Stalin: A Biography

think of giving up Kiev to the enemy?’ Still Zhukov stood his ground: ‘If you think the Chief of Staff can’t talk anything but absolute nonsense, he’s got no business here.’¹ Nevertheless Stalin stayed with his own impulses and the order was given that Kiev should be defended to the last. Timoshenko, usually timid about offending Stalin, considered withdrawing from Kiev without telling Stalin. (This, obviously, would have been a suicidal measure for Timoshenko.) Attack, attack and attack: this was Stalin’s way to repel the Nazi invasion. So at Stalin’s insistence the armed forces in the capital were ordered to prepare for decisive action. Civilians were told to stay behind.

The Wehrmacht moved forward. What astounded its commanders were Soviet pluck, determination and flexibility. They had been taught to regard the Russians as Untermenschen but discovered that the peoples of the USSR, including the Russians, were far from being primitives. Stalin would not yet budge on strategy. Abandonment of great cities was anathema to him. He had yet to learn that strategic withdrawal could facilitate an indispensable regrouping. He acted like a military ignoramus just as he had been proved a diplomatic one in mid-1941. Inevitably Kiev fell to the larger and better-organised forces of the Wehrmacht on 19 September.

The Red Army’s strategic options were few. While the Wehrmacht held the initiative, Stavka had to react to German moves. Commanders were ordered to hold their present positions. Stavka decided which sectors most needed reserves to be rushed to them. While Zhukov worked on a plan of campaign, Stalin harassed his politicians into expanding output for the armed forces. Astonishing feats were performed in the USSR in 1942. The factories and workforces evacuated from the western regions of the USSR were restored to operation in the Urals. Meanwhile the industrial enterprises of central Russia were intensifying activity. The grievous losses of 1941 were being made good. This was done with Stalin’s customary ruthlessness. The slogan ‘Everything for the Front!’ was realised almost to the letter. Industry, already heavily tilted towards military needs before 1941, produced virtually entirely for the needs of the armed forces. Consumer goods ceased to be manufactured. Soviet economic might was so successfully dedicated to the war effort that in the last six months of 1942 it reached a level of production which the Germans attained only across the entire year. The numbers were remarkable. In that half-year the USSR acquired fifteen thousand aircraft and thirteen thousand tanks.²

The price was paid by other sectors of the economy. Resources were denied to agriculture. As young men were conscripted into the armed forces and young women left for jobs in the factories, conditions on the collective farms sharply deteriorated. Many farms fell out of production or else were run by the labour of women long past their time of youthful vigour. Yet the government procurement quotas were maintained so that the soldiers and workers might be fed. The result was the deeper impoverishment of the countryside. The state administrative order which reported massive achievements in turning out tanks and aircraft was a disaster for agriculture. Stalin’s propagandists — and many later commentators — emphasised that his policies had proved themselves wonderfully in war; they could do this only by keeping silent about farms in the unoccupied regions.

Yet the patriotic spirit was unquenchable. Propaganda stiffened the resistance by publishing details of German atrocities. Pravda did not become a ‘paper of record’, yet it did not have to concoct falsehoods about the Wehrmacht and the SS. Once the Soviet military resistance began to stiffen, Moscow’s media concentrated effectively on German atrocities. Jews, Roma and communists were being shot out of hand. Murder and pillage were ravaging the USSR’s western borderlands. Although the Germans allowed most churches and some private shops to be reopened in Ukraine, they generally treated the country as a place for plunder. Harvests were routinely seized, and the German occupiers found the collective farms too useful an instrument of grain procurement to be abandoned. Early in Operation Barbarossa there had been debate in Berlin about policies of occupation. Several officials had urged the prudence of seeking to neutralise opposition in the western regions of the USSR by granting economic and social concessions. Hitler quashed this talk. For him, the whole purpose of the invasion was to realise his ideological dream. The Wehrmacht, SS and civilian administration were ordered to treat the Slav Untermenschen as a human resource exploitable to the point of death.

This apparently had no effect on Stalin. He had failed to anticipate the intensity of Nazi brutality; but even when reports reached him from behind the German lines, he held his tongue about them. He spoke only in general terms about German atrocities (whereas Churchill and Roosevelt emphasised the massive disregard for international laws on war). Stalin himself waged war, as he conducted politics, with his own immense savagery. The NKVD had rampaged across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania killing or arresting whole strata of the population. It was through Operation Barbarossa that for the first time since the Civil War he confronted an enemy as willing as he was to use terror against innocent non-combatants.

Stalin in any case gave little thought to the matter.³ Calling on his compatriots to fight a bitter war regardless of cost, he had no interest in focusing attention on the horrific strength and ruthlessness of the Wehrmacht. He and Stavka got on with planning, organising and supervising the war effort. They were hard men by any standards. Those communist leaders with a soft side to their thinking — Bukharin, Kamenev, Tomski or Ryazanov — had perished in the Great Terror. There were no such spirits in Stavka or the State Committee of Defence. If any of them had reservations about Stalin’s severity towards his own forces, they kept quiet about them. Both sides in the German–Soviet conflict went at each other without regard to the Geneva Convention. Prisoners-of-war were treated atrociously. Strategy and tactics were developed which spared neither soldier nor civilian. The restraints which characterised the fighting between Germany and the Western Allies never prevailed on the front with the Red Army. Warfare reverted to the colossal brutality last seen in Europe in the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and Stalin was in his element.

The USSR’s survival of that first terrible winter of 1941–2 seemed a miracle at the time. The USA entered the war against Germany in 1941. Stalin’s Western Allies, despite their public bravado, had not given him much of a chance; and although Washington promised arms and other supplies through the system of Lend-Lease (which postponed any payment till the end of hostilities), little reached the USSR until the later months of 1942. The Soviet Union had had to cope with Nazi Germany on its own, while Hitler could draw upon increasing support from Italy, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

Sober assessment was less unfavourable to Stalin’s chances. The pre-war analysis, shared in Berlin and Moscow, held that the Germans needed to attack by early summer if they were to conquer. The actual military campaign validated this analysis. The Wehrmacht, after massive advances into the western borderlands of the USSR, was halted outside Leningrad and Moscow; it had failed to overrun the Russian heartland, oil-rich Baku and the Volga transport routes. The USSR retained adequate human and material resources to go on resisting the aggressor. The Wehrmacht operated in bleaker conditions than Hitler had anticipated. The last months of 1941 were bitterly cold. German lines of communication and supply were overstretched: Hitler had not got far enough to have final success but had gone too far to maintain his armed forces in a decent condition. Germany’s military equipment, moreover, had not been built to specifications for the rigours of the Russian winter. The odds began to turn in the USSR’s favour despite the enduring impact of Stalin’s miscalculations about Operation Barbarossa.

Stalin had gained his second wind even though the immediate situation was deeply discouraging. The Wehrmacht prowled like a panther outside Moscow and Leningrad. Supplies of food in the unoccupied parts of the USSR had fallen by a half as a result of German control of Ukraine. The Don Basin too had been seized, and with it had vanished three quarters of the country’s access to coal, iron and steel. Other metal deposits lay in the territories held by Germany; these included copper, manganese and aluminium. Potential conscripts to the Red Army were reduced by the speed and depth of the Wehrmacht’s advance. In the Soviet-held territories, moreover, there was much chaos. Millions of refugees streamed into central Russia. Trains reached Moscow from the west with wagons piled high with the machinery of factories that had been evacuated.

The Supreme Commander reverted to instinct. Attack, he insisted to his exhausted generals, was preferable to defence. Even Stalin acknowledged that this was impossible near Moscow and Leningrad. But he thought his maps indicated German weakness in the Don Basin. Generals and commissars warned him that logistics and geography were unpropitious; but they got nowhere. Stalin argued — or rather he assumed and did not care about what others argued against him — that almost any action was better than passivity. In April 1942, as the snow gave way to mud, Stalin overrode Stavka and compelled its military specialists to organise an offensive in eastern Ukraine with the objective of seizing Kharkov. This would be the first serious Soviet counter-attack. It was planned with egregious indiscretion and German intelligence agencies had prior knowledge. The Wehrmacht had made its arrangements and was waiting; it also knew in advance about Stalin’s plan to retake the Crimea. A strategic trap was sprung. Despite the objections from his advisers, Stalin insisted on the offensives and the Red Army drove its tanks straight into the jaws of defeat.