In April 1940, when speaking to the military council in the aftermath of the Winter War, Stalin continued to address this topic. He spent a long time explaining to the officers that “an army that has been cultivated not for attacking but for passive defense” cannot be called modern.65
Obviously when Stalin made these statements, in 1938 and early 1940, he had no intention of invading Germany. But as certain historians and commentators have pointed out, by 1941 the situation was very different. The German Army massed along the Soviet border and ready to pounce on the USSR might very well have convinced Stalin of the advisability of a preventive strike. A variety of arguments and pieces of evidence (albeit circumstantial) have been used to defend this viewpoint.66 For a biographer of Stalin, this question is far from secondary. Are we seeing, in 1941, a “different Stalin”—not the cautious incrementalist who could be drawn into a fight only when he felt himself in a position of strength but a daring leader who believed the Red Army was prepared to challenge the Wehrmacht? Such an assumption is in fundamental conflict with the traditional view of the prewar Stalin, which is based on the reminiscences of Soviet marshals and evidence of his vacillating inconsistency in the months leading up to the war. Convincing evidence that Stalin was firmly resolved to go on the offensive has yet to surface. There is no serious basis for revising the traditional view that Stalin was fatally indecisive and even befuddled in the face of the growing Nazi threat.
It is, however, true that during 1940 and 1941 Stalin worked hard to strengthen the Red Army and prepare the country for the upheaval of war. In 1940, for the fourth year in a row, he did not take a vacation in the south. His primary concern was the army and the munitions industry. The accelerated buildup of heavy industry and its defense branches had been a priority since the late 1920s. The Stalinist approach to industrialization made this buildup especially costly, but in the end, the sacrifice of millions of ruined peasants and Gulag slaves and the expenditure of the vast country’s significant resources did have a military and economic effect. By the time war with Germany broke out, the Soviet Union had more than twenty-five thousand tanks and eighteen thousand fighter planes, three to four times more than Germany.67 Such figures have inspired proponents of the theory of a “preventive war” to claim that the USSR was ready to take on Germany. But statistics often lie. In the Soviet case, the true story was often one of poor quality weaponry and padded figures, made worse by a shortage of well-trained military personnel. In any event, Stalin and the military leadership did not believe all this military hardware was sufficient. Having a military threat right at their doorstep demanded special measures. Ominous rumors of the might of the German Army and the quality of its weaponry were reaching the USSR from vanquished Europe. During the prewar period, the Soviet Union made a desperate attempt to increase output and modernize at the same time. By 1940, military production was two and a half times what it had been in 1937.68 This was an extraordinary increase. Special emphasis was placed on the production of new types of weapons, modern tanks and planes especially. Key to this modernization effort were purchases of military hardware from Germany, enabled under the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Despite the energy put into this buildup, progress was slow. There are well-known examples from the tank and aviation industry. Of the 25,000 tanks in the Soviet arsenal as of June 1941, only 1,500 were of modern design, and only a quarter of Soviet military aircraft was new.69 This is not to say that the remaining tanks and planes were useless. It does, however, show that the job of modernizing the Soviet military was far from complete. The leadership knew this.
Stalin had a much better understanding of the problems plaguing the Soviet military economy than do today’s proponents of the preventive war theory, who focus exclusively on munitions-industry production statistics. The army and munitions industry were part of a huge socioeconomic machine with myriad interdependent parts. There was a limit to how much could be spent on the military buildup, especially as the prewar years coincided with yet another slowdown in the Soviet economy, associated with an imbalance between investment and resources. Such crucial resources as metal and electricity were in short supply, and the diversion of so much investment toward military production meant cutting the already scant resources put toward meeting the basic needs of Soviet citizens. Prices and taxes were rising, most of the population was getting by on a meager ration, and in some rural areas there were signs of famine. In late 1939 a ban was placed on the sale of flour and bread in the countryside. Hungry peasants rushed to cities and towns to buy these items, which were in short supply there too. The leadership in Moscow was inundated with desperate pleas for help. In February 1940, a woman wrote from the Urals, “Joseph Vissarionovich, something really terrifying has begun.… I’ve so wasted away I don’t know what will become of me.” Someone in Stalingrad wrote to the Central Committee that “We don’t have time to sleep anymore. At two in the morning people begin lining up for bread, and by five or six there are already 600–700–1,000 people standing outside the stores.… You might be interested to know what they’re feeding workers in the cafeterias. What they used to give to swine they now give to us.”70
The country’s top leadership was fully aware of the situation. The Politburo made repeated attempts to address the shortages, giving priority to major cities and industrial enterprises. The food crisis exacerbated the problems of employee turnover and absenteeism that had always plagued the Soviet economy. As the country mobilized for war, harsh measures were introduced to combat these problems. On 26 June 1940, as France was succumbing to the Nazis, the USSR enacted a new law lengthening the workday and work week and making it a crime to be late or to leave one’s place of employment without permission. Soviet peasants had lost their freedom of movement long ago. Now factory and office workers lost theirs. In the year between the enactment of this law and the start of war, it was used to convict more than three million people.71 Of them 480,000 served prison terms up to four months.72 The rest, though not imprisoned, were forced to perform compulsory labor for up to six months. The convicted were often allowed to remain at their jobs, but a significant share of their meager pay was deducted, condemning them and their families to hunger.
Such extreme laws and the declining standard of living took a toll on Soviet society, whose suffering only increased Stalin’s deeply ingrained fear of a fifth column. Whereas the purges of the prewar years had been targeted primarily at the western areas recently annexed by the USSR, Stalin now began to worry, and with reason, that people throughout Soviet society could prove disloyal to him in time of war. Too many had suffered at the hand of the government; too many had starved or eked out a meager existence. The propagandistic claims of monolithic unity at both the front and the rear were intended for the people, for foreign enemies, and for gullible posterity. Stalin was not among the gullible.
Soviet propaganda described the Red Army as the people’s own flesh and blood, and it was. Within the Red Army, the unique features and contradictions of the Stalinist system were manifested in concentrated form. Between January 1939 and June 1941 the Soviet armed forces more than doubled in size. This rapid increase came with the same fundamental problem that plagued Stalinist “leaps forward” in general, especially the rapid industrialization of the early 1930s. Ambitious attempts to calculate exactly what equipment—even what entire factories—had to be purchased from the West failed miserably. Young, untrained Soviet workers produced defective products, damaging factory equipment in the process. Stalin’s understanding of the complex interdependence between technical and social progress was expressed in the updating of the slogan “Cadres solve everything!” to “Technology solves everything!” The rapidly growing Red Army needed not only to be armed but also trained. It is difficult to say which was the harder task.