Apparently Stalin was not sure how to address these challenges. In the immediate aftermath of victory, he sent mixed messages to the country, including hints at a coming liberalization. Take, for example, the remarks made at a reception honoring Red Army commanders on 24 May 1945:
Our government made more than a few mistakes; there were moments of desperation in 1941–1942, when our army was on the retreat, abandoning our native villages and cities.… Another people might have told its government: you have not met our expectations; go away; we will put another government in your place that will sign a truce with Germany and ensure us peace. But the Russian people did not choose to do that since they believed in the correctness of their government’s policies and chose to make sacrifices in order to secure the destruction of Germany. And this trust the Russian people placed in the Soviet government proved to be the decisive force that secured a historic victory against an enemy of humanity—against fascism. Thanks to the Russian people for this trust!1
This hint of penitence was an effective gesture by a confident, popular, and triumphant leader. But soon Stalin began to sense that such statements could be perilous. They opened the door to discussion of critical questions about the past war, and echoes of these discussions were starting to reach him. In November 1945, he was told about a letter from a propagandist in the Buriat-Mongol republic who was being asked during lectures just what Stalin meant when he mentioned mistakes by the Soviet government: “I, of course, was not able to answer this question.… I earnestly ask you, Com. Stalin, for your explanation as to what should be the answer to this question.”2 More to the point was a letter from N. M. Khmelkov from the village of Maly Uzen in Saratov Oblast that asked, “How could we allow it to happen that when the war broke out the German Army was better armed than our army?” Khmelkov recalled prewar promises that the Red Army would soon be fighting “on the territory from which the enemy comes” and concluded by asking Stalin a central question, the validity of which Stalinists reject to this day: “Victors are not judged. But a victorious people is obliged to figure out whether victory was achieved with the least possible expenditure of effort and resources and with the fewest possible casualties, and if it was not, then why: were we given too little time to prepare for war, were the cogs in a complex machine operating poorly … and failing its more complicated parts?”3 Stalin instructed that Khmelkov’s letter be filed away.4 He had no intention of responding to such questions or “figuring out” what mistakes the government might have made. To forestall undesirable discussion of the price of victory, the performance of the military leadership, and hopes for postwar liberalization, he launched a series of ideological counterattacks.
The first of these was a reappraisal of the toll taken by the war and the reasons for defeat. In an obvious attempt to downplay the nation’s losses, in March 1946 Stalin officially stated that “as a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irretrievably lost approximately 7 million in fighting with the Germans and because of the German occupation and the driving of Soviet people into German hard labor.”5 This was a strange number to pick, and it was far from accurate, but it is possible to see how Stalin might have arrived at it. According to General Staff estimates, approximately 7 million Red Army soldiers were killed in the war or died of wounds and disease.6 He must have known that he was distorting the truth when he included the victims of occupation and those taken to work in Nazi labor camps in this figure. Soviet war losses no longer looked quite so terrible, and the matter was put to rest for many years.
While it may have been easy enough to hide the true number of Soviet war dead, the Red Army’s catastrophic retreat was another matter. How had the Germans been able to advance all the way to the Volga? At best, discussion of this ignominious episode could be suppressed. The horrible defeats suffered during the war’s first eighteen months cast a shameful light on the regime and on Stalin himself, diminishing his stature as the architect of victory. Soviet propaganda had a few stock arguments to explain those early defeats: the might of Hitler’s war machine, which enslaved Europe; the fact that the Red Army had not finished rearming; and the Nazis’ perfidious surprise attack. Apparently Stalin felt these arguments were not enough. Cautiously and gradually, he tried to introduce another idea into the propaganda arsenal, one that exonerated him as supreme commander: that the Red Army’s retreat was a calculated move designed to wear down the enemy. There was a well-known historical precedent that made this argument understandable and familiar: Kutuzov’s 1812 strategy of allowing Napoleon’s army to enter deep into Russian territory, even relinquishing Moscow, before counterattacking, a strategy that is credited with preserving the army and saving the country.
An opportunity to promote this new way of explaining the retreat came in the form of a letter Stalin received in early 1946 from Ye. A. Razin, a military academy instructor. Razin was writing the vozhd with general questions about doctrine, but Stalin responded in a letter by offering specific and far-reaching guidelines for understanding Soviet military history. He underscored two central ideas. First, Lenin was not “an expert in the military sciences” during the Civil War years or at any other time. Thus Stalin was the only Soviet leader who qualified as a true commander in chief. The second idea offered a more favorable interpretation of the early, catastrophic stage of the war. “A retreat, under certain disadvantageous conditions,” Stalin wrote, “is just as legitimate a form of combat as an offensive.” He noted the need to take a closer look at the counteroffensive “after an enemy’s successful offensive, [when] the defender gathers strength, switches to a counteroffensive, and hands the enemy a decisive defeat.” Bolstering this idea with historical parallels, Stalin cited the example of the ancient Parthians, who “lured” Roman forces deep inside their country and then “struck with a counteroffensive and annihilated them.” He also offered the example of Kutuzov’s counteroffensive against the French, calling him a “brilliant” commander.7
Of course, Stalin did not draw a direct line between these historical precedents and the events of 1941–1942, but the implication was obvious. The defeats of the war’s first stage were transformed into a manageable phase of preparation for a counteroffensive, a “legitimate form of combat,” and not a catastrophe caused by egregious blunders at the top or a broken chain of command. Aware of the questionable validity of this recontextualization, Stalin did not widely disseminate his letter at first. It was written in late February 1946 but not published until a year later.