On June 22, 1941 Molotov broke to the Russian people the grim
news about the German attack. Stalin, as if embarrassed by the
disastrous collapse of his hopes, shunned the limelight. He did
not utter a single word in public for almost two weeks. He apparently
waited to see what the results of the first battles would be,
what the attitude of Great Britain and the United States would
be, and what the feeling in his own country would be. Locked up
with his military leaders, he discussed measures of mobilization
and strategic plans.
He divided the enormous front into three sectors and put Voroshilov
in command of the northern sector, Timoshenko of the center, and
Budienny of the South. He himself assumed the supreme command.
His chief of staff was General Shaposhnikov, who had served on
the General Staff since before the revolution and had been reputed
a scholarly, hard-working, but not original strategist. The supreme
direction of the war effort was concentrated in the State Defense
Committee, which consisted of five members: Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov,
Berya, and Malenkov. Molotov was to conduct diplomacy. Berya was
in charge of domestic policy. Voroshilov was to ensure liaison
between the armed forces and the civilian authorities. Malenkov,
one of Stalin's assistants at the General Secretariat, represented
the party. Stalin himself presided over the Committee.
Although Stalin made many miscalculations, he was not unprepared
to meet the emergency created by his enemy-ally Hitler: He had
armed his country and reorganized its military forces. He was
not committed to one-sided strategy like the French dependence
on the Maginot Line and the concept of static defense. He could
rely on Russia's vast spaces and climate.
He had achieved absolute unity of command, the dream of the modern
strategist, but these advantages were balanced by some serious
disadvantages: The Red Army's morale was still uncertain. Only
ten years had passed since the peasantry revolted against collectivization.
Memories of the purges were even fresher. First reports from the
front gave a confused and contradictory picture: Here divisions
crumbled and dissolved in chaos and vast hauls of prisoners taken
by the Germans indicated an alarming lack of fighting spirit.
Elsewhere formations, surrounded and cut off, defended themselves
stubbornly, delaying the enemy's advance. Elsewhere again, under
overwhelming pressure, troops retreated in good order, saving
strength for future battles. But everywhere, Hitler's armies advanced
irresistibly. Behind the fighting lines, rumor, confusion, and
panic began to spread.
On July 3, 1941 Stalin finally broke silence to offer guidance
to this bewildered nation. In a broadcast address he spoke of
the "grave danger." His voice was slow, halting, colorless.
His speech was, as usual, laborious and dry. It contained none
of those rousing words which, like Churchill's promise of "blood,
toil, tears and sweat," pierce the mind of people. His style
was strangely out of keeping not only with the drama of the moment,
but even with the content of his speech, with his own appeals
and instructions which reflected his unbreakable and unbendable
will to victory. In his speech he
Russia was to sell space for time; the space sold was to be made
unusable to the enemy; and a merciless price was to be exacted
for it. This was the only way in which, after all his errors and
miscalculations, Stalin could meet the conqueror of Europe. He
confronted him with superior will-power.
But is it true, as it has been asserted, that he never lost his
confidence, ever for a moment? Not really!
So, in the first months of war uncertainty must have gnawed at
Stalin's mind, even though to the world he showed only an iron
mask. He wore that iron mask with amazing fortitude and self-mastery.
Perhaps, indeed, that mask was his most powerful weapon. It gave
his will to victory an heroic, almost super-human appearance.
Stalin knew, of course, that to him, personally, more than to
any one of Hitler's adversaries or victims, hesitation or weakness
spelt an inglorious end. Self-preservation made him behave as
he did. And now, more than ever before, his personal interest
was at one with the interest of the nation. This is at once the
strong and the weak point of any totalitarian regime--that at
certain moments the entire fate of a mighty nation seems to depend
on the nerve of its dictator, whose break-down or effacement would
create a void which hardly anyone could fill.
Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin during the war
were astonished to see on how many issues, great and small, military,
political, or diplomatic, Stalin personally took the final decision.
He was in effect his own commander-in-chief, his own minister
of defense, his own quartermaster, his own minister of supply,
his own foreign minister, and even his own protocol chief.
The Stavka, the Red Army's headquarters, was in his offices in
the Kremlin. From his office desk, in constant and direct touch
with them commands of he various fronts, he watched and directed
the campaigns in the field. From his office desk, too, he managed
another stupendous operation, the evacuation of 1,360 plants and
factories from western Russia and the Ukraine tot he Volga, the
Urals, and Siberia, an evacuation which involved not only machines
and installations but millions of workmen and their families.
Between one function and the other he bargained with, say, Beaverbrook
and Harriman over the quantities of aluminum or the caliber of
rifles and anti-aircraft guns to be delivered to Russia by the
western allies, or he received leaders of guerrillas who had come
from German-occupied territory and discussed with them raids to
be carried out hundreds of miles behind the enemy's lines.
At the height of the battle of Moscow, in December 1941, when
the thunder of Hitler's guns hovered ominously over the streets
of Moscow, he found time enough to start a subtle diplomatic game
with the Polish General Sikorsky, who had come to conclude a Russo-Polish
treaty. In the later days the number of foreign visitors, ambassadors,
and special envoys from all parts of the world grew enormously.
He entertained them usually late at night and in the small hours
of the morning. After a day filled with military reports, operational
decisions, economic instructions, and diplomatic haggling, he
would at dawn pore over the latest dispatches from the front or
over some confidential report on civilian morale from the Commissariat
of Home Affairs, the NKVD.
The NKVD report might also contain, say, a detailed record of
the things that the general in charge of the British Military
Mission in Moscow had said, the previous day, about Russia, about
her allies and their plans , and about Stalin himself in the privacy
of his office, for the office of the British general was "infected
with well concealed microphones" which recorded every word
of his. Thus he went on, day after day, throughout four years
of hostilities--a prodigy of patience, tenacity, and vigilance,
almost omnipresent, almost omniscient.
In October Hitler formally opened the battle of Moscow, "the
greatest offensive ever known." Leningrad had been cut off
and blockaded. Nearly the whole of the Ukraine and the coast of
the Azov Sea had been conquered by the Wehrmacht. Budienny's armies
had been routed--the Germans took half a million prisoners on
the Dnieper. Stalin dismissed both Voroshilov and Budienny from
the command. The "N.C.O.s," as Trotsky used to call
them, were not equal to this motorized warfare. New commanders,
Zhukov, Vassilevsky, Rokossovsky, were soon to replace them.
In November the Germans made an all-out attempt to encircle Moscow.
Their vanguards advanced to within twenty to thirty miles of the
capital. At one point they were only five miles away. All the
Commissariats and government departments were evacuated to Kuibyshev
on the Volga. In Moscow officials were burning the archives that
had not been carried away.
On November 6, the anniversary of the revolution, the Moscow Soviet
assembled, as usual, for a ceremonial meeting, but this time the
meeting was held underground, at the Mayakovsky station of the
subway. Stalin addressed the assembly in calm words, although
he made the alarming admission that Russian troops "had several
times fewer tanks than the Germans."
The next day he stood at the top of the Lenin Mausoleum to take
the parade of troops and volunteer divisions of the people's guards,
marching straight from the Red Square to the front at the outskirts
of the city. He appealed to the soldiers to draw inspiration from
the memories of the civil war, when "three quarters of our
country was in the hands of foreign interventionists" and
the young Soviet Republic had no army of its own and no allies.
The enemy is not so strong as some frightened little intellectuals
picture him. The devil is not so terrible as the is painted....Germany
cannot sustain such a strain for long. Another few months, another
half a year, perhaps another year, and Hitlerite Germany must
burst under the pressure of her crimes."
He finished with a strange, unexpected invocation to the saints
and warriors of Imperial Russia: "Let the manly images of
our great ancestors--Alexander Nevsky, Dimitry Donskoy, Kuzma
Minin, Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov
inspire you in this war!" (Note: Nevsky against the Teutonic
Knights; Donskoy against the Tartars; Minin and Pozharsky against
the Poles in the "Time of Troubles"; Suvorov against
the Turks under Catherine II; Kutuzov against Napoleon at the
Battle of Borodino.) This was the first time he so invoked the
shadows of the past which the revolution seemed to have covered
with contempt and banished for ever. "May the victorious
banner," he added, "of the great Lenin guide you."
The news of the evacuation of the government shook the people
of Moscow. Psychologically, this was a moment of supreme danger.
The decision of any government to leave its capital in the middle
of a war tends to sap the moral strength of a fighting nation
and to add impetus to centrifugal forces. So it was in France
in 1940 when the government, thrown out of its traditional seat
of power, became as vulnerable as a snail divested of its shell.
The more centralized the government, the more is its stability
and authority rooted in familiar landmarks of power, nearly all
of which are in the capital.
The evacuation of the government from Moscow was followed by riots
and disorders. People thought that the city had been given up.
Crowds stormed food stores. Members of the party destroyed their
membership cards and badges. Anti-communists prepared to settle
accounts with Communists and to win favor with the invader. Symptoms
of anarchy appeared in many places all over the area between the
fronts and the Volga.
People who spent those days in Moscow described later the salutary
effect of Stalin's action. The news that Stalin had not left with
the rest of his government affected the mood of the Muscovites,
who saw in it evidence that the will to victory, personified in
Stalin, was unshaken. His presence in the Kremlin at this late
hour was indeed a challenge to fate. It was as if the fortress
of the world had been balancing on the towers of the old fortress.
To both Stalin and Hitler the Kremlin became the symbol of their
ambition, for while Stalin was refusing to leave its walls, Hitler
issued an order that "the Kremlin was to be blown up to signalize
the overthrow of Bolshevism."
It was in the setting of the Kremlin that Stalin's figure had
grown to its present stature. He had become one with that setting
and its historical associations and he was as if afraid of detaching
himself from it. At least part of his power had lain in his remoteness
from the people. If he had left, the spell of his remoteness might
have been broken. He might have appeared to the people as a dictator
in flight. This is not to say that he could not have conducted
the war from some retreat in the country. But to leave Moscow
was for him a step awkward and humiliating enough to make him
shrink from it to the end.
He remained thus voluntarily immured in the Kremlin throughout
the war. Not once, so it seems, did he seek direct personal contact
with his troops in the field. Trotsky in the civil war moved in
his legendary train from front to front, exploring, sometimes
under the enemy's fire, advanced positions and checking tactical
arrangements. Churchill mixed with his soldiers in the African
desert and on the Normandy beaches, cheering them with his idiosyncrasies,
with his solemn words, his comic hats, his cigars, and V-signs.
Hitler spent much of his time in his advanced field headquarters.
Stalin was not attracted by the physical reality of war. nor did
he rely on the effect of his personal contact with his troops.
Yet there is no doubt that he was their real commander-in-chief.
His leadership was by no means confined to the taking of abstract
strategic decisions, at which civilian politicians may excel.
The avid interest with which he studied the technical aspects
of modern warfare, down tot he minute details, shows him to have
been anything but a dilettante. He viewed the war primarily from
the angle of logistics. To secure reserves of manpower and supplies
of weapons, in the right quantities and proportions, to allocate
them and to transport them tot he right points at the right time,
to amass a decisive strategic reserve and to have it ready for
intervention at decisive moments--these operations made up nine-tenths
of his task.
In the first phase of the war the army paid a heavy price for,
among other things, the loss of self-reliance which its commanding
staffs had suffered as a consequence of the purges. The lesson
was not, however, wasted on Stalin. He had the sense to give back
to his generals their freedom of movement, to encourage them to
speak their mind, to embolden them to look for the solution of
their problems by way of trial and error, and to relieve them
from the fear of the boss's wrath, a fear which weighed so heavily
on Hitler's generals.
He punished his officers with draconian severity for lack of courage
or vigilance; he demoted them for incompetence, even when the
incompetents happened to be Voroshilov and Budienny; and he promoted
for initiative and efficiency. Hitler's generals had a shrewder
appreciation of Stalin's method than Hitler himself when they
said that the top rungs of the Russian ladder of command "were
filled by men who had proved themselves so able that they were
allowed to exercise their own judgment, and could safely insist
on doing things in their own way."
It is nevertheless true that, like Hitler, Stalin took the final
decision on every major and many a minor military issue. How then,
it may be asked, could the two things be reconciled: Stalin's
constant interference with the conduct of the war, and freedom
of initiative for his subordinates? The point is that he had a
peculiar manner of making his decisions, one which not only did
not constrict his generals, but, on the contrary, induced them
to use their own judgment.
Hitler usually had his preconceived ideas--sometimes it was a
brilliant conception, sometimes a bee in his bonnet--which he
tried to force upon a Brauchitsch or a Halder or a Rundstedt.
For all his so-called dilettantism, he was a doctrinaire in matters
of strategy, impatient with those who could not see the merits
of his particular dogma or plan. Not so Stalin. He had no strategic
dogmas to impose upon others. He did not approach his generals
with operational blue-prints of his own. He indicated to them
his general ideas, which were based on an exceptional knowledge
of all aspects of the situation, economic, political, and military.
But beyond that he let his generals formulate their views and
work out their plans, and on these he based his decisions. His
role seems to have been that of the cool, detached, and experienced
arbiter of is own generals. in case of a controversy between them,
he collected the opinions of those whose opinion mattered, weighed
pros and cons, related local viewpoints to general considerations
and eventually spoke his mind. His decisions did not therefore
strike his generals on the head--they usually sanctioned ideas
over which the generals themselves had been brooding. This method
of leadership was not novel to Stalin.
In the early twenties he came to lead the Politburo in an analogous
way, by carefully ascertaining what were the views of the majority
and adopting these as his own. Similarly, the generals were now
receptive to his inspiration, because he himself was receptive
to their thoughts and suggestions. His mind did not, like Hitler's,
produce fireworks of strategic invention, but his method of work
left more room for collective invention of his commanders and
favored a sounder relationship between the commander-in-chief
and his subordinates than that which prevailed at the "Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht" (The High Command).
This is not to say that Stalin simply followed the majority of
his commanders. Even that majority was, in a sense , of his own
making. In the depth of defeat he radically renewed and rejuvenated
the high commanding staffs.