Zhukov would have none of this; he delivered a report to Stavka insisting that defence in depth was the better option: bloody but dependable attrition was preferable to a bloodier and riskier attack — and Zhukov predicted that Kursk would be the place where the decisive battle would take place.1 On 12 April a Stavka conference was held. Stalin gruffly gave way to Zhukov’s proposal, which was backed by his military colleagues Alexander Vasilevski and Alexei Antonov.2 German intentions quickly became clear as fifty of Hitler’s best divisions were moved into an attacking position where Zhukov had predicted. Stalin, though, had second thoughts in May and argued again in favour of a pre-emptive offensive. Zhukov, Vasilevski and Antonov held firm and carried opinion in Stavka with them.3 Stalin accepted the result and rushed Zhukov and Vasilevski to take direct command. By 4 July the imminence of the German attack was obvious to Zhukov, who ordered Rokossovski to put the agreed plan into operation. Stalin was informed of the decision without prior consultation. It was a bold gesture of autonomy by Zhukov but he got away with it. Stalin received the news without his usual rancour: ‘I’ll be in Stavka awaiting the development of events.’4
When hostilities started early next morning, Zhukov was immersed in the task of reacting to unexpected dispositions made by the Germans. It was Stalin who rang him rather than the other way round: ‘Well, how’s it going? Have they started?’ Zhukov simply replied: ‘They’ve started.’5 Stalin had to bide his time and control his nerves. The fate of the USSR was in the hands of the Red Army, and there was no longer anything he could do from Moscow that could affect the outcome of battle.
Wehrmacht tanks made ground in the first two days, but then the Soviet lines held. Zhukov and Manstein struggled to outwit and out-punch each other. Zhukov’s ruthless tactics were effective. Instead of waiting for his artillery to batter the enemy before throwing his tanks at them, he undertook both actions simultaneously. Soviet losses were immense; but although the Germans suffered fewer, they could ill afford them in the light of their increasing shortage of men and supplies. Zhukov by his own estimation had 40 per cent more troops, 90 per cent more weaponry, 20 per cent more tanks and 40 per cent more aircraft.6 Wasteful though he was of his resources, he had calculated that the Germans faced disaster unless they carried off a speedy victory. German success was never likely. In accordance with the long-elaborated plan, the Red Army counter-attacked from both the Bryansk Front and the Western Front. The Wehrmacht was pummelled backwards. Stalin could not resist demanding the intensification of offensive operations, and as usual it fell to Zhukov to get him to allow time for physical recovery and tactical regrouping. Disputes proliferated and Stalin made plenty of wounding accusations.7 But Zhukov was made of strong stuff and was sustained by confidence in imminent triumph. In August he had his moment of glory when he was able to report his final success to Stavka.
The Germans had failed to win the battle of Kursk. The Red Army had not won in a conventional sense because the Wehrmacht conducted a planned and orderly retreat. Thus there was no definitive end to the battle. But Hitler had sustained strategic defeat simply by not having been able to win. After Kursk the Wehrmacht was pushed steadily westwards. Red Army morale rose as German spirits dipped. The USSR conscripted its vast reservoir of peasant soldiers while the Germans and their allies were running out of fighting men. Soviet factories reached a peak of production and were accelerating at a faster rate than Germany’s industrial capacity. Stalin and his Stavka believed that the reverses suffered by German arms at Kursk signalled the beginning of the end for Hitler’s New Order in Europe.
Soviet commanders were right that Stalin had contributed less than themselves to the victory at Kursk. Yet they saw only the military side of his activity: they had little cognisance of his other interventions in the USSR’s war effort. Stavka had nothing to do with foreign policy, political organisation, cultural and social policy or economic mobilisation. Stalin interfered in all these sectors and his impact was deep. In 1941–2 this had already led to several adjustments which he thought necessary to the interests of the USSR. The massive territorial losses in the war’s early months precipitated a collapse in food supplies as Ukrainian wheat, potatoes and sugar beet fell into the hands of the Germans. Although no directive was issued, the authorities slackened off their efforts against the black market in agricultural produce. The exceptions were cities under siege such as Leningrad where the NKVD punished anyone caught trading on the street. But market economics more widely crept back into the Soviet order as party and municipal government accepted that peasants bringing sacks of vegetables for sale helped to alleviate urban malnutrition;8 and Stalin, who had fulminated against the flouting of trading laws in the 1930s, kept silent about this during the war.
He also understood the need to widen the limits of cultural expression. Many intellectuals who had been suspect to the authorities were told that the state welcomed their creative services. Notable among them were the poet Anna Akhmatova and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Akhmatova had been married to the poet Nikolai Gumilëv, who had been killed as an anti-Soviet militant in 1921; her son Lev still languished in prison and her writings had not been published for years. But well-read members of society remembered her with affection. It was in Stalin’s interest to allow her work to be read over the radio and at concerts. This permission was not indiscriminate. Preference was given to those of her poems which emphasised the achievements of the Russian people. Shostakovich had learned the lesson of his troubles before the war and given up accompanying his music with words. He wrote the score of his Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony while working as a night fire warden. The piece was recognised for its greatness by the first-night audience in 1942.
Cheap editions of the Russian classics were distributed at the front. Stalin as writer also belonged to the Soviet literary pantheon and the commissars gave his pamphlets to the troops; but he was not in fact a favourite author for men on active service. The regime recognised this and moderated its insistence on placing his oeuvre at the centre of its propaganda.
Stalin also dropped the Internationale as the USSR state hymn (or national anthem) and held a competition for a new one. The winner was Alexander Alexandrov with a melody which stirred the soul. Words were added by Sergei Mikhalkov and Garold El-Registan and they were among the most effective items in the armoury of official propaganda. The first verse went:9
The second verse moored patriotism in allegiance to the October Revolution:
The hymn had a genuine emotional resonance for the wartime generation; it was hardly a cultural ‘concession’ since it contained a paean to Stalin; but it indicated that the authorities understood that cosmopolitanism, as embodied in the Internationale, did little to make Russians fight for the Motherland.
Still more important were Stalin’s decisions on the Russian Orthodox Church. By 1939 there were only around a hundred places of worship still open to believers.10 No monastery had survived the Soviet years. Tens of thousands of priests had been slaughtered in the Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror. People nevertheless believed in God. When the USSR census took place in 1937, some 55 per cent of the population rejected the aspirations of the atheistic state and declared themselves religious believers — and naturally the true proportion of the faithful must have been much greater.