to keep his commanders in fear of him. But perhaps he also discerned the need to avoid causing a collapse in the morale of the entire officer corps. Hence he opted for compromise. He obtained his victim but refrained from the pre-war scenario of torture, show trial and forced confession. This was little consolation to the hapless Pavlov, but it was the earliest frail sign that Stalin understood the need to adjust his behaviour in the furnace of war.
Hitler’s Wehrmacht meanwhile continued to rampage deep into Soviet territory. The German strategic plan was to motor across the plains and marshes of the western borderlands of the USSR and, within a few weeks, occupy the main European regions. They seemed about to fulfil every expectation of the Fuhrer. Experienced tank formations rolled over vast territory encountering brave but ineffective defensive operations. Minsk, Belorussia’s capital, fell on 29 June, Smolensk on 16 July. No great urban centre lay between Smolensk and Moscow. Despairing of the existing command on his Western Front, Stalin released Timoshenko and Zhukov to reorganise things on the spot and stiffen resistance. Some deceleration of the German advance was achieved against Army Group Centre. But Panzer formations were simultaneously smashing their way towards Leningrad in the north and Kiev further south. Already all Poland, Lithuania and Belorussia was subject to rule by the General Government appointed by Hitler. It seemed that nothing could save ‘Soviet power’. Operation Barbarossa was undertaken by armed forces which had conquered every country in Europe they had attacked. Over three million men had been amassed for the campaign against the USSR. At Hitler’s disposal were more than three thousand tanks and two thousand aircraft. Security forces followed in the path of their victories: Einsatz-kommandos extirpated all those thought hostile to the New Order. Everything had been planned and supplied to evident perfection.
Panic seized Moscow and Leningrad as thousands of inhabitants tried to leave before the Germans arrived. The refugees included party and government functionaries. Stalin was merciless. Beria, who had been given general oversight of security matters in the State Committee of Defence, was empowered to set up barrier detachments on the capital’s outskirts and mete out summary justice to those who sought to flee. Strategic dispositions were made as the State Committee established high commands for the North-Western, Western and South-Western Fronts. Stalin’s confidence in military professionalism had not matured. Although he appointed Timoshenko to the Western Front, he stipulated that Voroshilov should head the North-Western Front while Budenny took the South-Western Front.22 Voroshilov and Budenny, his comrades in the Civil War, had won no laurels in the Soviet– Finnish War and yet Stalin stood by them. Party committees and soviet executive committees in the provinces were brought directly under the State Committee’s leadership and ordered to stiffen the spirit of resistance. The conscription of men for the Red Army was to be intensively undertaken. Armaments production had to be boosted, labour discipline tightened and food supplies secured from the villages. How this was done was a matter of indifference to Stalin. He cared only for results.
An immense number of prisoners-of-war fell into German hands: more than 400,000 Red Army troops were seized in the battle for Minsk alone. The Soviet air force in the western borderlands had been destroyed, mainly on the ground, in the first two days of hostilities. The linkages of transport and communications had been shattered. When Smolensk was occupied, the party headquarters had no time to incinerate its documents. The USSR lost its Soviet republics in the western borderlands as Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were subjected to German rule. The USSR had lost half its industrial and agricultural capacity and almost the same proportion of its population. Morale was low in the unoccupied zones. Civil administration was chaotic. German bombers continued to wreck places of habitation many miles beyond the lines of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In Moscow there was gathering panic. Many government officials tried to flee. Neither Molotov’s speech on 22 June nor Stalin’s eleven days later convinced most people that successful defence was possible.
Nor did the USSR lack citizens who were pleased with what seemed to be happening. Many in the western borderlands welcomed Wehrmacht troops as liberators. Ukrainian peasants greeted them with the traditional bread and salt. Stalin’s aim to extirpate the possibility of a fifth column by means of the Great Terror proved ineffective. All he had achieved was a stoking up of the fires of embitterment with his rule. The peasantry longed to be freed from the torments of the collective-farm system. They were not the only ones. In towns and cities, especially among people who were not Russians or Jews, there was much naivete about Hitler’s purposes. This was not surprising since German occupation policy had yet to be clarified, and some Nazi functionaries saw advantage in seeking voluntary co-operation in the conquered regions of the Soviet Union by dismantling the entire order constructed since 1917. Churches were reopened. Shops and small businesses began to operate again. Hitler foolishly overruled any further proposals in this direction. All Slavic peoples were to be treated as
The war effort in the USSR began to be co-ordinated. Party functionaries were ordered to address factory meetings and to tell the workforces that the Germans were about to be halted. Huge demands were to be made of Soviet citizens. Working hours were lengthened, labour discipline tightened still further. The menace of Nazism would be dispelled. The USSR was going to win and the Third Reich, despite current appearances to the contrary, to lose. The Soviet regime would act as ruthlessly in war as it had done in peace.
Yet it was difficult to believe the few real optimists. Official spokesmen were assumed to be saying only what they had been ordered to say. The Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow by 21 July. A month of fighting had brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Army Group North was approaching Leningrad and, with the fall of Moscow apparently imminent, Hitler and his generals began to contemplate switching forces to Army Group South to secure the coming conquest of Kiev. The Soviet refugees streaming into central Russia brought with them tales of German military success which undermined
38. FIGHTING ON
Autumn 1941 was grim for the Russians. The United Kingdom had stood alone against Germany for over a year and now the USSR joined it in even greater peril. The British could not send much aid in finances, armaments or troops. Although the front between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was but one of the fronts in the Second World War, it was at this time virtually a separate war. The front had yet to be stabilised by effective Soviet defence. In October the German forces, having lunged across the plains and marshes to the east of the River Bug, were massing outside Moscow for a final thrust at the USSR’s capital. Critical decisions needed to be taken in the Kremlin. The initial plan was for the entire government to be evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Stalin was set to leave by train — and Lenin’s embalmed corpse, reinfused with chemicals, was prepared for the journey to Tyumen in west Siberia. Moscow appeared likely to fall to the invader before winter. Not since Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 had the Russian capital faced such a plight — and Stalin, unlike Alexander I, could scarcely expect that Hitler would grant him his life in the event of the increasingly probable German victory.
Yet the line held. Zhukov, Stavka’s Chief of Staff, was transferred to the field for the defence of Moscow. At the last moment Stalin decided to stay in the capital. While sanctioning the departure of several People’s Commissariats to Kuibyshev, he decided that Zhukov might pull off victory and instructed the leading politicians to remain with him in the capital. He could not have dreamed up a better piece of propaganda. The word got out that the Leader was refusing to forsake the capital. Resistance was going to be shown by everyone from Stavka members down to the ordinary infantryman and factory worker.
The first test of Stalin’s resolve came towards the end of the year with Stavka’s discussion about deep defence. Zhukov was a natural forward-mover; he was never more content than when organising Red forces to attack the Wehrmacht. But he was also a professional military man. The strategic chances of resisting German forces advancing on Kiev were minimal, and Zhukov — like the other commanders — concluded that the abandonment of the Ukrainian capital would conserve human and material resources which could be used at a later stage in the war. He put this to Stalin at his predictable peril. Stalin was angry. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘could you even
