Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

  On 2 June Beria provided him with a digest of intelligence stipulating the exact location of German troops and their headquarters, although, characteristically, he diluted the impact of his report by concluding that if Germany were to begin a war against the Soviet Union, it would not be before an agreement had been reached between Germany and Great Britain.164 Other reports were less ambivalent and were now, by any measure, becoming distinctly disconcerting.

  The day before Beria delivered his digest, Richard Sorge (‘Ramzai’) had dispatched two reports from Tokyo based upon information emanating from Berlin. Ambassador Ott had learned that the German attack on the USSR would begin in the second half of June, Sorge indicated, and was 95 per cent certain that war would begin.165 In a second report, also on 1 June, ‘Ramzai’ passed on information he had received from an acquaintance, Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl, who was passing through Tokyo en route to a new posting at the German embassy in Bangkok. Scholl told him that war would begin on 15 June. Scholl also mentioned that the limited Soviet defensive lines (concentrated, as we have seen, in the south) were a weakness, since the main German attack would be launched on its left flank (that is, in the north).166 When Sorge’s telegram was decoded and translated into Russian, his superiors added the disparaging comment: ‘Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations.’167 Stalin had long been disparaging about Sorge, dismissing the man risking his life for Soviet intelligence as ‘a little shit’.168 The Stalinist system was at all levels preprogrammed to supply the Soviet dictator with confirmation of his own prejudice.

  On 12 June Stalin, Molotov and Beria received information provided by ‘Starshina’ (Schulze-Boysen) of talk within the upper echelons of the Luftwaffe and Air Ministry indicating that a decision had been made to attack the USSR. Whether demands would be made of the Soviet Union beforehand or whether there would be a surprise attack was unknown.169 The same day, a report reached the Foreign Ministry and Central Committee noting a total of 2,080 violations of the Soviet border by German aeroplanes between 1 January and 10 June, some penetrating as far as sixty miles or so into districts with defence fortifications and large troop concentrations. Ninety-one planes had violated the borders during the first ten days of June. One military plane, which had flown a hundred and twenty miles into Soviet territory and been forced to land, had on board maps and aerial photographs of a region in the Ukraine.170 On 17 June, another report from ‘Starshina’, based within Luftwaffe headquarters, told Stalin, Molotov and Beria that all German military measures for an attack on the USSR were complete, and that the blow could come at any time. The report gave a list of immediate bombing targets and the designated German heads of the future occupied territories.171 Two days later a Soviet agent in Rome passed on information, said to be derived from the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Augusto Rosso, that Germany would attack the USSR sometime between 20 and 25 June.172 In mid-June information came in from ‘Lucy’ (an émigré German anti-Fascist publisher, named Rudolf Rössler), a Soviet agent based in Lucerne, in Switzerland, stipulating the date of the attack (22 June) and providing details of the German operational plan.173 ‘Ramzai’ (Sorge) in Tokyo reported on 20 June the view of Ambassador Ott that war was inevitable, and that the German military believed Soviet defences to be weaker than those of Poland.174 On the same day the Soviet agent in Sofia informed Moscow that the attack would come on either 21 or 22 June.175 Nor were the danger signs to be derived only from intelligence reports. By now, most of the German embassy staff, in a state of great nervousness, had left Moscow. Italian, Romanian and Hungarian embassy staff swiftly followed.176

  However, Soviet distrust of reports from agents and from foreign intelligence services continued unabated. The distrust was, as before, especially pronounced towards Britain–perhaps in part a veiled reflection of Stalin’s belief that the British would act with equal duplicity to his own double-dealing in 1939. On 14 June the official Soviet news organ, Tass, published a communiqué denouncing British press rumours of imminent war between Germany and the USSR. Molotov later claimed the Tass communiqué had been ‘a last resort. If we had managed to delay the war for the summer, it would have been very difficult to start it in the fall.’177 Reports of the rumours had been passed to Moscow by the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, who continued to believe that German troop movements on the Soviet border were just a part of Hitler’s ‘war of nerves’.178 Stalin hoped, by publishing the communiqué, to elicit an equivalent denunciation from the German side of the rumours. None was forthcoming.179

  In fact, British intelligence, long convinced that German troop movements were to exert pressure on the Soviet Union, had by now changed its tune and become–belatedly–convinced that an invasion of the USSR was imminent.180 The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, barely able to believe that Hitler might invade the Soviet Union in preference to exploiting his conquests in the Balkans to attack the British in north Africa and the Middle East, nevertheless summoned Maisky to his office on 16 June and passed on precise and detailed evidence of the imminent threat. Maisky, himself greatly disturbed by the reports, relayed the information to Moscow, though with the usual caveats to meet the expectations of his leaders.181

  The information, like other British warnings, was taken with a large pinch of salt in Moscow. But one of the last warnings received before the German onslaught was from a recognized friend, the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. On 21 June, Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, noted in his diary that he had received a telegram from Mao. It stated that Germany would attack that very day. Dimitrov noted that rumours of such an attack were mounting on all sides. He telephoned Molotov to ask about the position to be adopted by Communist parties. Molotov’s reply was that ‘it was all a game’.182 He said he would speak with Comrade Stalin about it.183

  He knew what response to expect. Stalin remained in complete denial. His position throughout had been: he knew best. Given the structure of leadership and decision-making in the Soviet Union, together with the fear of recrimination that underpinned any perceived opposition, it was difficult even to put a countervailing argument, let alone to persuade Stalin that he was wrong. So the other Soviet leaders, from conviction or convenience, were compliant. Even on the day before the German invasion, Beria wrote to Stalin criticizing the increasingly urgent warnings from one of his own acolytes, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Dekanozov. He told Stalin of his view that Dekanozov should be dismissed and punished ‘because he is bombarding me incessantly with disinformation. Hitler is allegedly preparing an invasion of the USSR. Now, he [Dekanozov] has told me that this invasion is to begin tomorrow.’184 Stalin’s own obscenity about what he took to be disinformation was cited near the beginning of this chapter. The vehemence of his outburst was, nevertheless, in all probability a sign of his own inner doubts that he had been right all along. The problem was that his stance had dictated policy at every stage. And now Stalin, paralysed by his own analysis into inaction, had no alternative to offer. When a German deserter, a former Communist, appeared at a border post in the Ukraine at 8 p.m. on the evening of 21 June, saying that Hitler’s forces would invade next morning, Stalin was at least anxious enough to agree to Zhukov’s directive to warn all military districts of a possible surprise attack at dawn and ordered all units to be made ready for combat. But it was far too little, and far too late. And even now Stalin still thought that ‘perhaps the question can be settled peacefully’.185

  Whatever his inner doubts, his unwavering conviction for so long that he was right, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, had left Stalin with no choice but to believe–or perhaps just to hope–that he was not wrong.

  He was. His illusions were shattered by a telephone call from Zhukov at 3.40 a.m. on the morning of 22 June. A massive German attack had started on all parts of the western front. The war had begun.

  VII

  Stalin was speechless when he heard the news. Al
l Zhukov could hear was his heavy breathing on the telephone. Stalin gave no immediate orders for countermeasures. He told Zhukov and Timoshenko to go straight away to the Kremlin. Members of the Politburo were also summoned. The meeting, under the direst circumstances imaginable, finally began at 5.45 a.m., Moscow time, just over an hour after the attack had started. Astonishingly, Stalin thought the attack might have been unleashed as a provocation by German officers acting on their own initiative. ‘Hitler simply does not know about it,’ he stated. He poured out his bile on Ribbentrop instead. For some time, Stalin did not rule out the possibility that the attack was to intimidate the Soviet Union into political submission. He would not order action by the Red Army until he had heard from Berlin.

  Schulenburg was contacted and told to come immediately. He had, in fact, been trying to arrange a meeting with Molotov. When he arrived, Schulenburg read out a telegram that had arrived at 3 a.m., Berlin time, stating that Germany had been forced to take ‘countermeasures’ against the concentration of Soviet forces. Schulenburg spoke of his own ‘despondency, caused by the inexcusable and unexpected action of his own government’. Shocked and angry, Molotov retorted that it was ‘a breach of confidence unprecedented in history’. He returned to Stalin’s office to announce that Germany had declared war on the Soviet Union.186

  Stalin received the news in silence. He seemed shocked, tired and depressed. But he soon pulled himself together. ‘The enemy will be beaten all along the line,’ he declared.187 At this stage, he was unaware of the full scale of the disaster that was unfolding. He still thought the Red Army could swiftly turn the tables on the enemy and inflict a crushing defeat on the German invaders. The directive that Timoshenko composed (though it bore Stalin’s imprint) and dispatched to all military districts at 7.15 a.m. ordered Red Army units to ‘use all their strength and means to come down on the enemy’s forces and destroy them where they have violated the Soviet border’. But a Soviet offensive was still held back. ‘Until further orders, ground troops are not to cross the border,’ ran the directive. Meanwhile, the enemy’s aircraft would be destroyed on the ground and bombing raids carried out up to a hundred miles into German territory.188 In fact, by now much of the Soviet air force had already been put out of action. The unreality of the directive was compounded by another, fourteen hours later, that still spoke of taking the area of Lublin–fifty-five miles inside German-occupied Poland.189

  Nevertheless, during the course of the day consciousness of the scale of the calamity began to become clear. At midday, Molotov–not Stalin (subdued, and unable to announce the beginning of the war)190–spoke to the Soviet people. With a slight nervous stammer, he told them of ‘an unparalleled act of perfidy in the history of civilised nations’. He referred to losses of two hundred.191 The address, heard by fearful and incredulous citizens, listening in border areas as bombs rained down from the skies, ended with words drafted by Stalin: ‘Our cause is just, the enemy will be smashed, victory will be ours.’192 Stalin himself was meanwhile immersed in non-stop meetings, issuing decrees and directives and trying to ascertain the seriousness of the invasion. Only that afternoon, when the Politburo met at 4.00 p.m., did the full gravity of what had happened become apparent. Timoshenko reported that the severity of the German attack had exceeded all expectations. The Soviet air force and border forces had experienced heavy losses. Some 1,200 planes had been lost, 800 of them destroyed on the ground. German forces were advancing rapidly into the heart of the country. Almost unbelievably, Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, was under threat. Stalin thought that ‘inconceivable’, branded the invasion a ‘monstrous crime’ and angrily declared that heads would roll.193 Among the first was to be that of General Pavlov, the Commander-in-Chief of the western front, who would be executed within a month along with three other front commanders. Even Stalin thought the charges of ‘anti-Soviet military conspiracy’ were absurd. But he confirmed the sentences, and wanted the fronts to be informed ‘so they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy’. Eight generals in all were shot–scapegoats for the debacle.194

  The news from the front worsened by the day. By 28 June that which Stalin had described as ‘inconceivable’–the fall of Minsk, laying open the way to Smolensk and Moscow itself–had happened. As many as 400,000 Soviet troops had been trapped in the German encirclement. In no more than a week the Wehrmacht had advanced some 300 miles into Soviet territory. The psychological shock of what had happened now hit Stalin. For two days he did not appear in the Kremlin. He could not be contacted. In self-confinement at his dacha, he appears to have been briefly in a state of near nervous collapse. Finally, the members of his inner circle plucked up courage to drive out to his dacha. They found him looking haggard and depressed, seemingly nervous at the arrival of his leading henchmen. If, as was later claimed (probably with some exaggeration), he thought they might have come to hold him to account for his failings, and to depose him, he had nothing to fear. They persuaded him to return to the Kremlin, now as chairman of a newly formed State Defence Committee, an all-powerful small War Cabinet, with wide-ranging powers. Next day, 1 July, he was back in the Kremlin, and in full control. Two days later, he gave a powerful address to the nation, combining patriotic rhetoric with threats of merciless reprisals ‘against cowards, panic-mongers and deserters’.195 The low point of Stalin’s personal adjustment to the disaster that had befallen the Soviet Union had passed.

  At this very time, even so, Stalin, together with Molotov and Beria, seems to have been secretly contemplating putting out feelers to Hitler to see what his conditions would be for halting the attack. The idea was to win more time for the USSR to regather military strength. The cession to Germany of substantial territory, including the Baltic republics, the Ukraine and Bessarabia, was mooted. Molotov apparently spoke of a second Brest-Litovsk treaty, referring to the amputation of Russian territory that ended Russian participation in the First World War. If Lenin could do it, such was the implication, it could be done again–a lesser evil, to cut losses, and prepare militarily for a time when the lost lands could be recovered. According to the postwar testimony of General Pavel Sudoplatov, then deputy head of the NKVD’s intelligence section, he was assigned to put the proposals, under conditions of the highest secrecy, to a trusted intermediary, the Bulgarian ambassador to Moscow, Ivan Stamenov, in a Moscow restaurant. The meeting took place. But Stamenov appears to have thought his interlocutor was eliciting his own impressions of whether it was worthwhile passing the information to Berlin. His view, perhaps tailored to what he thought his dinner companion wanted to hear, was that Soviet superiority would ultimately prevail. Germany would be defeated in the war. Whether or not he had misinterpreted what was expected of him, Stamenov passed on no message. Sudoplatov himself reported back to Beria and the issue was quietly dropped.196

  According to Zhukov, Stalin considered putting out peace-feelers on a second occasion.197 This was in October 1941, soon after the advancing German army had smashed the Soviet front line in the great encirclements at Brjansk and Viaz'ma, where as many as 673,000 Red Army soldiers were captured. If there were such thoughts, they could only have arisen out of desperation. But the second story of possible peace overtures sounds implausible. The chances of Hitler stopping with Moscow apparently at his mercy would have been remote. In any case, no overtures were made.

  Moscow was, however, indeed by now within the sights of the Wehrmacht. The deepest crisis in that crisis-ridden year was mounting for the the increasingly panic-stricken population of the Soviet capital. When the Germans broke through the capital’s main strategic defence on the night of 14–15 October, the survival not only of Moscow, but of the Soviet state itself, was in question. The State Defence Committee ordered the evacuation of most of the government to Kuibyshev, on the Volga 400 miles to the south-east. Factories and industrial installations were made ready for detonation. So was the Moscow underground. The moves reflected a belief among the top Soviet leadership that Moscow could soon fa
ll to the Germans.198 Among ordinary Muscovites, what came to be known as ‘the big skedaddle’ began, as hundreds of thousands voted with their feet and rushed to leave the city.199 Possibly a fifth of the city’s population took flight as the panic spread.200 Lenin’s embalmed body was removed from its Kremlin mausoleum and shipped east, to be secretly housed in a former Tsarist school.201 Preparations were made for Stalin, too, to leave Moscow. His dacha near the city was mined. Offices and a bomb shelter had been made ready for him at Kuibyshev. A plane waited to transport him out of Moscow. So did a special train.202 Beria was encouraging the complete relocation of the government to Kuibyshev. Stalin faced another vital decision. According to testimony, if at a much later date, from Nikolai Vasilievich Ponomariov, in 1941 a military liaison communications officer in Stalin’s entourage, he was told on the evening of 16 October to prepare for immediate evacuation and driven to the railway station. Stalin’s bodyguards were on the platform. The train was ready for departure, but Stalin never appeared. Zhukov, it seems, had persuaded him that Moscow could be held.203 Stalin stayed. When asked at a later date what would have resulted from a different decision by Stalin, to leave the city and move to Kuibyshev, Molotov replied: ‘Moscow would have burned.’ He went on to say that the Germans would have taken the city, the Soviet Union would have collapsed and this would have led to the break-up of the coalition against Hitler.204 This was, perhaps, an over-dramatic surmise. But Stalin’s decision to stay was unquestionably an important boost to morale for the city of Moscow, and for the Soviet Union generally. Word rapidly circulated. The strong Leader was still at the helm, and would stay with his people in the capital. The immediate crisis subsided. The panic dissipated as quickly as it had arisen. But the danger was still not at an end.

  The tide of the German onslaught would only be stemmed in the first successful counter-offensive of the Red Army, in December 1941, with the spearhead of the Wehrmacht on the outskirts of Moscow. It was a turning point. Never again would the threat be so grave. For the hitherto all-conquering Wehrmacht, the winter crisis before Moscow was a key moment. In retrospect, it is not too fanciful to see in it the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. For the Soviet Union, there were still many dark days ahead before victory was achieved. By that date, 8 May 1945, huge tracts of the country were in ruins and some twenty-five million Soviet citizens lay dead. The cost of Stalin’s decision that he knew best had been colossal.