During the 1939 to 1941 period, attacks on the British were encouraged, but no mention even of the word fascism was allowed. The Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in Paris, Nikolai Ivanov, was actually sentenced to five years for “anti-German views,” and the sentence was confirmed—doubtless through bureaucratic inefficiency—in September 1941!32
As an old Soviet diplomat remarked, the two years gained by the Nazi-Soviet Pact were almost completely wasted. He commented sourly, “He suspected his own closest comrades, but he trusted Hitler.”33
It has been said that so much genuine enmity had been focused on Trotsky that Hitler, in comparison, seemed a shadowy figure, a bogeyman for use in frightening the Party rather than a real threat. There may be an element of truth in this, psychologically speaking. But Stalin’s lack of contact with reality on the one point of the Nazi invasion had not been reflected in his attitude to Soviet–German relations during the earlier part of the Pact’s duration. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union had bargained hard, had refused to make definite commitments, and, though providing the Germans with various services appropriate to an ally such as the U-boat “Base North” near Murmansk, had conducted even the lowest-level negotiations with all the self-centered closeness and suspiciousness later shown in relations with the Anglo-American allies of a subsequent phase of the war period. The complete withdrawal from reality in the face of unpleasant facts is very much the aberration of 1941.
It seems likely that Stalin, realizing the incapacity of his Army and his regime in the face of the Germans, hoped against hope at least for a further year or two’s grace. Everything had gone his way for years. He could scarcely, it seems, conceive of his luck failing. Be that as it may, the result of his attitude was the despairing and absurd messages which poured in from the frontier on 22 June—“We are being fired on. What shall we do?”
And yet the Soviet Army was larger in numbers, stronger in materiel, and at least as well equipped technically as the Germany invaders. There was only one element in which the armies were not comparable: the German Command, staff, and officer corps in general were of immensely superior quality. Although Hitler had removed a number of the higher officers, he had at least the sense to see that he could not fight a major war without a trained military cadre.
As the armies facing the Germans broke up under a task for which they had not been properly prepared or supported, Stalin reacted promptly. The Commander of the Western Front, Pavlov; his Chief of Staff, Klimovskikh; and his Signals and Artillery Commanders were shot. General Korobkov, commanding the battered Fourth Army, followed them. This did not save the three armies and four mechanized corps trapped between Minsk and Bialystok.
The Air Force, with 10,000 to 11,000 machines to the Luftwaffe’s 5,000,34 was almost annihilated in the first days of the war. A large proportion of Soviet aircraft were not of modern type. And the other faults of Stalin’s rule in the Air Force reinforced the errors of industrial and design policy. First, training had been inadequate, and tactical methods were poor. Kesselring applied the term infanticide to the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Soviet bomber formations.
And all these long-established errors were compounded by Stalin’s last and most fateful blunder, the failure to believe in the imminence of attack. Large parts of the Air Force were caught on the ground and destroyed in the first hours. General Kopets, of the air arm, committed suicide, having lost 600 aircraft while imposing negligible damage on the Luftwaffe, and others were arrested and shot—for example, General Chernykh, commander of an aviation division in the Western Front, who had lost seven-eighths of his command, and General Ptukhin, commander of the Kiev District Air Force.35 In all, between June and August 1941, about 8,500 Soviet planes were lost.36
The Russians also had a great superiority in the number of tanks, 11,000 or 12,000 to 4,300,37 and here design had not fallen behind. The original Soviet tank defeats can be attributed almost entirely to bad tactical methods and worse staff work.38
In his biography of Stalin, Isaac Deutscher mentions that imprisoned officers (like survivors of the purged opposition) were “brought out of concentration camps and assigned to important work.”39 This needs to be qualified.
Three hundred experienced officers were being held in the Lubyanka in October 1941 while at the front battalions were being commanded by lieutenants.40 A Soviet account refers to two lists of “men inside” who were liquidated in October 1941 and July 1942, respectively, at times when Stalin “considered the situation to be desperate.” The October executions included, on the twenty-eighth of that month, and after severe torture, Colonel-General Shtern; three successive Heads of the Soviet Air Force—Loktionov, Smushkevich, and Rychagov—and a number of other senior officers, mainly artillery or Air Force (with three of their wives). They were shot without trial, on an administrative order from Beria.41
Moreover, a Soviet Marshal makes it clear that while some of the officers brought out of camps and rehabilitated gave good service, in many cases the men concerned had been ruined: “the moral, and often also the physical sufferings undergone in the prisons and camps had killed in them all the will, initiative and decisiveness necessary for a military man.” He gives the example of a general (a Civil War hero who had been wounded eleven times) who was arrested and sentenced in 1939 to twenty years’ imprisonment without any charges being presented apart from the simple formula “enemy of the people.” In a camp of “severe regime,” he became a bath attendant and was given five years more for stealing a few underclothes. He was released in 1943 and made Chief of Staff of an Army, but his sufferings had broken his character.42
The “Horse Marshals” commanded in 1941—all three from the old First Cavalry Army. Timoshenko, in the center, proved reasonably competent, though he, too, suffered heavy losses. On the southern and northern flanks, Budenny and Voroshilov were merely catastrophic, especially the former. Stalin’s other protégé, Marshal Kulik, came to grief in a clumsy operation before Leningrad. General Tyulenev became involved in the disasters in the Ukraine. All four were removed, but none was shot (except, apparently, Kulik, but only after the war). As late as 1957, Tyulenev was defending Stalin’s Lwów operations of 1920, the old wound in the side of the Soviet Army which had festered so long and so desperately.
With superior Soviet resources and vastly lengthened German communications, it was still only possible to avoid total defeat for three reasons. First was the continued existence of further reserves. Second was Allied aid. Third, and most important, was the selection of better commanders. This could only be done in the course of the endless battles of the great retreat. The incompetents who had been put in to replace an adequate command in 1937 and 1938 were weeded out by disaster. A new and efficient command was created by natural selection in the struggle itself. It was purchased, in fact, with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, with hundreds of miles of Russian territory, and with a great prolongation of the war.
Tukhachevsky’s military doctrines were reinstated in the directives of the Stavka for the counter-offensive at Moscow in 1941. The turn had come. But, as a Soviet Army officer once remarked to the author, it was owing to the purges that the road to Berlin involved the long and painful detour via Stalingrad.