To ensure that the troops fought as hard as they could, Stalin made it not only shameful but also illegal to be taken prisoner. The provisions making capture by the enemy a crime were contained in the notorious Order No. 270, issued by Supreme Command Headquarters on 16 August 1941. Judging by its style, the order was mostly (if not solely) written by Stalin. It required that those taken prisoner be killed “by any means, either from the ground or from the air.” The families of commanders who joined the ranks of “malicious deserters” were to be arrested. Families of soldiers who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner were deprived of their government pensions. The order was read out loud in every unit of the army.51 Treating capture as treasonous doomed former Soviet prisoners of war to discrimination long after the war concluded.
Using a combination of threats and promises of reinforcements, Stalin tried to instill in his military the will to be unyielding. On 11 July 1941, when the Germans had reached the outskirts of Kiev, Stalin sent Ukrainian party secretary Khrushchev a telegram that read: “I warn you that if you take even one step toward pulling your troops back to the left bank of the Dnieper and fail to defend the fortified districts on the right bank of the Dnieper, you will all face brutal retribution as cowards and deserters.”52 On 16 July he signed a State Defense Committee order to defend Smolensk to the last. Any thought of surrendering the city was “criminal, bordering on outright treason against the Motherland.”53 Throughout the Battle of Smolensk, which lasted until September, the surrounded Red Army put up a dogged fight, delaying the German advance across the Central Front to Moscow. Hitler’s decision to move a sizable portion of his forces from the Central Front to Ukraine and Leningrad also helped slow the Nazi advance toward the capital. Throughout July and August Stalin continued to hope that Soviet forces would hold the line. Beyond it stood their three major capitals: Leningrad to the north, Moscow in the center, and Kiev to the south. Time was working against the Germans. Fall was coming, with its slushy roads, and the first frosts would not be far behind.
Demonstrating that the Red Army could put up a good fight was important for Stalin’s negotiations with his Western allies, Great Britain and the United States. Right after the German invasion, the leaders of these countries expressed full support for the Soviet people in their fight against the Nazis. Then began the complicated process of working out relations and holding talks about what form support would take. President Roosevelt sent his adviser, Harry Hopkins, to Moscow to obtain firsthand information. Stalin gave Hopkins an exceptionally warm welcome and tried to demonstrate decisiveness and confidence of victory. When their talks were interrupted by an air raid, the Soviet leader brought Hopkins in his own car to the bomb shelter at metro station Kirovskaia, where they were met by bodyguards and Internal Affairs Commissar Beria. One Soviet official left a description of the scene:
[Beria] took Stalin by the arm and tried to bring him down below, making some remark about danger. Stalin responded curtly and rudely, which is how he always spoke when he was irritated: “Get away from me, coward!” … Stalin stood in the middle of the dark courtyard and looked into the black sky at the German plane in the searchlight’s cross beams. Hopkins stood next to him, also watching. Then something happened that did not happen very often during night raids. The German Junker started to fall uncontrollably from the sky—it must have been hit. And just then the anti-aircraft artillery hit a second plane. Stalin said, and the interpreter told Hopkins:
“That’s what will happen to everyone who comes to us with a sword. And anyone who comes in the name of the good will be welcomed as a dear guest.”
He took the American by the arm and led him below.54
In such demonstrations of steadfastness, together with the fierce fight put up by the Red Army, the Western allies saw something for which they were ardently hoping: Hitler’s blitzkrieg was being impeded. They could and should help the Russians. On 29 September through 1 October 1941, a conference of the three powers—the USSR, Great Britain, and the United States—was held in Moscow. Britain’s minister of supply, Lord Beaver-brook, led the British delegation, and Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the USSR, acted as President Roosevelt’s personal representative. On the Soviet side, negotiations were conducted by Stalin and Molotov. The Moscow Conference concluded with important specific agreements on assisting the Soviet war effort. The scope of assistance gradually grew. Western tanks and planes supplied through Lend-Lease made a significant contribution along the Soviet-German front. By war’s end, the Red Army was mostly driving American-made trucks. Lend-Lease also played a crucial role in supplying communications equipment, locomotives, railcars, and food to the Soviet Union. “If not for Lend-Lease, victory would have been greatly hindered,” Stalin told Roosevelt during their meeting in Crimea in February 1945.55
The USSR’s new allies were clearly worried about the grim situation along the Soviet-German front. Not long before the Moscow Conference, disaster had struck the Southwestern Front, where a ferocious battle was being waged over Kiev. According to Zhukov, in late July he had informed Stalin of the difficult situation and proposed abandoning Kiev and focusing on fortifying the eastern bank of the Dnieper to prevent the Germans from breaking through the Southwestern Front’s right flank. Stalin responded with a gruff refusal, removed Zhukov as chief of the General Staff, and sent him to the Western Front.56 The situation in Ukraine continued to deteriorate. In early August the Sixth and Twelfth Armies—approximately 130,000 men—found themselves completely encircled by the Germans outside Uman.57 On 8 August, after an advance by German troops, Stalin summoned the commander of the Southwestern Front, General Mikhail Kirponos, to confer with him via telegraph. He began the meeting in his usual manipulative manner, attributing to Kirponos intentions he had not openly expressed but that might be expected. “We have received information that the front has decided to surrender Kiev to the enemy with a light heart supposedly due to a shortage of units capable of holding Kiev. Is that true?” Kirponos assured Stalin: “You have been misinformed. The Front’s Military Council and I are taking every measure to prevent Kiev from surrendering under any circumstances.”58 Stalin ordered him to stand firm and promised help in a few weeks.
It was obvious that the Soviet armies in the vicinity of Kiev were in danger of being encircled. In early September, the Southwestern Command, with the support of the General Staff in Moscow, proposed that forces be urgently pulled back. Stalin categorically refused. “Just the mention of the harsh necessity of relinquishing Kiev was enough to throw Stalin into a rage and cause him to momentarily lose his composure,” Aleksandr Vasilevsky wrote in his memoirs.59 On 14–15 September, the Germans closed the ring, encircling some 452,700 Soviet troops east of Kiev,60 the worst defeat of the war thus far. On 20 September, Kirponos and the rest of the Southwestern Command were killed in combat. The opportunity to surrender Kiev but preserve the army had been lost. The destruction of this huge force further strengthened the Germans’ strategic advantage.
Historians of every stripe, even those favorably disposed toward Stalin, place most of the blame for this catastrophe on his shoulders. Zhukov claims that Stalin implicitly acknowledged his own guilt. When putting Zhukov in charge of the Leningrad Front in September 1941, Stalin brought up the general’s warning about the threat to the Southwestern Front and said, “Your report to me back then was accurate, but I did not understand it quite correctly.”61