Fortunately Stalin and army leadership did more than look for scapegoats. On the second day of the war Stalin set up a State Defense Committee headed by himself, soon replacing Timoshenko with himself also as People’s Commissar of Defense, and additionally he became the head of the High Command and formal supreme commander of the armed forces. Zhukov remained as chief of staff. Stalin thus took personal responsibility for the whole conduct of the war. He learned to work with Zhukov and the other generals, but his was the final decision in all matters. Sometimes his orders led to more defeats, but ultimately they led to victory. He had, more than ever, supreme power. The mobilization of the army continued, and became even more essential with the loss of millions of men over the first summer of war. As the situation at the front deteriorated, the government began to evacuate industry from the Ukraine and Leningrad and other areas threatened by the advancing Nazis. In the short run this meant a fall in military production just as the Wehrmacht was capturing and destroying masses of Soviet equipment. Ultimately it was a crucial and a heroic effort, for tens of thousands of men and machines and their families had to move thousands of miles east to the Urals and Siberia, and then build factory buildings to house the equipment, build housing for themselves, and start production on vital goods as quickly as possible. Not just factories were evacuated: the kolhoz and state farms were ordered to move their cattle and other larger animals to the east as well. Huge herds of thousands of cattle moved through the cities, prodded along by women from the villages heading toward the east.
In September the Germans began the final advance toward Moscow, sure of victory. Hitler even considered that he could soon send troops to help Mussolini in the Mediterranean. As the Nazis advanced, Soviet armies to the west of Moscow were ordered to hold on and hundreds of thousands were encircled and perished, but their deaths bought time. Time was of the essence, for the Germans had no conception of Soviet resources. Their pre-invasion intelligence had underestimated the size of the Red Army at the moment of the attack by nearly a third, by one hundred divisions. Even in the first weeks German commanders in the field were surprised to find that new Soviet units suddenly appeared where they thought that resistance had been smashed. Yet as the autumn advanced, German victory seemed assured: in October the foreign embassies and most of the Soviet government evacuated east to Kuibyshev (Samara) on the Volga. Only the announcement that Stalin was still in Moscow and did not intend to leave staved off panic in the capital. On November 7, he appeared on the Lenin Mauseoleum on Red Square as in previous years to review the parade in honor of the October Revolution, a major Soviet ritual. This time the soldiers marched past in the snow straight to the front. German reconnaissance units began to appear on the outskirts of the city, around and inside the ring highways that encircle it today. The government formed volunteer units of students, older office and factory workers, and sent them to the front to fill the gaps torn by the attackers. Yet the situation was better than it appeared. As the Germans plowed on toward Moscow, the Soviets had formed a substantial strategic reserve, part of which now moved west of the city to meet the Nazis. Now for the first time the Germans were halted, for the apparently seamless advance to the east had in fact cost the Wehrmacht dearly. German casualties were greater than the German losses for all campaigns of the war until the invasion of the USSR. German armor had lost thousands of tanks to enemy fire, and many were inoperable from the wear and tear of Russian conditions or out of ammunition. German engines and automatic weapons froze in the cold. Unlike the Russians they had not thought how to keep them working at night temperatures of forty below freezing. Even the Luftwaffe, which had ruled the skies in the first months, was taking rapidly mounting losses as newly built Soviet aircraft with newly trained pilots filled the gaps left by the massive losses of the summer. In early December, the Red Army counterattacked, pushing the Germans away from Moscow and far to the west, inflicting (and taking) massive casualties. By the end of January 1942, the Nazis had lost nearly a million men and four thousand tanks, half of them in the final battle for Moscow. The Soviets had stopped the Wehrmacht, the first time any army had done so since 1939.
While the Red Army’s losses were horrific, the German losses were ultimately crippling. Germany lacked the population of the Soviet Union, and its superbly functioning industry had not been used to prepare supplies for a war on this scale. The German army at Moscow lacked winter clothes not just because Hitler had assumed a rapid victory but also because he had not counted on the massive expenditure of supplies and the need to fully mobilize to counter Soviet industry. He had no idea that the Soviets could produce far more tanks and aircraft than Germany from a smaller industrial base. By early 1942 the evacuated Soviet industries had come back into production and began to turn out equipment in numbers Germany could not match. This equipment was also superior to the German, especially the tanks, the rocket artillery and many of the aircraft. Now the Soviets had to learn how to use it properly, but they had already inflicted a major strategic defeat from which Germany did not have the resources to recover. Germany could no longer defeat the Soviet Union, although Hitler had no intention of stopping.
The German invasion was not only a military conflict but also a political conflict as well. Stalin saw the war in political terms, as he did everything else, and as in the case of the conduct of war, it took him some time to understand what he was dealing with. He made no statement at first, ordering Molotov to make the formal announcement of war on June 22, several hours after the invasion. Stalin’s first speech came on July 3 and reflected his determination to fight, for he ordered a scorched earth policy in the path of the German invaders and called on Soviet citizens to form partisan units. The old illusions still remained, for he asserted that the Nazis were coming to restore tsarism and the rule of the landed gentry. Though he also stated that the Germans wanted to destroy the culture and statehood of the Soviet peoples, his description of the Nazi aims missed the essential truth. The Wehrmacht and its European allies were paving the way for the extermination of the great majority of the Russian and other Slavic peoples and the colonization of the territory by Germans, the famous “Lebensraum” that Hitler had wanted from the beginning. Yet Stalin concluded with a ringing declaration that the German people, enslaved by the Nazi leaders, would be an ally. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
The extermination began in the first days. The orders to the German troops had been that all “representatives of the Soviet way of life” were to be eliminated, and that no food was to be given to soldiers or civilians out of any misguided sense of humanity. These orders applied to Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet citizens and were behind the destruction of Soviet prisoners of war. The extermination of the Jews also followed the first German victories, for Einsatzgruppen began to round up Jews in occupied territory, the first large-scale massacre taking place in Kaunas on June 25, 1941, with the enthusiastic participation of the local Lithuanian population. Ultimately two million of the five million European Jews who perished in the holocaust were Soviet citizens. Contrary to Stalin’s expectations, Hitler did not restore the pre-soviet order, keeping the collective farms since they made it easy for the Germans to extract grain and meat from the population. The remaining factories went to German businessmen, though sabotage by the workers meant that few really went back into production. Any remaining Russians, elite or otherwise, were to become the slaves of the Reich and were to be prepared for that role. Most schools closed and the Germans frequently hanged the teachers as “representatives of the Soviet way of life.”