Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  of oil and other materials in short supply were rushed to Germany without pressing for the delivery of industrial equipment from Germany due to Russia under the Trade

  Agreement.

  Whereas Schulenburg remained amicable in his talks with Molotov, the German

  Government's response to Stalin's friendly economic and diplomatic gestures was

  precisely nil. It seems, therefore, that it was in sheer desperation that—exactly a week before the Invasion—Stalin decided to publish that famous TASS communiqué of June

  14, a document which was to figure prominently in all Soviet histories of the war written under Khrushchev as the most damning piece of evidence of Stalin's wishful thinking, shortsightedness and total lack of understanding of what was going on in Germany even at that late hour. This is the text of the famous TASS communiqué:

  Even before Cripps's arrival in London and especially after he had arrived there, there have been more and more rumours of an "early war" between the Soviet Union and Germany. It is also rumoured that Germany has presented both

  territorial and economic claims to the Soviet Union... All this is nothing but clumsy propaganda by forces hostile to the USSR and Germany and interested in an

  extension of the war.

  TASS is authorised to state: 1) Germany has not made any claims on the USSR, and

  is not offering it any new and closer understanding; there have been no such talks.

  2) According to Soviet information, Germany is also unswervingly observing the

  conditions of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, just as the USSR is doing.

  Therefore, in the opinion of Soviet circles, the rumours of Germany's intention to tear up the Pact and to undertake an attack on the USSR are without any

  foundation. As for the transfer to the northern and eastern areas of Germany of

  troops during the past weeks, since the completion of their tasks in the Balkans, such troop movements are, one must suppose, prompted by motives which have no

  bearing on Soviet-German relations.

  3) As is clear from her whole peace policy, the USSR intends to observe the

  conditions of the Soviet-German Pact, and any talk of the Soviet Union preparing

  for war is manifestly absurd.

  4) The summer rallies now taking place among Red Army reservists and the

  coming manœuvres have no purpose other than the training of reservists and the

  checking of railway communications. As everyone knows, such exercises take place

  every year. To represent them as something hostile to Germany is absurd, to say the least.

  [ In the recent History Stalin is taken severely to task for this TASS communiqué: "Up to the last moment I. V. Stalin tried to prevent a German attack and tried to influence the German Government. In order to test Germany's intentions and to influence her

  government, Stalin caused TASS to publish this communiqué... It reflected Stalin's

  incorrect assessment of the political and military atmosphere. Published at a time when war was already on our threshold, the TASS statement misguided Soviet public opinion and weakened the vigilance of the Soviet people and of the Soviet Armed Forces."

  (IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 404.)]

  The History is no doubt quite right in saying that it was much too late in the day to "test"

  Germany's intentions; but, on the other hand it seems deliberately to exaggerate the TASS communique's soporific effect on the Soviet people.

  The Russians were sufficiently used to reading between the lines of government

  communications not to overlook the innuendo of the phrase: "These troop movements, one must suppose, are prompted by motives which have no bearing on Soviet-German relations." Far from being unduly reassured by this TASS communiqué, a very high proportion of the Russian people spent the next few days anxiously waiting for Berlin

  "reactions" to it. According to Gafencu, the Rumanian Minister in Moscow, thousands of people were glued to their wireless sets listening to news from Berlin. But they listened in vain. The German Government did not respond in any way to the TASS statement, and

  did not even publish it. When, on the night of June 21, Molotov asked Schulenburg to call on him, it was too late.

  Schulenburg, apparently wholly uninformed of Hitler's plans, was unable to give any

  answer to Molotov's anxious questions as to "the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction"; and not until he returned to the Embassy did he receive Ribbentrop's instructions to go to see Molotov and, "without entering into any discussions with him" to read out to him a cabled document which, framed in Hitler's most vituperative manner, was in fact a

  declaration of war.

  [As Shirer says, "It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies and fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert... Perhaps ... it

  somehow topped all the previous ones for sheer effrontery and deceit" (op. cit., p. 847).]

  Sick at heart, the Ambassador drove back to the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, and read the document to Molotov. According to Schulenburg's account, the Foreign

  Commissar listened in silence, and then said bitterly: "This is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?"

  PART TWO

  From the Invasion to the Battle of Moscow

  Chapter I SOVIET UNPREPAREDNESS IN JUNE 1941

  In the early morning hours of June 22, 1941, Plan Barbarossa—on which Hitler and his generals had worked for the last six months— came into action. And the Russians were not prepared for the onslaught.

  The three-pronged German invasion, aiming at Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the

  middle, and the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the south, with the ultimate object of

  occupying within a short time practically the whole of European Russia up to a line

  running from Archangel to Astrakhan, was to prove a failure. But the first weeks of the war and, indeed, the first three-and-a-half months were, to the Russians, an almost

  unmitigated disaster. The greater part of the Russian air force was wiped out in the first few days; the Russians lost thousands of tanks; hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in a series of spectacular encirclements during the first fortnight, and by the second week of July some German generals thought the war as good as won.

  How was this possible? Stalin's interpretation of these initial disasters—which was to remain the official version for many years afterwards—was that the element of surprise had been overwhelmingly in the Germans' favour. No doubt, Stalin himself later admitted that "certain mistakes" had been made on the Russian side; but there was no mention of these "mistakes" at first, and the only explanation given in July was the "suddenness and perfidious-ness" of the German attack.

  This explanation did not entirely satisfy the Russian people at the time; they had been told so much for years about the tremendous might of the Red Army that the non-stop

  advance of the German steam-roller during the first three weeks of the war—to

  Smolensk, to the outskirts of Kiev and to only a short distance from Leningrad —came as a terrible shock. There was much questioning and heart-searching as to what had gone wrong. But, in the face of the fearful threat of the destruction of Russia, and despite much sotto-voce grumbling, this was not a time for recrimination, and, whatever had gone wrong, and whatever the mistakes that had been made, the only thing to do was to fight the invaders. The mystique of a great national war, of a life-and-death struggle took deep root in the Russians' consciousness within a very short time; and the "national war"

  motifs of Stalin's famous broadcast of July 3 made such a deep impression precisely

  because they expressed the thoughts which, in the tragic circumstances of the time, the Russian people—consciously or unconsciously—wanted to hear clearly stated. Here at

  last was a clear programme of action for a stunned and
bewildered nation.

  But the fact remains that at first Russia proved totally unprepared to meet the German onslaught, and that in October 1941 the Germans very nearly won the war.

  While Stalin was alive, no serious attempt was made openly to analyse the numerous

  long-term, as well as immediate causes of the military disasters of 1941; and it was not, in fact, till after the 20th Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in 1956, and Khrushchev's sharp, and at times even exaggerated, criticisms of Stalin's

  "military genius" that Soviet military historians got down to the job of explaining what really happened.

  The explanations given for the disasters of 1941 are numerous and touch on a very wide range of subjects. Among the principal long-term causes some were historical (e.g. the 1937 purges in the Red Army); some were psychological (the constant propaganda about the invincibility of the Red Army); some were professional (lack of any proper

  experience of war among the Red Army as compared with the Germans and, in many

  cases, a low standard of training); some, finally, were economic (the failure of the Soviet war industries, despite the breathing-space provided by the Soviet-German Pact, to turn the Red Army into a well-equipped modern army).

  Whether, as seems likely, the Red Army would have been perfectly fit to fight the

  Germans in 1942, it was obviously not in a condition to do so in 1941.

  One of the most important recent Russian publications, printed in 1960, is the first volume of the official History of the War. This explains with refreshing candour many of the things that went wrong in 1941. In particular, it deals in considerable detail with the bad psychological conditioning for the "next" war of both the Red Army and the Soviet people generally.

  Thus, it draws particular attention to the wishful thinking pervading the famous Draft Field Regulations of 1939 which said:

  Any enemy attack on the Soviet Union will be met by a smashing blow from its

  armed forces;

  If any enemy inflicts war upon us, our Red Army will be the most fiercely-attacking army the world has ever known;

  We shall conduct the war offensively, and carry it into enemy territory;

  The activity of the Red Army will aim at the complete destruction of the enemy and the achievement of a decisive victory at a small cost in blood.

  The present-day History strongly criticises this document, as well as other pieces of military doctrine current in the Red Army before 1941.

  Soviet strategic theory [it says] as propounded by the Draft Field Regulations of 1939 and other documents did not prove to be entirely realistic. For one thing, they denied the effectiveness of the blitzkrieg which tended to be dismissed as a lopsided bourgeois theory. Soviet military theory was largely based on the principle of ending any attack on the Soviet Union with the complete rout of the enemy on his own

  territory.

  Thus, the whole emphasis of Soviet military theory was on the offensive, and the failure of both Poland and France to break the German attack was, all too easily, attributed to a) the lack of organised resistance and b) the nefarious activities of "fifth columns" in the rear in the case of France, and to the lack of national homogeneity in the case of the Polish army.

  Soviet strategy (says the History) considered defence as an essential part of war, but stressed its subsidiary role in relation to offensive operations. In principle, our strategy considered a forced retreat as a possibility, but only on a limited and isolated part of the front, and as a temporary measure, connected with preparations for the offensive. The question of large forces having to break out of a threatened

  encirclement was never seriously examined at all... (Emphasis added.) This makes, indeed, ironical reading in the light of what happened in 1941. There is another important point the History makes— namely, the "deadening" effect on Soviet military thought of the Stalin "personality cult":

  This "personality cult" led to dogmatism and scholasticism, which impaired the independent initiative of military research. It was necessary to wait for the

  instructions by a single man, and to look for the confirmation of theoretical

  propositions, not in life and practical experience, but in ready-made formulae and quotations... All this greatly reduced the scope of any free discussions of military theory.

  [IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 439. ]

  There were other shortcomings. The Red Army had had very little actual experience of war. Its only major experience dated back to the Civil War of 1918-20, and the conditions in which that war was fought had very little relevance to modern warfare. Experience was, indeed, soon to show that heroes of the Civil War like Budienny and Voroshilov

  were completely out of their depth in the war conditions of 1941. True, there had, since then, been the war in Spain, in which the Russians had participated in a small way, but, as the History says,

  The limited and peculiar nature of the war in Spain was wrongly interpreted. Thus, the conclusion was reached that the concept of large tank units—though we were

  the first to have applied them in practice— was erroneous. As a result our

  mechanised tank corps were dissolved, and did not begin to be reconstituted again until the very eve of the German invasion.

  [Ibid.]

  There had also been, in 1938-9, the successful battles against the Japanese at Lake

  Hassan and Halkin Gol, but these again were different from the vast war of 1941. Certain bitter lessons, it is true, had been learned from the Winter War in Finland, but had not yet been sufficiently implemented. As for the German invasion of Poland and France, there was still an irresponsible tendency in the Red Army to imagine that "it couldn't happen here". At least not along a vast front.

  This irresponsible optimism and wishful thinking were faithfully reflected in the

  "political-educational" work done in the Red Army in 1940-1. The History now readily admits that some appalling mistakes were made in this education, especially in all

  questions concerning Germany. Under the influence of the Soviet-Nazi Pact, anti-Nazi propaganda was toned down to an almost unbelievable extent. Nothing was done to

  suggest that the Germans were Russia's most likely enemies in the next war. Instead, the Molotov line continued to be plugged that it was in the "state interests" of both countries not to attack one another. Much of the propaganda both in the army and among the Soviet people generally was, in 1940 and even in 1941, full of the most infantile wishful

  thinking.

  On the eve of the War (says the History) great harm was done by suggesting that any enemy attacking the Soviet Union would be easily defeated. There were popular films

  such as If War Comes Tomorrow and the like which kept rubbing in the idea... Even some army papers followed a similar line. Many writers and propagandists put across the

  pernicious idea that any fascist or imperialist state that attacked us would collapse at the very first shots, since the workers would rebel against their government. They wholly underrated the extent to which, in fascist countries, the masses had been doped, how terror had largely silenced the rebels, and how soldiers, officers and their families had all acquired a vested interest in military loot.

  [IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 434-5.]

  Nevertheless, even after the war had started, Molotov and Stalin still continued to

  distinguish between the "long-suffering" German people and the criminal Nazi clique!

  Such, according to the History, were the main factors of the psychological

  unpreparedness of the Soviet people and of the Red Army in 1941, on the eve of the

  German invasion. The picture, it must be said, is slightly exaggerated because, as will have been seen from our story of the Soviet-German Pact period, there was

  unquestionably in the country a growing uneasiness which, especially after the fall of Yugoslavia in April 1941, developed into real anxiety.

  No less serious than this psycho
logical unpreparedness for an all-out war against Nazi Germany was the military unpreparedness of the Red Army both as regards the actual

  training of the men and the quantity and especially the quality of their equipment.

  A major question that arises in this connection is whether the Soviet Government really made full use of the twenty-two months' respite given it by the Soviet-German Pact. The argument put forward by present-day Soviet historians is that the Soviet Union had a very sound economic and industrial base in 1940-1, that "the importance of the defence measures taken during these twenty-two months cannot be overrated", but that the net result of it all was not as good as might have been expected. On the one hand it is true, Soviet economy had a material and technical base which would permit it to embark

  on the mass-production of all forms of modern armaments ... and meet the needs of both the Armed Forces and the population in case of war... The armaments

  industry, based on a heavy industry, was able, before the war, to supply the Army with all the necessary equipment, to set aside reserves, and fully supply new

  formations with equipment once the war had begun. With vast raw material

  resources, the Soviet Union was economically prepared to repel a fascist aggression.

  [IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 405.]

  The Soviet Union had the largest engineering industry in Europe, and some 9,000 large new industrial enterprises had been set up under the three Five-Year Plans—1,500 under the first, 4,500 under the second, and 3,000 during the first three years of the third (that is, up to 1941). In 1940 she produced 18.3 million tons of steel, 31 million tons of oil and 166 million tons of coal—these production figures were, moreover, to be substantially increased in 1941. Military expenditure had represented only 12.7 per cent of the budget during the Second Five-Year Plan, but had, since the beginning of World War II, risen to 26.4 per cent, and, in 1941, "there was a further increase in connection with the technical re-equipment of the Army". Since September 1939, in particular, measures had been taken by the Party and the Government to increase in the next one-and-a-half to two years the productive capacity of certain armaments industries, and particularly of the aircraft industry, by at least 100 per cent.