should be made absolutely autonomous and not sections of the Comintern. They must be transformed into national communist parties with diverse denominations: workers’ party, Marxist party, etc. The name is not important. What is important is that they put down roots in their people and concentrate on their own specific tasks… The International was created in Marx’s time in the expectation of an approaching international revolution. The Comintern was created in Lenin’s time at an analogous moment. Today, national tasks emerge for each country as a supreme priority. Do not hold on tight to what was yesterday.
Dimitrov had virtually been told that his job was obsolete.
This did not mean that Stalin had given up faith in the ultimate worldwide success of communism; but what Dimitrov was hearing, in an indirect way, was a judgement that the military situation in Europe had become so complex and dangerous that it was no longer to the USSR’s advantage to maintain a co-ordinated communist movement under the direction of the Comintern. Stalin had not abandoned hope of controlling the activity of other communist parties. Instead he had made the provisional judgement that his policy of appeasing Germany would be enhanced if he put distance between his government and the Comintern. Only the outbreak of war with Germany delayed Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern.
Yet Stalin, while seeking to appease Hitler, wanted to keep up the morale of his own Red Army. On 5 May 1941 he addressed the ceremony for graduates of military academies in Moscow. His words, unreported in the press at the time, were combative. Instead of the reassuring words he issued to the media about Germany, he declared:18
War with Germany is inevitable. If com[rade] Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two or three months through the M[inistry] of F[oreign] Affairs, that will be our good fortune, but you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our forces.
Stalin urged the Soviet armed forces to prepare for war.19 He explained:20
Until now we have conducted a peaceful, defensive policy and we’ve also educated our army in this spirit. True, we’ve earned something for our labours by conducting a peaceful policy. But now the situation must be changed. We have a strong and well-armed army.
Stalin continued:
A good defence signifies the need to attack. Attack is the best form of defence… We must now conduct a peaceful, defensive policy with attack. Yes, defence with attack. We must now re-teach our army and our commanders. Educate them in the spirit of attack.
Was this — as some have suggested — the index of an intention to attack Germany within the near future? Undeniably he had no scruples about stabbing friends and allies in the back. Hitler felt and acted the same way, and Nazi propaganda about Lebensraum and Slavic Untermenschen had not been forgotten in the Kremlin. It would have made strategic sense for Stalin to strike down Hitler before Hitler could invade the USSR. It is also true that Zhukov and Timoshenko were sketching plans for such an offensive.
Yet none of this proves that Stalin genuinely contemplated his own offensive in the immediate future. A military graduation ceremony in the Europe and Asia of mid-1941 was hardly an occasion for a political leader to moderate the combat mentality of future officers. They needed to be readied for war; they also had to see that they had a political leadership willing to wage war. Moreover, it would have been remiss of Stalin to fail to instruct Zhukov and Timoshenko to plan for an offensive. All armies need to undertake multiple planning and the Red Army was no exception. Stalin wished to be able to deal with every possible contingency. He was realistic about the need for at least a couple of years before his forces could take on the Germans. He did not exclude the possibility of attacking Germany if and when the Wehrmacht seemed weak. The Marxist–Leninist tradition in foreign policy prescribed that the USSR should exploit the political, economic and military rivalries among capitalist powers. This was how states of all kinds had behaved since time immemorial. If Germany looked weak, the Soviet mountain eagle would swoop down and take its prey.
Consequently Stalin’s priority in May and June 1941 was to avoid giving Hitler a reason to start a war. The General Staff had yet to complete a definitive comprehensive plan for defence.21 Diplomatic and economic appeasement remained foremost in Stalin’s mind. The analyses of military professionals in Berlin and Moscow had pinpointed the importance of beginning such hostilities in early summer in order to shatter the USSR’s defences before the onset of winter; and Stalin was hoping that all this was correct. Hitler had been prevented from invading the Soviet Union at the appropriate time because of trouble in Yugoslavia since the spring. But the secret decision had already been taken in Berlin: Hitler was going to attack as soon as he had amassed sufficient forces in German-occupied Poland. His confidence rested on ignorance of Soviet military capacity. Stalin’s secretiveness meant that the Germans had been kept in the dark about the USSR’s true strength. By the time such information started to reach Berlin, it was too late to persuade Hitler to call off the invasion.22
Stalin hoped against hope that his diplomatic manoeuvres were paying off as midsummer approached. He ignored the rising mountain of information that Hitler was up to no good on his borders. Zhukov was becoming frantic. In mid-June he made one of his recurrent attempts to snap Stalin out of his policy of appeasement. Stalin angrily pounced on him: ‘What are you up to? Have you come here to scare us with the idea of war or is it that you really want a war? Haven’t you got enough medals and titles?’23 This was a punch below the belt that made Zhukov lose his temper even with Stalin. But the moment passed and the appeasement policy was maintained. Thus the conditions for the greatest military disaster of the twentieth century were unwittingly prepared by the supremely confident Leader in the Kremlin.
37. BARBAROSSA
In the hour before dawn on 22 June 1941 the German armed forces started Operation Barbarossa. There was no warning from Hitler; this was a classic Blitzkrieg and Stalin was in bed at the time in his Blizhnyaya dacha. In the diplomatic crisis of recent weeks he had judged that intelligence sources predicting a German invasion were just a provocation. Timoshenko as People’s Commissar of Defence and Zhukov as Chief of the General Staff thought him mistaken and had stayed up on duty all that last night. At 3.30 a.m. they received reports of heavy shelling along the Soviet–German frontier. They knew this for what it was: the beginning of war. Timoshenko ordered Zhukov to call Blizhnyaya by telephone. Zhukov obediently asked a sleepy Vlasik, the chief of Stalin’s bodyguard, to rouse the Leader.1
Like a schoolboy rejecting proof of simple arithmetic, Stalin disbelieved his ears. Breathing heavily, he grunted to Zhukov that no counter-measures should be taken.2 The German armies had had no more compliant victim. Stalin’s only concession to Zhukov was to rise from his bed and return to Moscow by limousine. There he met Zhukov and Timoshenko along with Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov and Lev Mekhlis.3 (Mekhlis was a party bureaucrat who had carried out many tasks for Stalin in the Great Terror.) Pale and bewildered, he sat with them at the table clutching an empty pipe for comfort.4 He could not accept that he had been wrong about Hitler. He muttered that the outbreak of hostilities must have originated in a conspiracy within the Wehrmacht. Always there had to be a conspiracy. When Timoshenko demurred, Stalin retorted that ‘if it were necessary to organise a provocation, German generals would bomb their own cities’. Ludicrously he was still trying to persuade himself that the situation was reversible: ‘Hitler surely doesn’t know about it.’ He ordered Molotov to get in touch with Ambassador Schulenburg to clarify the situation. This was clutching at a final straw while Armageddon erupted. Schulenburg had in fact already requested an interview with Molotov in the Kremlin. In the meantime Timoshenko and Zhukov went on imploring Stalin’s permission to organise armed counter-measures.5