The people and especially the army deserved some explanation for what had gone wrong. They deserved scapegoats, and the search did not take long. The breakdown of Soviet defenses was attributed to missteps under the leadership of General Dmitry Pavlov, commander of the Western Front. He and many of his subordinates were tried and shot. The orders, signed by Stalin, were widely circulated within the army.41
According to Soviet General Staff statistics, between the start of the war and 1 January 1942, 4.5 million members of the Red Army and Navy were killed, wounded, or captured. Of this total, 2.3 million were listed as missing in action or taken prisoner.42 These estimates were probably low. Nevertheless, they show that much of the army that was thrust into battle on 22 June 1941, including a large number of newly formed units, was completely wiped out. The causes of this catastrophe need further study. Clearly they included insufficient war readiness, the massive casualties resulting from the enemy’s use of surprise, and the military and organizational advantages of the Wehrmacht. Despite countless examples of heroism and steadfastness, the Red Army was demoralized. Another important factor was incompetence on the part of the military and political leadership.
Lacking a firm grasp of the situation, Moscow was often too slow in its decision making, and many of its decisions were bad. The links in the chain of command, the General Staff especially, were not fully functional, and it took a long time to establish reliable communication with the forces in the field. “Even the Chinese and Persian armies,” Stalin scolded his subordinates, “understand the importance of communication when it comes to managing an army. Are we really worse than the Persians and the Chinese? How can you manage units without communications? … We can’t stand for this absurdity, this disgrace, any longer.”43 During the early stages of the war, Stalin spent a great deal of time in a special room set up next to his Kremlin office conducting conferences via telegraph. This was a cumbersome means of communication, the main beneficiaries of which are the historians who today have access to tapes of the conversations. The army and the rear were largely managed using plenipotentiary “helpers.” These plenipotentiaries gathered information for Stalin and, with varying degrees of success, helped him deal with the never-ending bottlenecks plaguing transport, industry, and the overall war effort. This system, apparently unavoidable during this time of defeat and disorganization, was extremely inefficient.
Stalin, who had no experience commanding a modern army, did the best he could, relying largely on common sense rather than military science. On 27 August 1941 he sent the Leningrad leadership the following advice on organizing the city’s defenses: “Position a KV tank an average of every kilometer, in some places every 2 kilometers and in some every 500 meters, depending on the terrain. Behind these tanks or between them position other less powerful tanks and armored vehicles. Behind this line of tanks, in back of it, place heavier artillery. Infantry divisions will be immediately behind the tanks, using the tanks not only as a strike force, but also as a shield.”44 To achieve this plan, Stalin was prepared to allocate 100–120 KV tanks, the newest and best heavy tanks in the Soviet arsenal, a mighty force in the right hands.
Stalin’s involvement in tactical actions, sometimes even at the platoon level, shows just how disorganized the military command was.45 The first months of the war offered many painful lessons in the futility of uncoordinated counterattacks. Poorly planned, they often led to huge losses and achieved little. The Red Army’s leaders had scant knowledge of how to thwart an enemy advance or minimize casualties through the use of tactical retreats to positions prepared in advance. Stalin insisted on holding every inch of ground, no matter the cost. Retreat was not allowed until it was too late. The result was the encirclement of Soviet armies and their gradual destruction, one unit at a time.
Seeing battlefield failures left and right often heightened Stalin’s tendency to suspect treachery. Playing up to his suspicions, on 19 August 1941 Georgy Zhukov, then commanding the Reserve Front, sent Stalin the following report: “I believe that the enemy knows our entire defensive system very well, all the operational-strategic alignments of our forces, and knows what capabilities we have at hand. It seems that the enemy has its own people among our very senior officials with immediate knowledge of the overall situation.”46 Ten days later, Stalin himself wrote to Molotov, who was then in Leningrad: “Does it seem to you that someone is intentionally paving the way for the Germans?”47 This paranoia most likely had no serious consequences. Stalin, well aware of how dangerous it would be to start a witch hunt among Soviet generals in the midst of war, limited himself to accusations of cowardice. Few generals were arrested. More often they were deprived of their command or demoted and reassigned.
Intangibles such as patriotic readiness for self-sacrifice and determination to defend the motherland could partly compensate for a shortage of weaponry, battlefield experience, and tactical skill. Heroism and self-sacrifice by Soviet soldiers existed side by side with the demoralization brought on by the overwhelming force of the German assault, and Stalin received abundant evidence of both.48 He believed in the importance of intangibles and attributed the failures of the Red Army to panic, the wholesale surrender of Soviet units, mass desertions, and the absence of a firm command. With shrinking faith in the army’s ability to consolidate its own ranks, when it came time to ensure that his commanders absorbed his own ideas about leadership and discipline, he resorted to tried-and-true methods. In July 1941 he resurrected the institution of the military commissar, loyal and eagle-eyed party representatives who would be assigned to work side by side with every commander at every level.49 The commissars were given vast powers, to be exercised largely through “special” (secret police) departments within the army. According to official statistics, between the outbreak of war and 10 October 1941, 10,201 members of the Red Army were shot, 3,321 of them in front of their units.50 Even these numbers hardly tell the full story of repression at and around the front lines.