He drove himself and others at the maximum pace until the early hours of 29 June, when Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria were the last to leave him. (V.N. Merkulov, who had headed the state security organisation for several months, had departed some minutes before.)16 At that point he started to behave mysteriously. His visit to the Ministry of Defence two days earlier had been a difficult one. When Timoshenko and Zhukov showed him the operational maps, he was shocked by the extent of the disaster for the Red Army. Having surmounted his bewilderment about Operation Barbarossa on 21 June, he suffered a relapse. Fellow members of the Politburo, Sovnarkom and Stavka had no idea what had happened to him. When calls were put through to the Blizhnyaya dacha, his chief aide Poskrëbyshev claimed not to know where he was. Yet he was indeed skulking at that dacha. Commanders and politicians were left to get on with the war with Germany as best they could. No one outside Blizhnyaya knew whether he was alive or dead.
The German advance quickened across the Soviet borderlands. Trained by Stalin to accept his whims, his military and political subordinates tried to run their institutions as if nothing strange was occurring. But they worried about doing anything without clearing it with him beforehand. The situation was changing by the hour. Stalin’s sanction had been essential for years and Stavka needed his presence at the centre of things. What was he doing? One possibility was that his morale had fallen so low that he felt incapable of continuing at his post. He had much reason to feel bad about his recent performance. Another possibility is that he was seeking to impress upon his subordinates that, however poorly he had performed, he remained the irreplaceable Leader. Stalin was an avid reader of books on Ivan the Terrible and to some extent identified himself with him. Tsar Ivan had once abandoned the Kremlin and withdrawn to a monastery; his purpose had been to induce boyars and bishops to appreciate the fundamental need for him to go on ruling. After some days a delegation came out to the Tsar to plead with him to return to the Kremlin. Perhaps Stalin was contriving a similar situation.
The truth will never be known since Stalin never spoke of the episode. His subordinates eventually plucked up courage to find out what was going on. Nikolai Voznesenski, the rising star in state planning bodies, was visiting Mikoyan when a call came through from Molotov for them to join him. Malenkov, Voroshilov and Beria were already with Molotov, and Beria was proposing the creation of a State Committee of Defence. Mikoyan and Voznesenski agreed. This State Committee of Defence was envisaged as supplanting the authority of both party and government and as being headed by Stalin. It was the first great initiative for years that any of them had taken without seeking his prior sanction.17
The snag was to get Stalin to agree. The group resolved to drive out to Blizhnyaya to put the proposal to him directly. When Molotov raised the problem of Stalin’s ‘prostration’ in recent days, Voznesenski stiffened his nerve: ‘Vyacheslav, you go first and we’ll be straight behind you.’ Mikoyan interpreted this as more than a travelling plan. Voznesenski was saying that, if Stalin could not pull himself together, Molotov should take his place. Arriving at the dacha, they found him slumped in an armchair. He looked ‘strange’ and ‘guarded’, quite unlike the Leader they were used to. ‘Why,’ he muttered, ‘have you come?’ Mikoyan thought Stalin suspected that they were about to arrest him. But then Molotov, his old comrade, spoke for everyone by explaining the need for a State Committee of Defence. Stalin was not yet reassured, and asked: ‘Who’s going to head it?’ Molotov named Stalin himself. Even then Stalin appeared surprised and simply said: ‘Good.’ The ice was melting. Beria suggested that four Politburo members should join him in the State Committee: Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria. Stalin, recovering his confidence, wanted to add Mikoyan and Voznesenski.18
Beria objected that Mikoyan and Voznesenski were indispensable for work in Sovnarkom and Gosplan. Voznesenski rose angrily against Beria. Stalin was in his element: his subordinates were more interested in arguing with each other than in rivalling him. Agreement to a State Committee of five members was obtained with wide powers for Mikoyan to organise supplies and for Voznesenski to co-ordinate armaments production.19 The decision was confirmed in the press on 1 July.20 And Stalin was back in charge. The suggestion that Molotov might be substituted for Stalin could have been the death of all of them; it was kept secret from him. It was anyway an occasion which Stalin was unlikely to forget. Beria believed that sooner or later the visitors to the dacha would pay the price just for having seen him in a moment of profound weakness.21
On 10 July, after being prodded by Zhukov among others, Stalin allowed himself to be appointed Supreme Commander. He was cautious even about this and the acquisition of the title was withheld from the media for several weeks. His reason for this fumbling was not disclosed and he never discussed it with his intimates. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Stalin had wanted to avoid too close an association in the popular mind with the catastrophe at the front. If the defeats continued, he would make other heads roll. He took even longer to take official charge of Stavka. Not until 8 August did he agree to become its Chairman. Was this yet another sign that he had learned from biographies of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, that real power mattered more than titles? Whatever it signifies about Stalin’s attitude to his image, it is clear evidence that at last he thought that the Red Army had recovered from its disastrous first days in the field against the Germans. The beginnings of an effective defence were being organised, and order and efficiency were replacing chaos: Stalin could at last take the risk of assuming full supreme responsibility; and indeed failure to do so would raise questions about his commitment.
Someone who paid the ultimate price for annoying Stalin even without having seen him in his depressed mood at the dacha was Western Front commander Dmitri Pavlov. Placed in an impossible situation by Stalin’s military mismanagement before and on 22 June 1941, Pavlov was being made the scapegoat for the German military success. To err is human and Stalin had erred on a stupendous scale. He forgave himself but not others; and when he made a mistake, it was others who got the blame. Pavlov was arrested, tried by court martial and sentenced to death. Quite what Stalin thought he was achieving by this is hard to understand. The sentence was not given wide publicity. Most probably Stalin was just doing what had become his normal practice, and he wanted to keep his commanders in fear of him. But perhaps he also discerned the need to avoid causing a collapse in the morale of the entire officer corps. Hence he opted for compromise. He obtained his victim but refrained from the pre-war scenario of torture, show trial and forced confession. This was little consolation to the hapless Pavlov, but it was the earliest frail sign that Stalin understood the need to adjust his behaviour in the furnace of war.