Between 1937 and 1940, the Soviet officer corps grew more than two and a half times. As a result, a sizable proportion of commanders lacked the requisite knowledge and experience. During the war Stalin reproached one of his generals for the quality of army officers: “You in the military in your time ruined the army by sending all sorts of junk into academies and administration.”73 As usual, he was blaming others for problems that were primarily his fault. It was on his initiative that in the 1930s, tens of thousands of commanders, men who would have been capable of serving their country with distinction, were fired, sent to the camps, or shot for political reasons. But the damage to the Red Army was not measured only in numbers. Until the outbreak of war (and to a lesser extent even during it), repression had distorted the decision-making process, including promotions, making it possible for time-serving incompetents, skilled primarily in expressions of loyalty, to make successful careers. It also discouraged a commander’s most important quality—a willingness to take the initiative—and instead encouraged excessive caution. As was well known from anti-wrecking campaigns, repression subverted the authority of those in charge and undermined discipline. The problems of rule breaking and drunkenness that had always plagued the Red Army were magnified.
The Soviet leadership could see that there was trouble within the army. The clearest signal was the Winter War with Finland. The unexpected foiling of the Red Army by an incomparably weaker enemy dealt the Soviet military’s reputation a stunning blow that could not have come at a worse time. After the peace treaty was signed, Stalin conducted a review to determine what had gone wrong. Countless deficiencies in the arming and training of soldiers were discovered, along with problems in the command system. Stalin removed his old friend Kliment Voroshilov from the post of people’s commissar for defense and replaced much of the military’s leadership. These changes brought little improvement. In April 1941, approximately one year after the shake-up, the Politburo looked into accidents in military aviation. It turned out that even in peacetime, an average of two to three planes was lost in accidents every day. Furious, Stalin placed all the blame on the air force leadership.74 On the very eve of war, a new wave of arrests roiled the military command.
Stalin did not allow his focus on the Red Army to distract him from keeping an eye on his adversary’s forces. The ruthless efficiency of the Wehrmacht was extremely alarming. Delegations of Soviet weapons experts who visited German munitions plants under a Soviet-German cooperation agreement returned home with glowing reports. Delegation members were unable to hide how impressed they were and wrote of the huge successes of the German weapons industry. In keeping with the Russian saying “Fear has big eyes,” Soviet intelligence and the military and economic leadership constantly exaggerated the enemy’s strength. In 1940 the new people’s commissar for airplane production, Aleksei Shakhurin, reported to Stalin that Germany’s aviation industry had twice the capacity of its Soviet counterpart. The reports Stalin received from his intelligence agencies significantly exaggerated both the potential of German industry and the size of its armed forces.75 As a result of these overestimates, the enemy looked much more imposing that it actually was.
The sources of Stalin’s prewar anxiety are a huge subject that cannot be fully addressed within the scope of this book. Clearly, he had good reason to fear war with Germany. One way he may have reacted to this fear was with a desire (which many believe he felt) to delay the start of war in order to give the Soviet Union time to strengthen its military capabilities and hope that international events would take a favorable turn. He certainly had reason to hope that war would be delayed. One of the most convincing reasons was the idea that Hitler would not be so foolhardy as to mire his forces on two fronts by engaging the Soviet Union while he had Great Britain and the increasingly active United States threatening his rear. Stalin was not alone in this line of reasoning. Hitler, fully aware of how much sense this theory made, took care to exploit it. Secure in the knowledge that he was preserving the element of surprise, he did indeed take the risky plunge of engaging enemies on two fronts—largely because his enemies saw such a move as an impossibility. Nazi propaganda spread disinformation to perpetuate this mistaken idea. Stalin wound up the victim of his belief in Hitler’s instinct for self-preservation.
A few peripheral factors strengthened Stalin’s faith that Hitler would not hurry to attack the USSR. For one, Soviet-German economic cooperation was thriving. Soviet exports were feeding Germany’s appetite for raw materials. Goods imported into Germany from three different countries traveled across Soviet territory, so war with the USSR would undermine some of Germany’s important economic ties. The intelligence reports reaching Stalin’s desk were contradictory. His predisposition to believe Hitler would not attack soon influenced his intelligence agencies, who preferred to tell Stalin what he wanted to hear. Such a cause-and-effect sequence is hardly unique in world history.76
Stalin’s reaction to a 17 June 1941 intelligence report claiming that an attack was imminent is well known. Just days before the actual invasion, he wrote to the state security commissar, “You can send your ‘source’ from German aviation headquarters back to his f**king mother. This is disinformation, not a ‘source.’”77 Even if Stalin may have been correct in this case, clearly reactions like this frightened intelligence officials and discouraged them from speaking up, rendering them much less effective. It was safer to say what Stalin wanted to hear or be silent, and those in charge of the country’s security and military readiness increasingly opted for safety. Stalin got what he wanted. He alone had the right to an opinion. Everyone waited to see what the dictator had to say, hoping he knew what he was doing. Unfortunately, he did not.
PATIENT NUMBER 1
The summoning of the doctors to the near dacha on the morning of 2 March 1953.
Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov returned to their homes, leaving Stalin on the couch without medical attention. Perhaps out of fear, or perhaps out of unspoken ambivalence toward his recovery, Stalin’s comrades rejected the idea that they were facing a medical emergency. After Malenkov and Beria checked on the vozhd and found him sleeping, they proceeded to dismiss what the bodyguards had told them about his symptoms. Had he really had some sort of fit? The bodyguards were not doctors. Their imaginations could have been playing tricks on them. His colleagues probably also remembered that Stalin had recently accused his own doctors of being murderers. Who would take responsibility for calling a doctor (or summoning a murderer, as the vozhd might see it) unless he were absolutely sure one was needed? A simple need for emergency medical care was transformed into a multidimensional political problem.
Stalin’s bodyguards spent the remainder of the night in a state of anxiety. No doubt worried that they could be held accountable if Stalin died, they again asked for guidance from above and reported that things did not seem right with the boss. This time the four comrades decided to send a team of doctors to the dacha. Before doing so, however, they convened the Bureau of the Central Committee Presidium1 so that the summoning of medical luminaries would look like a collective decision by the party leadership. Should Stalin recover, his anger would fall on everyone at once. On the morning of 2 March the doctors arrived at Stalin’s bedside.