by John Keegan
In extension of his purge of the party and secret police (NKVD), which had assured his political primacy, Stalin had then accused, tried, convicted and executed for treachery over half the senior commanders of the Red Army. The first to go was Tukhachevsky, his chief of staff, the leading representative of that group of former tsarist officers who had convincingly turned coat during the Civil War of 1918-20 and thereafter provided the army with the professional leadership of which it was in such dire need in the era of post-war reconstruction. He had given firm evidence of his commitment to the new Russia. It was he who had led the offensive against Warsaw in 1920 and put down the Kronstadt rising of 1921. He had also pioneered the creation of the army’s tank arm and the organisation of the large mechanised corps whose existence had by 1935 put the Red Army at the very forefront of modern military development. Perhaps because of his very strategic radicalism, he was singled out for extinction at the outset of the military purge and shot, with seven other generals, on 11 June 1937.
The shootings thereafter were to proceed apace. By the autumn of 1938 three out of five of the Red Army’s marshals were dead, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders and 186 out of 406 brigadiers. The massacre of those in administrative and politico-military appointments was even more extensive: all eleven deputy commissars for defence were shot, seventy-five out of eighty members of the Military Soviet, and all military district commanders, together with most of their chiefs of political administration – those party commissars whose function was to ensure that soldiers should not take decisions or commitments which might attract the disfavour of the party.
The effects of the purge
It was difficult to detect any pattern in Stalin’s bloodlust. The purge certainly exterminated many of the ex-tsarists who had thrown in their lot with the Bolsheviks after 1917; yet it did not spare the chief of staff, Yegorov, whose proletarian credentials were impeccable, who was replaced by Shaposhnikov, a graduate of the Imperial General Staff College. Nor was it the case that commanders suffered worse than commissars, since the ‘politicals’ were executed in even greater numbers than the ‘soldiers’. If there was a clue to Stalin’s murderous motives, it seemed to lie in the history of personal rancours and alliances formed during the Civil War. Just as the principal victims of the party purge were those who had opposed or not assisted Stalin’s aggrandisement of his role as First Secretary after Lenin’s death, so the principal victims of the military purge were those who had been identified with Leon Trotsky’s command of the Red Army in its struggle with the Whites. The anti-Trotsky faction had been centred on the First Cavalry Army, commanded by S. M. Budenny and K. E. Voroshilov, which had recalcitrantly conducted its own strategy during the struggle against the Whites in South Russia where Stalin was political commissar, in 1918-19, and signally failed to assist Tukhachevsky in the abortive advance on Warsaw in 1920. The First Cavalry Army had been an aberrant element in Trotsky’s – and Tukhachevsky’s – anti-White war; but it had been the military instrument associated with Stalin’s early struggle against Trotsky, and its old comrades, in the years of his triumph, therefore stood high in his favour. The four men whom the purge elevated to high place in the Soviet military command after the purge, Budenny, S. K. Timoshenko, L. Z. Mekhlis, G. I. Kulik, were all First Cavalry Army officers and veterans of the southern Russian campaign. Voroshilov, already Defence Commissar before 1937 but much enhanced in power by Tukhachevsky’s fall, was also a First Cavalry Army man.
Their advancement was not to Russia’s military advantage. Budenny had a fine moustache but no military brain. Mekhlis, the chief commissar, seemed, in Professor John Erickson’s words, to have ‘combined a monumental incompetence with a fierce detestation of the officer corps’. Timoshenko was at least competent, but a political rather than a military commander. Kulik, head of ordnance, was a technological reactionary who opposed the distribution of automatic weapons to soldiers on the grounds that they were incapable of handling them and halted the production of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. Voroshilov was worst of all; in 1934, apparently for no better reason than Tukhachevsky’s advocacy of the independent armoured force, he argued: ‘It is almost axiomatic that such a powerful force as the tank corps is a very far-fetched idea and we should therefore have nothing to do with it.’ Immediately after Tukhachevsky’s removal, he abolished all tank formations larger than a brigade.
Voroshilov’s obscurantism – and that of other First Cavalry Army veterans – was exposed by the Finnish war. The humiliation inflicted on the Russians by the Finns, whom they outnumbered two-hundredfold, demanded hasty reforms. Voroshilov, nominated to the comparatively harmless posts of Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Defence Committee on 8 May 1940, was replaced by Timoshenko as Commissar for Defence. Though his conduct of operations against Finland had been less than masterly, Timoshenko at least grasped that the Red Army stood in urgent need of reorganisation. Under his aegis, steps were taken to re-establish Tukhachevsky’s large armoured formations, consisting of two armoured and one mechanised division forming an armoured corps; to begin the construction of fixed defences on Russia’s new military frontier, which stood some 200 miles further westward than before the annexation of eastern Poland in 1939; to demote commissars to a consultative status in the command structure and to bring forward soldiers of proven ability to high command. First among those was G. K. Zhukov, who in 1939 had won the Battle of Khalkin-Gol in Russia’s undeclared war against Japan on the disputed border of Mongolia. Zhukov, according to a colleague, Lieutenant-General P. L. Romanenko, describing his presentation to a high-level staff conference held in the Kremlin in December 1940, had not altogether grasped the dynamism with which Germany’s Panzer formations operated, the large scale on which they were organised or the closeness with which they combined their attacks with those of their supporting Luftwaffe squadrons. According to Romanenko, he expected ‘a relatively weak saturation level of equipment in formations’ – an old-fashioned battlefield, in short, where infantry predominated and tanks merely leavened the mass, rather than the dense concentrations of armour with which, as in France, infantry formations were tossed about by the flail of armour like sheaves on the threshing floor. Nevertheless, his was clearly a modern military mind.
The fighting potential of a Russian army – Red or tsarist – was never in doubt. Russian soldiers had proved brave, hardy and patriotic fighters against the enemies who had taken their measure in the past – Turkish, Austrian, French and British as well as German. As artillerymen they stuck to their guns – and the quality of Russian artillery material had always been excellent. As infantrymen they were tenacious in defence and aggressive in attack. Russian armies, when they had failed, had done so not because their soldiers were poor but because their generals were bad. It had been the fate of too many Russian armies to be cursed by incompetent leadership, in the Crimea, in Manchuria, and never more so than in the First World War. The Revolution had swept away the likes of Rennenkampf and Samsonov who had succeeded in leading overwhelmingly superior armies to defeat by the outnumbered Germans in East Prussia in 1914. It had replaced them during and after the Civil War with young and dynamic leaders who had learned the art of victory in the face of the enemy. The question now was whether those who had survived the purge – and they were, by definition, junior officers of conformist quality – retained the self-confidence to act with decision and energy on the battlefield.
The prospect for the 479 officers newly appointed major-general in June 1940 (the largest mass promotion in the history of any army) was not wholly discouraging. One by-product of the purge was a tightening of the Red Army’s disciplinary code, which subjected the Soviet conscript to a positively Prussian standard of military obedience. Another, paradoxically, was a demotion of the commissars; these political officials, whom the Revolution had originally imposed on the army to forestall treachery by ex-tsarist commanders, had been empowered with the right to veto military
orders until 1934. That right was reimposed during the purges but withdrawn again after the débâcle of the Finnish campaign. The ‘political deputies’ of the new divisional commanders were therefore restricted in their responsibilities to the political education of the soldiers and the maintenance of party orthodoxy among the officers. There lay an important alleviation of professional military anxieties. Another encouraging factor was the improvement of equipment. For all Kulik’s efforts to retard the modernisation of the Red Army, the material reaching its formations was of good quality. One effect of Stalin’s industrialisation programme had been to encourage the development of modern tanks, based on designs purchased outright from the American tank pioneer, Walter Christie. His revolutionary propulsion and suspension systems had resulted in the models that would evolve eventually into the T-34, which was to prove itself the best all-round tank of the Second World War. Soviet industry was also producing useful military radio sets and a prototype radar; while the aircraft industry, with an annual output of 5000 machines, was busily accumulating a fleet which, like the tank park, would by 1941 be the largest in the world.
Through his arbitrary terrorisation of inventive scientists and technologists in the armaments industry during the era of the purges, Stalin did much to interrupt the transformation of the Soviet forces into an advanced instrument of war; and, when he was not directly persecuting the innovators, he often spoke with two tongues in their support. Thus, at the important Kremlin conference of December 1940, he ridiculed his creature Kulik’s advocacy of a return to large marching divisions of infantry supplied by animal transport, comparing him to the peasant who preferred the wooden plough to the tractor; nevertheless he permitted the disbandment of the mechanised transport department and starved the army of trucks (which, when the time came, would have to be supplied by Lend-Lease from Detroit). Yet his influence was not wholly malign. Having wrought his spite in the purge, he thereafter accepted the need for reform which the army’s disastrous showing in the Winter War with Finland had revealed, accepted the common-sense advice of men like Timoshenko, recognised the talents of others who had made their name in the Mongolian campaign against Japan, like Zhukov and Rokossovsky, and in Finland, like Kirponos, and promoted other younger men of good military standing, like Konev, Vatutin, Yeremenko, Sokolovsky and Chuikov. Above all he sustained the growth of the Red Army itself. It was a source of pride to him and the Russian people that the army was the largest in the world, and from its very size he took confidence in Russia’s ability to defend itself and exercise influence beyond its borders. By the spring of 1941 its war strength numbered between 230 and 240 ‘rifle’ divisions (about 110 in the west) – formations 14,000 strong, though largely dependent on horsed transport for supply – as well as 50 tank divisions and 25 mechanised divisions which were fully equipped. The Soviet tank park numbered 24,000 and, if of mixed quality, could draw on an annual output of 2000, of which an increasing number were T-34s; by the end of 1941 tank production targets would stand at between 20,000 and 25,000, while Germany would never succeed in producing more than 18,000 tanks in any year. The Red Air Force, drawing on an annual output of 10,000 machines in 1941, stood at a strength of at least 10,000 in 1940; lacking as yet equivalents to the best German aircraft, and wholly subordinate to the army though it was, it was nevertheless the largest air force in the world.
In crudely material terms, therefore, Stalin as warlord stood on equal, perhaps superior, footing to Hitler. As strategist, however, he was as yet in no way his match. Hitler’s decision to provoke war in 1939 was to prove a catastrophic miscalculation; in its prosecution, however, he displayed exactly the same cynical estimation of motive and ruthless exploitation of weakness as had won him such spectacular diplomatic victories in 1936-9. Stalin also operated with ruthlessness and cynicism; but his estimation of motive and assessment of reality were clouded by a coarse and over-cunning solipsism. He ascribed to adversaries a pattern of calculation as brutal and grasping as his own. Thus, because he took such satisfaction in the quantity of territory he had added to the Soviet Union since 1939, he appears to have thought that it would be a primary German aim, in the event of war, to take it from him. He certainly made it his primary object to hold what he had. Consequently much of Soviet military effort in the spring of 1941 was dedicated to the construction of new frontier defences, to replace those abandoned by the advance from the 1939 frontier in the previous two years. At the same time the Red Army was deployed so as to defend the frontier’s every kink and twist, in defiance of all traditional military wisdom about ‘defence in depth’ and the maintenance of counter-attack reserves. The defences of the 1939 frontier were actually stripped to provide weapons for the new ones; while the armoured formations, which might have been held in support behind the zone under fortification, were dispersed piecemeal throughout the five western military districts, concentrated neither for a counter-stroke nor for deep blocking operations.
Stalin’s dissipation of his own forces was matched by his disregard for others’ warnings of the danger in which they stood. Entirely cold-hearted though he was in his dealings with Hitler, he insisted on regarding reports of his fellow dictator’s aggressive intentions as ‘provocation’. Such reports came to him in profusion after March 1941, from his own ambassadors and military attachés, from Soviet agents, Russian and non-Russian, from foreign governments already at war with Germany, particularly the British, even from neutrals, including the United States. Primary indications of German intentions were provided by the systematic flights of German reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet territory – by the same squadron commanded by Theodor Rowehl that had overflown Britain in 1939 – and the penetration of the Soviet border zone by German patrols dressed in Russian uniforms. These were supplemented as early as April by reports from Richard Sorge, the Comintern spy in Tokyo who was privy to the dispatches of the German ambassador (which he helped him compose), that preparations for war were complete. On 3 April Winston Churchill, whose source (unrevealed, of course, to the Russians) was Ultra intelligence, sent Stalin word that the Germans had deployed armour released by Yugoslavia’s accession to the Tripartite Pact directly to southern Poland. By a strange dereliction of duty, Stafford Cripps, the warmly pro-Soviet British ambassador to Moscow, delayed transmission of the message until 19 April; but Stalin had had equally good Western intelligence of German intentions weeks before that. Early in March, Sumner Welles, the American Under-Secretary of State, had passed to the Russian ambassador in Washington the gist of an official inter-governmental communication which, in its original form, read: ‘The government of the United States, while endeavouring to estimate the developing world situation, has come into possession of information which it regards as authentic, clearly indicating that it is the intention of Germany to attack the Soviet Union.’ The imprecision of this weighty warning was dissipated throughout the spring by messages from the Comintern agent Alexander Foote and the mysterious but quickly authenticated ‘Lucy’ network, both based in Switzerland. ‘Lucy’, whose identity remained obscure – perhaps a member of the exiled Czech secret service, the most effective run by any government during the war; perhaps a cell of the Swiss intelligence agency; perhaps an outpost of Bletchley – signalled Moscow in mid-June with a list of German objectives, a Wehrmacht order of battle for Barbarossa and even the current date for D-Day, 22 June. At about the same time (13 June), the British Foreign Minister told the Soviet ambassador that evidence of an imminent German attack was mounting and offered to send a military mission to Moscow.
Stalin’s wishful thinking
Stalin by then had a plethora of evidence that German (with Romanian and Finnish) forces stood ready in millions to attack Russia’s western frontier. Yet in the face of it all he clung to his belief and hope that every unwelcome interpretation of the facts was the fruit of Western ill-will. Cripps appears to have been so baffled by Stalin’s wishful thinking that he consistently represented it to London as proof of Russia’s intentio
n to yield to a German ultimatum. In that judgement he was, of course, half right. Since the failure of Russia’s diplomatic offensive against Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Turkey four months earlier, Stalin was in chastened mood. Badly frightened also by the Hess mission, which he insisted on seeing as an attempt by Hitler to make peace with Britain so that he could attack Russia, Stalin had reverted to his earlier policy, fixed in August 1939, of dealing with Germany by granting her concessions, and he was now concerned most of all to placate Hitler by a meticulous fulfilment of the economic terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Train-loads of oil, grain and metals, as by strict quota, continued to pour across the frontier throughout June; what was to prove the final delivery crossed in the early hours of 22 June itself.
In this climate of appeasement, the Red Army’s commanders, denied access to reliable intelligence (‘reliable’ intelligence, in Stalin’s topsy-turvy world, was automatically deemed ‘unreliable’, as Professor John Erickson has demonstrated), and fearful of offending their timorous warlord, were prevented from taking any precautionary measures. M. P. Kirponos, commander of the Kiev military district, who was to show himself the most independent-minded of Stalin’s generals in the weeks before Barbarossa (and who died in the great encirclement battle at Kiev in September which was the worst outcome of Stalin’s blindness), deployed some of his units to the frontier in early June, was reported by the local NKVD to Beria, Stalin’s secret policeman, for ‘provocation’ and required to countermand the order. In mid-June, when he tried to man his defensive positions again, he was flatly told, ‘There will be no war.’ This was not merely a statement for private consumption. On 14 June, eight days before the launching of Barbarossa, the Soviet national newspapers printed a government statement to the effect that ‘rumours of the intention of Germany to break the [Molotov-Ribbentrop] Pact are completely without foundation, while the recent movements of German troops which have completed their operations in the Balkans to the eastern and northern parts of Germany are connected, it must be supposed, with other motives which have nothing to do with Soviet-German relations.’ On 14 June in ‘eastern and northern parts of Germany’, which meant those parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia captured or annexed between 1938 and 1939, nearly 4 million German troops, organised in 180 divisions, with 3350 tanks and 7200 guns supported by 2000 aircraft, stood ready to march to war. They were to be accompanied by fourteen Romanian divisions and shortly to be joined by the Finnish, Hungarians and puppet Slovak armies, together with a volunteer Spanish (the ‘Blue’) and several Italian divisions. To those Russian commanders in the front line who sensed the massing of this mighty host and asked for orders, advice, even reassurance from above, the answer, as Kilch, the chief of artillery at Minsk (a primary Wehrmacht objective), later bitterly recalled, was ‘always the same – “Don’t panic. Take it easy. ‘The boss’ knows all about it.” ’
