Everyone agreed that the government had to announce the war. Mikoyan and the others proposed Stalin should do it but he refused: “Let Molotov speak.” After all, Molotov had signed the treaty with Ribbentrop. The entourage disagreed—surely the people would not understand why they were not hearing from the Premier. Stalin insisted that he would speak another time. “He didn’t want to be first to speak,” said Molotov. “He needed a clear picture… He couldn’t respond like an automaton to everything… He was a human being after all.”
Molotov, who still regarded himself as a political journalist, immediately set to work on the announcement but Stalin dominated the drafting for he possessed the gift of distilling complex ideas into the simple and stirring phrases that henceforth characterized his war speeches. At midday, Molotov drove to the Central Telegraph Office on Gorky Street, just up from the Kremlin. He mastered his stammer and delivered the famous speech in his flat but quavering voice: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”
When Molotov returned, Stalin walked up to his office to congratulate him: “Well, you sounded a bit flustered but the speech went well.” Molotov needed praise: he was much vainer than he looked. Just then the vertushka rang: it was Timoshenko reporting on the chaos of the frontier where the commanders, especially Pavlov on the vital Western Front that covered Minsk and the road to Moscow, had lost contact with their troops. Stalin fulminated about how “unexpected attack is very important in war. It gives the initiative to the attackers… You must strictly prevent… any panic. Call the commanders, clear the situation and report… How long will you need? Two hours, well not more… How is the situation with Pavlov?” But Pavlov, bearing the brunt of the German attack, “has no connection with the staff of his armies…”
Attended by Molotov, Malenkov and Beria, the threesome who were to spend most of the war in the Little Corner, Stalin gradually learned of the startling German successes and the Soviet collapse. During that first week, Beria, master of the Special Department, the Osobyi Otdel, the secret police in every military unit responsible for hunting down traitors, met Stalin fifteen times while Mekhlis, political boss of the army, virtually resided in the Little Corner: terror was Stalin’s solution to defeat. But these two, along with Civil War cronies like Voroshilov and Kulik, were little comfort when Timoshenko reported that almost a thousand planes had been eliminated on the ground by the end of the day.
“Surely the German air force didn’t manage to reach every single airfield?” Stalin asked pathetically.
“Unfortunately it did.” But it was the disaster of Pavlov’s Western Front that reduced Stalin to wild, if impotent, fury: “This is a monstrous crime. Those responsible must lose their heads.”
Stalin abruptly ordered his most trusted cronies to travel to the fronts and find out what was happening. When they hesitated, Stalin shouted: “Immediately.” Chief of Staff Zhukov headed for the South-Western Front but asked who would run things in his absence.
“Don’t waste time,” scoffed Stalin. “We’ll manage somehow.” Malenkov and Budyonny, a strange coupling, the bloodless bureaucrat and the swashbuckling Cossack, flew to Briansk; Kulik to the Western Front.
The whirlwind almost consumed them: in a series of semi-farcical fiascos, all were lucky to escape with their lives. Meanwhile, in the Little Corner, Stalin’s hours were as inconsistent as the performance of his armies. Stalin and Beria were the last two to leave at 4:45 that afternoon, having been up since dawn. They still believed their counter-offensives would throw the battle onto enemy territory. They must have grabbed some sleep but Stalin was back in the office at 3:20 on the morning of 23 June to meet Molotov, Mekhlis and Beria until the early hours. By the 25th, faced with the free fall of the fronts, Stalin was spending the whole night, from 1:00 to 5:50 a.m., in the office in a state of rising outrage as one by one his special envoys disappeared into the cataclysm.
“That good-for-nothing Kulik needs a kick in the arse,” he said.1
Only Zhukov, brutal, courageous and energetic, managed to counter-attack on the South-Western Front, brandishing the Stalinist ruthlessness that distinguished him throughout the war: “Arrest immediately,” reads one of his typical orders to the Special Departments about retreating officers. “And bring them to trial urgently as traitors and cowards.”2
The boozy buffoon Marshal Kulik, whose war was to be a chronicle of tragicomical blunders, outfitted himself in a pilot’s fetching leathers, cap and goggles and arrived on the Western Front like a Stalinist Biggles on the evening of 23 June. Bewildered by the rout of the Tenth Army, he was cut off, surrounded and almost captured. He had to escape in fancy dress. “The behaviour of Marshal Kulik was incomprehensible,” the regimental Commissar denounced Kulik to Mekhlis. “He ordered everyone to take off their regalia, throw out documents and then change into peasant garb,” a disguise he was more than capable of carrying off. Burning his marshal’s uniform (and his Biggles outfit), “he proposed to throw away our arms and he told me personally to throw away my medals and documents… Kulik rode on a horse-drawn cart along the very road just taken by German tanks…”3 The Western Front itself was disintegrating. Ailing Marshal Shaposhnikov collapsed from the strain. Headquarters lost him too.
Like a game of hide-and-seek, in which more and more children are sent to find the ones hiding, Stalin sent Voroshilov to find Kulik and Shaposhnikov. On 26 June, the “First Marshal” arrived in Mogilev on a special train but was unable to find either the Western Front or the two marshals. Eventually his adjutant came upon a pitiful sight that looked more like a “gypsy encampment” than a headquarters and espied Shaposhnikov on the ground covered by a coat, looking very dead. Then he saw Pavlov, the commander, lying alone beneath a tree eating kasha out of a mess-tin in the pouring rain which he did not seem to have noticed. Shaposhnikov stirred. The adjutant realized he was alive and introduced himself. Shaposhnikov, wincing with pain, thanked God that Voroshilov had come and started to shave. Pavlov, who had now finished his kasha, was dazed and desperate: “I’m done for!”
Voroshilov descended on the camp with an explosion of threats, while sending his adjutant to hunt for Kulik. Then the two marshals retired to the special train to decide what to do about poor Pavlov. Voroshilov ordered dinner: a cook brought in ham, bread and tea, a repast that evidently disappointed the Marshal because he became furious, screaming for his cook, Comrade Franz, who emerged and stood to attention. Voroshilov demanded to know how he dared serve such a meal for two marshals.
“Why’ve you sliced the ham? Do people cut ham this way? In a god-damn inn, they serve better ham!” Voroshilov summoned Pavlov, berating him for his failures. In another of those moments that reveal the importance of personal vendetta, he reminded Pavlov that he had once complained to Stalin about him. Pavlov fell to his knees, begged for forgiveness and kissed the Marshal’s boots. Voroshilov returned to Moscow. 4
At dawn on 4 July, Mekhlis arrested Pavlov for treason: “We ask you to confirm arrest and prosecution,” Mekhlis reported. Stalin welcomed it “as one of the true ways to improve the health of the Front.” Under torture, Pavlov implicated General Meretskov who was immediately arrested too. Before Pavlov’s “trial,” Poskrebyshev brought Stalin the “[Draft] Sentence.” Seeing that it contained the traditional inventions, Stalin told Poskrebyshev: “I approve the sentence but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about ‘conspiratorial activity.’ The case shouldn’t drag out. No appeal. And then inform the fronts so that they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy.” Mikoyan (and presumably the rest of the Politburo) approved of the sentence and still did so thirty years later when he wrote his memoirs: “It was a pity to lose him but it was justified.” On 22 July, the four commanding officers of the Western Front were shot. So many telegrams flooded in asking permission to shoot traitors, they blocked up the wires in Mekhlis’s office. That day, he told them to sentence and shoot their own traitors.5