tremendous expenses, incomparable to any of those previously spared for the benefit of scientific research. And it was necessary to tell this straight to your government, making it clear that the expenses may turn out to be in vain — an atomic bomb may not result…
Scientists and their governments developed confidence and mutual understanding in England and the United States, Adamsky concludes, but not in Germany. At the end of 1940, such confidence and mutual understanding had not yet developed in the USSR.
The overwhelming German surprise attack along the entire western border of the Soviet Union at dawn on June 22, 1941, one month after Stalin's prediction that a shooting war would not begin for another year, mooted the issue of how large an effort should be devoted to what Soviet physicists called the “uranium problem.” Stalin met with military and other leaders for eleven hours that first day and almost continuously for several days thereafter, Beria at his side. The Wehrmacht decimated the Soviet Air Force, rolled over Belorussia and the Ukraine and thrust up through the Baltic states toward Leningrad. Once the magnitude of the disaster sank in, says Stalin biographer and General of the Soviet Army Dmitri Volkogonov, the dictator “simply lost control of himself and went into deep psychological shock. Between 28 and 30 June, according to eyewitnesses, Stalin was so depressed and shaken that he ceased to be a leader. On 29 June, as he was leaving the defense commissariat with Molotov, [Kliment] Voroshilov, [Andrei] Zhdanov and Beria, he burst out loudly, ‘Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up!’” Stalin retreated to his dacha at Kuntsevo; it took a visit from the Politburo, led by Molotov, to mobilize him. “We got to Stalin's dacha,” Anastas Mikoyan recalled in his memoirs. “We found him in an armchair in the small dining room. He looked up and said, ‘What have you come for?’ He had the strangest look on his face… ”
By the time the Soviet dictator rallied, the Germans were bombing Moscow. Volkogonov chronicles the debacle:
Soviet losses were colossal. Something like thirty divisions had been virtually wiped out, while seventy had lost more than half of their numbers; nearly 3,500 planes had been destroyed, together with more than half the fuel and ammunition dumps… Of course, the Germans too had paid a price, namely about 150,000 officers and men, more than 950 aircraft and several hundred tanks… The [Red] army was fighting. It was retreating, but it was fighting.
Stalin finally rallied the Soviet people on July 3. Molotov and Mikoyan had written the speech and they almost had to drag Stalin to the microphone. The Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, a front-line correspondent throughout the war, recalled the momentous occasion in his postwar novel
Stalin spoke in a toneless, slow voice, with a strong Georgian accent. Once or twice, during his speech, you could hear a glass click as he drank water. His voice was low and soft, and might have seemed perfectly calm, but for his heavy, tired breathing, and that water he kept drinking during the speech…
Stalin did not describe the situation as tragic; such a word would have been hard to imagine as coming from him; but the things of which he spoke —
“It was an extraordinary performance,” reports the Russian-born journalist and historian Alexander Werth, who covered the war in the USSR for the London
But Stalin's secret police had surprises in store for any of his newfound “friends” whose loyalty might be suspect, particularly if their background was German. “In every village, town and city,” notes Victor Kravchenko, “long blacklists were ready: hundreds of thousands would be taken into custody… The liquidation of ‘internal enemies’ was, in sober fact, the only part of the war effort that worked quickly and efficiently in the first terrible phase of the struggle. It was a purge in the rear in accordance with an elaborate advance plan, as ordered by Stalin himself… ” Half a million people — the entire population of the Volga German Republic — were transported to internal exile in Siberia. “In Moscow alone thousands of citizens were shot under martial law in the first six months,” Kravchenko concludes. “… The magnitude of the terror inside Russia cannot be overstated. It amounted to a war within the war.”
In the course of his July 3 speech, Stalin announced the formation of a State Defense Committee (GKO), in which he vested “all the power and authority of the State.” He appointed himself chairman of the five-man committee, Molotov deputy chairman, and as members Red Army Marshal Kliment Voroshilov (“an utterly mindless executive with no opinion of his own,” scoffs Volkogonov), the assiduous bureaucrat Georgi Malenkov and Beria.
Thus Lavrenti Beria came into his own. Born in the Sukhumi district of Georgia in 1899, he had worked his way to power first as police chief and then party chief of Georgia and the Transcaucasus (where he had personally organized the terrible purges) and now at the center in Moscow. Stalin had summoned him from Georgia in 1938 to purge the NKVD itself. “By early 1939,” according to a biographer, “Beria had succeeded in arresting most of the top and middle-level hierarchy of [his predecessor's] apparatus… ” He inherited a gulag slave-labor force of several million souls. “Camp dust,” he liked to call them. “A magnificent modern specimen of the artful courtier,” Svetlana Alliluyeva mocks; she blamed Beria for her father's excesses. The Yugoslavian diplomat Milovan Djilas met Beria in the course of the war: a short man, Djilas says, “somewhat plump, greenish pale, and with soft damp hands,” with a “square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind his pince-nez” and an expression of “a certain self-satisfaction and irony mingled with a clerk's obsequiousness and solicitude.” Beria's brutality extended to casual rape — of teenage girls plucked off the street and delivered to his Lubyanka office — and official torture and murder. He was nevertheless an exceptional administrator. Stalin gave him huge responsibilities: for evacuating wartime industry eastward over the Urals, for mobilizing gulag labor, for overseeing industrial conversion and for moving troops and materiel to the front. “Beria was a most clever man,” Molotov testified, “inhumanly energetic and industrious. He could work for a week without sleep.” In the early months of the war he almost certainly did.
“Beria was no engineer,” observes Victor Kravchenko, a factory manager in those days. “He was placed in control for the precise purpose of inspiring deadly fear. I often asked myself — as others assuredly did in their secret hearts — why Stalin had decided to take this step. I could find only one plausible answer. It was that he lacked faith in the patriotism and national honor of the Russian people and was therefore compelled to rely primarily on the whip. Beria was his whip.”
According to Marshal K. S. Moskalenko, who told a group of senior military officers in 1957 that he heard it from Beria himself, Stalin colluded with Beria and Molotov in late July to offer a surrender, “agreeing to hand over to Hitler the Soviet Baltic republics, Moldavia, a large part of the Ukraine and Belorussia. They tried to make contact with Hitler through the Bulgarian ambassador. No Russian czar had ever done such a thing. It is interesting that the Bulgarian ambassador was of a higher caliber than these leaders and told them that Hitler would never beat the Russians and that Stalin shouldn't worry about it.”
The war emptied out the Leningrad institutes. The scientists crated up their movable equipment and shipped it on tracks crowded with troop trains to the other side of the Urals, out of range of German bombers. Fiztekh went to Kazan, four hundred kilometers east of Moscow on the Volga. Whole factories moved east,[4] reports Sergei Kaftanov, minister of higher education and deputy for science and technology to the State Defense Committee:
How long would it take today to move a big industrial enterprise to a new site? Two years? Three years? During the war it took only months for plants that had been moved a thousand kilometers to start up again. The regular order of construction is: walls — roof — machines. We were doing it this way: machines — roof — walls. War pressed us for quick solutions.
