Stalin himself and his military indoctrinators, after all, repeatedly touted “offensiveness” as the Red Army’s most distinctive feature. So wedded were they to this concept of waging offensives on enemy territory and reaping the advantages of surprise attack that they seriously neglected designing necessary defensive (oборонителЬние, or oboronitel’niye) strategies and defense-oriented preparations for the Red Army. This is all but admitted now by contemporary Russian historians and even by some latter-day defense officials (e.g., in a long article appearing in mid-2000 in a major Russian military publication written by the current chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, General Anatoly Kvashnin).4 In any case, retreat was out of the question for the mighty, well-motivated Red Army, whose mission was “revolutionary” and “world historical,” not simply traditional war fighting alone based on conventional principles of armed struggle.
Among the several, newly disclosed documents of the last few years up through the year 2000 that call for a reassessment of the conclusions previously drawn in earlier discussions of the prewar period are the texts of Stalin’s address and remarks made to the graduating Red Army military cadets, May 5, 1941; the texts of Red Army strategic plans, in particular that of May 15, 1941, and their later “refinements”; and the telltale orders issued from the General Staff for secret, well-camouflaged deployments of Red Army troops to the Western Front in the run-up to the fatal day of June 22, in which defensive preparations are not even given as one of the Red Army’s main tasks but, instead, in which offensive troop concentrations and tactics are paramount.
The preparation of this book has been further sourced by a comprehensive, well-documented, 600-page study of the pre-June 1941 Red Army, Navy, and Air Force war preparations as canvassed in the new book by Russian military historian, Mikhail I. Mel’tyukhov of VNIIDAD. Together with Bobylev and other “new historians”—whether Russian, French, German, or American—all such historians are cited in the pages that follow.
NOTES
Stalin’s documented remarks in the epigraph are quoted in F. I. Firsov, “Arkhivy Kominterna I Vneshnyaya Politika SSSR v 1939–1941” (”Archives of the Communist International and the Foreign Policy of the USSR 1939–1941”), Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya, no. 6 (1992), pp. 18–19.
1
P. N. Bobylev, “Tochku v diskussii stavit’ rano. K voprosu o planirovanii v general’nom shtabe RKKA vozmozhnoi voiny s Germaniyei v 1940–1941 godakh” (“Calling an Early Halt to the Discussion about the Problem in the General Staff of the RKKA on Planning a Possible War with Germany from the Years 1940–1941”), Otechesvennaya istoriya, no. 1 (2000), pp. 41–64. Bobylev also takes Viktor Suvorov (Vladmir Bogdanovich Rezun, a Russian émigré living in London) to task for the distortions in his writings of 1989–90, including his 1990 book, The Ice-Breaker Who Started the Second World War? and notes that Suvorov, in any case, was not the first to search for offensism in Stalin’s and the Red Army’s war planning against Germany.
2
M. I. Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi Shans Stalina Sovetskyi Soyuz I Bor’ba za Yevropu 1939–1941 (Stalin’s Lost Opportunity: The Soviet Union and the Battle for Europe 1939–1941) (Moscow: Veche, 2000), pp. 7, 9. This book, running 600 pages, is the most comprehensive study to date on the period under examination. Its author is a post-Soviet historian on the staff of the All-Russian Scientific-Research Institute for Documents and Archive Affairs (VNIIDAD), founded in 1966. Mel’-tyukhov has contributed chapters and articles to a number of books and scholarly history periodicals in Russia.
3
A. N. Yakovlev, ed., 1941 God. Dokumenty (The Year 1941: Documents) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond Demokratiya, 1998), 2 vols. Russian historians describe these volumes as crucial in updating discussion of the pre-June 1941 preparations and other relevant events.
4
Anatoly Kvashnin and Makhmut Gareyev, “Sem’ Urokov Velikoi Otechestvennoi” (“Seven Lessons from the Great Fatherland War”), Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozreniye (April 28-May 11, 2000), pp. 1–3.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude for the inestimable cooperation and critical input of a number of people as follows.
Without the support and confidence placed by Ms. Mary Carpenter of Rowman & Littlefield in me and my manuscript, this book would not be in readers’ hands. I am deeply indebted to Ms. Alyona Mossounova in Moscow for her generous work in corralling and reproducing for me numerous Russian journal articles, especially given the small ways in which she selflessly allowed me to “repay” her.
A number of Russian and American scholars and authors helped me in the preparation of this book—either via one-on-one exchanges or indirectly through their own research and their valuable books. Especially helpful in this respect were Yuri Afanasiev, Pavel Bobylev, David M. Glantz, Oleg Kalugin, Mikhail Meltyukhov, Lev Navrozov, Vladimir Nevezhin, Richard C. Pipes, R. C. Raack, Ellsworth Raymond, Harriet F. Scott, and Gerhard L. Weinberg.
Others lent various types of indispensable support, whether logistic, bibliographic, or moral. They include my close friend, Fred Duda; Linda Hunsaker Hardman of the Kimbrough Memorial Library at the Ringling School of Art and Design; Molly Molloy of the Hoover Institution and Thomas Titura.
Introduction
As long as capitalism exists and socialism exists, we cannot live in peace. In the end, one or the other will triumph. A funeral dirge will be sung either over the Soviet Republic or over capitalism.
—V. I. Lenin
Bolshevism cannot evade responsibility for perpetrating falsehoods unheard of in history . . . for fostering criminal ideas of force and violence, class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, revolution, [and] for the militarization of the country.
—A. N. Yakovlev, former Communist Party Secretary for Propaganda
[Revolution in Russia] did not lead to national harmony but to catastrophe and genocide. Anyone who forgets the past is destined to repeat it over and over.
—V. P. Ostrovskyi, post-Soviet Russian high school textbook author
The demise of communist rule in Russia in 1991 triggered intense discussion about depictions of the past as boilerplated in Communist Party–guided Soviet historiography. With the partial opening of archives of Soviet civilian, military, and security police authorities, the contents of the Orwellian Memory Hole, to which so many historical truths were committed in the Stalin period, began to be exhumed. As a result, wholesale revisionism has been sweeping through Russian historical science for the past ten years. In this process almost no stone has been left unturned. One of the great “white spots,” as Russians call intentional omissions in the Soviet historical record, concerns Josef Stalin’s and the Red Army General Staff’s intentions and plans during and after the signing of the crucial Nazi–Soviet agreements of August–September 1939. Included are secret protocols drawn up and signed by the governments of Berlin and Moscow sixty-two years ago, whose very existence was disingenuously denied by former Soviet authorities, including Mikhail Gorbachev. Since roughly 1994–95, even more revealing documents have surfaced as various Russian archival holdings are made available to working historians. Western historians have still not caught up with the new disclosures that date from 1996 to 2001.