Stalin: A Biography

deviation from total obedience invoked instant retaliation. The state planning agencies diverted available resources to the armed forces at the expense of civilians, who were left with barely enough for subsistence. The vertical chains of command were tightened. Central and local political leaderships were required to carry through every decree from the Kremlin to the letter. The one-party dictatorship was being put to the ultimate test and was reorganised so as to use the powers at its disposal to the maximum effect. The party in particular acquired importance as an organisation co-ordinating relations between the Red Army and the governmental institutions in each locality; it was also the party which devised the propaganda to stiffen the morale of soldiers and civilians. Yet the USSR remained a terrifying police state and the basic structures of coercion stayed in place. No informed citizens should have expected anything different from Stalin. He had ruled by fear for too long for there to be doubt about how he would behave on the resumption of peace.

41. SUPREME COMMANDER

The man with the gammy left arm rejected for conscription in the First World War and criticised for military bungling in both the Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War commanded a state at war with Nazi Germany. Stalin in Moscow confronted Hitler in Berlin. In the minds of both men this was a personal duel as well as a clash between ideologies and state-systems. Neither of them lacked self-belief in directing his war effort.

The Soviet war leader took time to judge how to handle public opinion. Molotov made the initial announcement about the war on behalf of the political leadership on 22 June 1941. Another hero of the day was the radio announcer Isaak Levitan, whose rich bass voice epitomised the popular will to resist the German invasion at any cost. When at last Stalin made his broadcast to Soviet citizens on 3 July, eleven days after the start of military hostilities, he adjusted his language to the wartime emergency. These were his opening words:¹

Comrades! Citizens!

Brothers and sisters!

Fighters in our army and navy!

It is to you I appeal, my friends!

Many have noted that Stalin was reverting to traditional Russian discourse by addressing himself to ‘brothers and sisters’. This is true. But what is usually missed is that he started his speech by appealing to comrades and citizens (and at least one listener noted a caesura between ‘Citizens! Comrades!’ and ‘Brothers and sisters’).² Nor did he seek to identify himself exclusively with Russians. When listing the peoples threatened by Germany, he mentioned not only the Russians but also ‘the Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the other free peoples of the Soviet Union’.³

Listeners were grateful for signs that resolute defence was being prepared. The writer Yekaterina Malkina heard the speech and was inspired by it; and her house servant was so moved that she broke down in tears. Malkina wrote to a friend:⁴

I forgot to tell you further about Stalin’s speech that, as I listened to it, it seemed that he was very upset. He talked with such large pauses and frequently drank a lot of water; you could hear him pouring it out and swallowing it. All this served to strengthen the emotional impact of his words. That very day I went and signed up with the volunteer army.

Few persons who heard him that day forgot the experience.

Groping his way towards an appropriate mode of communication, he sometimes succeeded brilliantly:

How could it happen that our glorious Red Army gave up to the fascist forces a number of our towns and districts? Surely the German fascist forces are truly invincible forces, as the boastful fascist propagandists constantly trumpet?

Of course not! History shows that invincible armies don’t exist and have never existed. Napoleon’s army was considered invincible but it was crushed in turn by Russian, English, German forces. Wilhelm’s German army during the first imperialist war was also considered an invincible army, but it suffered defeat several times at the hands of Russian and Anglo-French forces and, finally, was defeated by Anglo-French forces. The same has to be said about the present German fascist army of Hitler. This army has not yet met serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance.

These words were delivered in an unyielding tone which confirmed that the fight would be taken to the Germans. The challenge was flung back at Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

Stalin’s rhetoric was woefully unrealistic about the kind of enemy facing the Red Army. He warned people that enslavement to ‘German princes and barons’ awaited them in the event of the USSR’s failure to beat the Wehrmacht.⁵ He ignored the specific nature of Nazism’s New Order. Not princes and barons but Gauleiters and the SS were the Third Reich’s enforcers. Racial violence, mobile gas-wagons and concentration camps were installed in the East and yet not once did Stalin refer to them. The First World War remained imprinted on his mind. He was also transfixed by the memory of the Civil War. In his speech on Red Square on 7 November 1941 — the anniversary of the October Revolution — he rambled on about foreign ‘interventionists’ as if they and the Nazis were threats to the Soviet state of equal importance.⁶ Equally adrift from the facts was his claim that Germany was racked by ‘hunger and impoverishment’.⁷ Stalin was dredging up outdated cliches of Bolshevik party pronouncements. As Soviet soldiers and civilians came into direct contact with the Wehrmacht and SS, they learned for themselves that Nazism had methods and purposes of unique repulsiveness. Stalin’s reputation as a propagandist was greater than his performance.

There were limits indeed to Stalin’s adaptability. Winston Churchill’s regular parliamentary speeches and Franklin Roosevelt’s weekly radio broadcasts stood in contrast with Soviet practice. Stalin delivered only nine public wartime addresses of any length. He did not write for the newspapers. Although he could have got others to compose pieces for him, he refused to publish in his own name what he himself had not written. Information in general about him was scanty. He passed up opportunity after opportunity to inspire people outside the format of his preferred modalities.

Pravda continued to mention him with cultic reverence. Photographers were seldom allowed to take his picture; it was mainly old photos which were published in the press, and even these were used sparingly.⁸ It was as if the decision was taken to treat him as a disembodied symbol of the USSR’s war effort rather than the living Supreme Commander. Posters, busts and flags continued to be produced. Booklets of his best-known articles and speeches were on sale at cheap prices. Commissars in the armed forces gave lectures on political policies and military strategy as well as on Stalin’s personal leadership. He let no details of his activities be aired in the mass media. He continued to handle his public image on his own terms, and he had never felt comfortable with the frequent communing with society which the leaders of the Western Allies found congenial. Nor did he change his mind on letting a subordinate — as Hitler did with Goebbels — manufacture a public image for him. As before the war, Stalin kept direct control of what was said on his behalf.

Yet his reclusive tendency retained at least some advantages and was not as harmful to the regime as it would have been elsewhere. Many Soviet citizens inferred that a wise patriarch commanded the political and military agencies of the state. This may have helped more than it hindered the war effort. Stalin was inept at tasks of self-endearment or public reassurance. His characteristic inclination at large gatherings and in radio broadcasts was to project ferocity. If people had seen him more often, the illusion of his well-meaning sagacity could have been dispelled. His seclusion allowed them to believe in the sort of Stalin they wanted. They might persuade themselves that all the troubles of the inter-war period would be resolved once the Germans had been defeated. There was immense popular expectation that a victorious Stalin would sanction a relaxation of the Soviet order. People in their millions had got him wrong. But their mistake helped them to fight on for victory despite the horrific rigours.