The following day, 30 June, Stalin did not show up at his Kremlin office or anywhere else in Moscow. Given the growing crisis, this withdrawal from his duties was truly reckless. The huge machine of government had been specially designed so that it could not run without him; inevitably, it started to break down. Something had to be done, and Molotov took the initiative. He was the most senior member of the informal hierarchy within the Politburo. According to various eyewitnesses, after losing track of Stalin, Molotov began calling him at the dacha.31 When he was unable to get a response—or, more likely, after bearing the brunt of Stalin’s dark mood—he concluded that Stalin was truly struggling. According to Mikoyan, Molotov said that “Stalin is so exhausted that he doesn’t care about anything; he’s lost all initiative and is in a bad way.”32 This account was indirectly confirmed many years later by Molotov himself in interviews conducted by the writer Feliks Chuev: “He didn’t show himself for two or three days; he was at the dacha. He was certainly suffering and a little depressed.”33 Molotov’s memory seems to have failed him on certain details: Stalin did not seclude himself at the dacha for even two full days, let alone three, but given the catastrophic circumstances, even a brief absence by the country’s leader must have seemed an eternity.
Alarmed, Molotov called a meeting with Beria, Malenkov, and Voroshilov. There was no talk of officially removing Stalin from power or even taking over his duties. Instead the group tried to figure out how to lure Stalin out of his dacha and make him do his job. This was a delicate task. One simply did not show up at Stalin’s dacha without an invitation, and under the circumstances they could only imagine how he might react to an un-sanctioned visit. Furthermore, it would not be easy explaining their reason for coming to see him. Nobody wanted to be the one to tell Stalin that his breakdown was placing the entire country in jeopardy. But these men were not neophytes when it came to political maneuvering, and they devised a brilliant plan. They decided to go together (certainly nobody wanted to go alone!) and present Stalin with a proposal for creating a supreme authority to oversee the war effort: the State Defense Committee, to be headed by Stalin himself. In addition, the committee would include the four men who had come up with the plan. Molotov would serve as first deputy to the committee chairman.
The creation of the State Defense Committee solved multiple problems at once. Now Stalin’s fellow leaders could visit him at his dacha without implicitly reproaching him for not showing up at the Kremlin. That the committee would be headed by Stalin demonstrated his continued leadership and the Politburo’s firm support, while the fact that it was a small committee of his most faithful comrades allowed them to privately help him make decisions as he recovered his mental balance. Finally, the four men together interacting with Stalin at this delicate time helped protect each of them from the full force of Stalin’s outbursts.
Once Molotov, Malenkov, Voroshilov, and Beria had agreed on the idea of the committee, Mikoyan and Voznesensky were called to Molotov’s office. They were two members of the leadership group that the four men had decided not to include in the committee, but it was important that they also come to the dacha as a demonstration of unity.
Mikoyan left behind an account of what happened when the delegation arrived at Stalin’s dacha late in the day on 30 June. The vozhd was sitting in an easy chair in the small dining room. He looked at his unexpected visitors inquisitively and asked why they had come. As Mikoyan describes it, “He looked calm, but somehow strange.” After hearing Beria, the chosen spokesman for the delegation, present the proposal to create a State Defense Committee, Stalin raised only one objection: he wanted Mikoyan and Voznesensky included as well. Beria was ready with the argument against expanding the membership: someone had to lead the Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin relented.34
Mikoyan’s memoirs were edited by his son Sergo, who took a number of liberties with his father’s original text, which is preserved in the archives.35 In editing his father’s account of this incident, Sergo clearly tried to create the impression that Stalin was frightened by his comrades’ visit, inserting embellishments such as “Upon seeing us, he [Stalin] seemed to cower in his chair” and “I [Mikoyan] had no doubt: he had decided that we were there to arrest him.”36
Was Stalin really frightened? How should we interpret this meeting? Unquestionably, it was an exceptional moment in the history of his dictatorship. However deferential their demeanor, Stalin’s associates had violated his supreme authority in at least five ways. (1) They had come unbidden to the dacha, (2) having worked out an enormously important initiative behind his back, and (3) they urged that their proposal be adopted in the form they had agreed on among themselves. (4) They had formalized Molotov’s role as second-in-command in the government despite the fact that he was out of favor with the vozhd, and (5) they had decided to exclude Voznesensky from the committee, even though just that May, when Stalin had taken over the chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars, he had chosen Voznesensky over Molotov to serve as his first deputy. In essence, Stalin’s closest colleagues were letting him know that in the face of an existential threat, the post-Terror leadership had to be consolidated and that he had better abandon any thought of further shake-ups at the top. This was a unique episode; in his time in power, Stalin saw nothing like it before or after. It signaled a temporary change in the nature of the dictatorship and the emergence of a wartime political compromise, a rebalancing of power within the Politburo somewhere between the flexibility Stalin had demonstrated in the early 1930s, when he was first consolidating his dictatorship, and the tyranny he was exercising when the war broke out. This arrangement endured almost until the war’s end.
The day after the meeting at the dacha, the establishment of the State Defense Committee was announced in newspapers. The fact that the committee’s membership was limited to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov, and Malenkov did not mean that the rest of the Politburo’s top leadership had lost its influence. Mikoyan and Voznesensky had important jobs keeping the economy running. Zhdanov was focused on the defense of Leningrad. Given the critical nature of wartime supply and evacuation, Kaganovich’s responsibilities as railway commissar were pivotal. In February 1942, Mikoyan, Voznesensky, and Kaganovich also joined the committee.37
The establishment of the State Defense Committee was the first in a series of organizational changes that eventually placed supreme leadership in the Soviet war effort in Stalin’s hands. On 10 July General Command Headquarters, which had been headed by Defense Commissar Timoshenko, was replaced with a Supreme Command Headquarters, headed by Stalin. On 19 July the Politburo passed a resolution making Stalin people’s commissar for defense and, on 8 August, supreme commander.38 The customary order was restored. Stalin was once again the sole leader of both the people and the army, decisive and confident of victory. An important milestone in “Stalin’s return” was his famous radio address on 3 July.
Whereas Molotov had gone to the Central Telegraph Building, next door to the Kremlin, to make his nationally broadcast speech of 22 June, Stalin demanded that radio facilities be set up in the Kremlin itself. The telegraph service’s already overwhelmed technical staff had no choice but to comply. Cables were extended to the Council of People’s Commissars building. Stalin read his address sitting at a little table with microphones and a bottle of Borzhomi mineral water.39 From the very start it was clear that the address would not conform to his usual style. “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and navy! It is to you, my friends, that I speak!”40 The speech, different from any other in his career, was long talked about and remembered. Glued to their radios or studying his words in the newspaper, people sought an answer to the most pressing questions: What did the future hold? When would the war be over? Stalin offered little cause for comfort. While greatly exaggerating German losses (“The enemy’s best divisions and the best units of its aviation have been smashed”), he was forced to acknowledge that “This is a matter of … the life and death of the Soviet state, the life and death of the peoples of the USSR.” Ominously, he called on the people to recognize “the full depth of danger that threatens our country,” to organize a partisan struggle in German-occupied territories, to create militia detachments, and to remove or destroy all material resources from territories under threat from the enemy. He used two difficult-to-translate words in characterizing the war: vsenarodny (of all the peoples) and otechestvenny (domestic or “of the fatherland,” but often translated as “patriotic” in the context of World War II). Anyone listening could draw only one conclusion: the war would be long and hard.