidentally landed at Soviet airports June 19 was Moscow’s evaluation shaken. True, that same day General Kirponos was instructed to advance his command post to Ternopol, closer to the border. The shift was to be made June 22. But no orders came through to move up troops or put planes on the ready.
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Political workers in the army were briefed to carry out a new line which was said to reflect the intentions of the Tass communiqué. There were three main points: first, talk of war is pro vocational; second, the communiqué proves that there is no disagreement with Germany; third, thanks to Stalin’s policy peace has been secured for a long time.
These views certainly were shared by both Stalin and Zhdanov. Zhdanov was Chief of the Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department. The Party line of “No War” was being laid down under his strict guidance.
Only in the navy did it prove possible to maintain some vigilance. There, due to Kuznetsov and his chief political officer, I. V. Rogov, the line of imminent danger and possible attack by Germany continued to be presented in lectures to the troops.
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But not without repercussions. When the Deputy Political Chief Kalachev lectured along these lines to the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad, a letter quickly turned up in Moscow complaining that the press spoke of peace and Kalachev of war.
Rogov sent a strong group of propagandists to lecture to the Black Sea Fleet during their maneuvers. The group was headed by Vice Admiral I. I. Azarov. The Party line was to warn the sailors of the threatening situation with Germany. On the very day Azarov spoke before the personnel of the cruiser
Krasny Kavkaz
, Tass denounced war rumors as a provocation.
Captain A. V. Bushchin came to Azarov and said: “Comrade Commissar, you will have to speak again before the command and tell them whom to believe. Are those who talk of the nearness of war
provocateurs
or not?”
It was a difficult moment for Azarov, but he held to his position, telling the men the Tass communiqué was solely for foreign consumption.
Throughout the Black Sea maneuvers alarming naval reports came in. The Danube flotilla commander advised that Nazi military engineering work was being pressed night and day on the west bank of the river. Deserters said that military action was expected by month’s end. Marine units were seen at Rumanian ports and German officers along the Danube. Daily calls from the Baltic commanders told of German ship and plane movements.
The NKGB reported to Stalin personally June 11 that the German Embassy in Moscow had on June 9 received instructions to prepare to evacuate its quarters in the course of seven days. There was evidence that the embassy was burning documents in the basement. Five days later the NKGB reported that German troops concentrated in East Prussia had been ordered to occupy take-off positions for attacking Russia by June 13. Then the date was changed to June 18.
By this time rumors had begun to circulate among high staff officers of warnings which Stalin had received from Churchill and Roosevelt. Tension in the Defense Commissariat was high.
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Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky told a questioner June 18: “Things will be all right if Germany doesn’t attack in the next fifteen or twenty days.”
On what did Vasilevsky base this remark? In part, certainly, on the movement of reinforcements to the west, which was now, belatedly, under way on a fairly large scale. There had been a steady build-up of Soviet forces, roughly parallel to that of the Germans.
The German troop movement had been carried out in three stages. About thirty divisions were sent to East Prussia and Poland in the fall of 1940. This force was built up to seventy divisions by mid-May. In the same period Soviet forces in the west were increased to about seventy divisions, but with the difference that the Soviet divisions generally were not at war strength nor disposed in frontier positions.
The Germans began heavy troop movements May 25, sending in about one hundred military formations each twenty-four hours. The Soviet reinforcements, ordered in mid-May, soon began to arrive in the west. These movements were carried out on an urgent basis, troops being moved without equipment and arms. They were concentrated on the line of the western Dvina and the Dnieper from Kraslava to Kremenchug. This was the destination of Konev’s troops from the north Caucasus and Lukin’s Trans-Baikal army. They were assembling at Shepetovka, southeast of Rovno. But only slowly were the frontier troops advanced to border positions.
The movement of troops from the interior was to be completed only in the second half of July—the critical period to which Vasilevsky referred.
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By June 21, 1941, the Soviet had deployed about 2.9 million troops in the Western defense districts against an estimated 4.2 million Germans. The total strength of the Soviet military establishment had been strongly expanded from the 1939 level—up to 4.2 million in January, 1941, against 2.5 million in January, 1939. The total stood just below 5 million June 1. The air force had been tripled and land forces increased 2.7 times. The army had 125 new rifle divisions.
But the numbers were deceptive. The army had only 30 percent of the automatic weapons provided by the table of organization; only 20 percent of the planes were of new modern types and only 9 percent of the tanks. When General S. M. Shtemenko took over the 34th Cavalry Division in July, 1941, he found it had no arms whatever. He finally got some 1927 vintage cannons but was unable to obtain enough rifles or ammunition to equip his troops. There were no antitank guns—nothing but Molotov cocktails (gasoline bottles with wicks). He got twelve antitank guns, but not until October, 1941.
The chiefs of the Soviet Air Force and the air construction industry were hastily summoned to the Kremlin in early June and denounced for failure to develop a system of camouflaging Soviet planes. Stalin had learned, through a letter from an aviator, that air force planes along the Western border were parked in parade formation at the airdromes, gleaming in aluminum, beautiful targets for attack. No one had ever given the question of camouflage the slightest thought. The Air Construction Commissariat was ordered to come forward with a comprehensive plan for camouflage within three days. The plan was submitted in early June but had not been carried out, except in part, by the time the attack started.
Thus some precautions, even though sluggish, were being taken.
Is it credible in the face of all the evidence that Stalin genuinely believed Germany would not attack—or that he could stave off the attack by a diplomatic maneuver?
It seems not only possible but certain. In mid-June Major General A. A. Korobkov of the Soviet Fourth Army on the Bug River told his commanders that the higher-ups in Moscow were inclined to interpret the German concentrations as a blackmailing maneuver, designed “to strengthen the argument of Germany in the decision of some political discussions” with the Soviet Union.
The Soviet historian A. M. Nekrich observed that if this represented Stalin’s view, he had no real idea of what was going on in the world.
This seems to have been the case. Marshal Voronov is certain that Stalin persisted to the end in believing that war between Russia and Germany could only arise as a result of provocations, not by Hitler, but by “military revanchists.” In other words, Stalin trusted Hitler but not his generals!
There were some final efforts by field commanders to take the necessary steps before it was too late. General M. P. Kirponos, the commander in Kiev, became convinced a week or so before June 22 that war was coming. He sent Stalin a personal letter asking permission to evacuate from frontier regions along the Bug River 300,000 civilians, to prepare defense works and set up antitank barriers. To this the reply was the same as all the others: This would be a provocative act. Do not move.
There is a possibility that Stalin thought he had an ace in the hole. Beginning about mid-May there circulated in both Moscow and Berlin rumors that Russia and Germany were exploring the possibility of reaching a new economic and political accord. Grigore Gafencu, the Rumanian Minister in Moscow, thought there might be substance to the reports. He heard that the Germans had made very stiff demands—the right to exploit the Ukraine, the turning over of all Russia’s airplane production and other proposals which sounded outrageous. But some felt Stalin was ready to pay an extremely high price to avoid war.
Ulrich von Hassell, the famous German diplomat and diarist, in Berlin heard much the same thing. There were, he noted in his diary, “whispers everywhere that Stalin will make a kind of peaceful capitulation.” Von Hassell was skeptical of this, and so, he noted, was Weizsäcker. Von Hassell was certain Hitler was going to carry out his campaign against Russia.
But as time passed, as German preparations for war mounted at an ever-faster tempo, the rumors did not die. They grew. Von Hassell again took note of them, just after the fateful Tass communiqué of June 13. His entry for June 15 reported: “With astonishing unanimity come rumors—in the opinion of ‘knowing men’ spread for propaganda (why?)—that an understanding with Russia is imminent, Stalin is coming here, etc.”
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Was this Stalin’s ace in the hole? Did he plan, if worse came to worst, if Hitler was really preparing to attack, to make the pilgrimage himself? To emulate Ivan Kalita (Moneybags), the medieval Czar, who solidified his power by making the submission to the great Tatar Khans, by accepting the yarlik? Did he harbor the intention of going to Berlin at the last moment and buying his way out of the cul-de-sac into which his policy had led his country and himself?
Some curious evidence points in this direction.
On June 18 Ambassador Dekanozov in Berlin asked to see Weizsäcker. The Soviet Ambassador was received, but, according to one account, “nothing important resulted” because Weizsäcker had no instructions.
Weizsäcker’s own report stated that Dekanozov brought up only “a few current matters.” He described Dekanozov as chatting “with complete un-constraint and in a cheerful mood” about such trivialities as Weizsäcker’s recent trip to Budapest and the situation in Iraq. He got into no detailed discussion of Soviet-German relations.
On June 20 Haider placed a cryptic note in his diary: “Molotov wanted to see the Fuhrer on June 18.”
Was this subject raised in the Dekanozov meeting on the eighteenth? Was there an eleventh-hour effort to arrange a Hitler-Stalin meeting? The Italian Ambassador in Berlin, L. Simoni, heard rumors of a Stalin trip for the purpose of making last-minute concessions.
This hypothesis is given support by the fruitless efforts of Molotov and Dekanozov to get into meaningful discussions with the Germans on the evening of June 21, when the preparations for attack could hardly have been overlooked by a ten-year-old child.
As good a portrait of Stalin in these days as is available is that drawn by Admiral Kuznetsov. In the Admiral’s view, Stalin unquestionably expected war with Hitler. Stalin regarded the Nazi-Soviet pact as a time-gaining stopgap, but the time span proved much shorter than he anticipated. His chief mistake was in underestimating the period he had available for preparation.
“The suspiciousness of Stalin relative to England and America made matters worse,” Kuznetsov concluded. “He doubted all evidence about Hitler’s activity which he received from the English and Americans and simply threw it to one side.”
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The suspiciousness of Stalin complicated matters in other ways. It was not ordinary suspiciousness, but what Kuznetsov called the “sick suspicious-ness peculiar to [Stalin] at that time.” And under its influence Stalin not only rejected the plain evidence before him but refused to share with anyone whatever plans he had for the conduct of war should it break out.
“I did not know in that time [the eve of the war] whether we had any kind of operative-strategic plan in case of war,” observed Marshal Voronov, one of the highest officers in the Soviet Army. “I only knew that the plan for artillery and combat artillery tactics had not yet been approved, although the first draft had been worked out in 1938.”
It was not possible for responsible commanders in the General Staff or the High Command to take even ordinary precautions. They had no war plans —except offensive plans for carrying war beyond the frontiers of the Soviet Union. They had no contingency plans for liaison between staffs. They had no prepared schemes on which to fall back in event of sudden Nazi attack because
Stalin had decreed that there would be no Nazi attack
. If a dictator decrees that there will be no attack, an officer who prepares for one is liable to execution as a traitor.
The men around Stalin were so dominated by him that when the crisis came, in Admiral Kuznetsov’s words, “they could not take in their hands the levers of direction.”
“They were,” he noted, “not accustomed to independent action and were able only to fulfill the will of Stalin standing over them. This was the tragedy of those hours.”
General Tyulenev, commandant of the Moscow area, and Marshal Voro-shilov met in the Kremlin on the morning of June 22 a few hours after the German attack.