June 21 1941 could scarcely have been more stifling, and
Stalin’s top aide, Alexander Poskryobyshev, was sweating profusely, his window
open but the leaves on the trees outside utterly still. The son of a cobbler,
like the despot whom he served, he occupied the immediate outer office through
which all visitors had to pass, and invariably they would spray him with
questions—“Why did the Master have me summoned?” “What’s his mood?”—to which
Poskryobyshev would laconically answer, “You’ll find out.” He was
indispensable, handling all the phone calls and document piles in just the way
the despot preferred. But Stalin had allowed Beria to imprison Poskryobyshev’s
beloved wife as a “Trotskyite” in 1939. (Beria had sent a large basket of fruit
to their two baby girls; he then executed their mother.) Now, Poskryobyshev sat
at his desk trying to cool down with a bottle of Narzan mineral water, under a
photograph of a youthful Stalin wearing a pointy, red-starred civil war cap. On
Stalin’s instructions, at around 2:00 p.m., he phoned General Ivan Tyulenev,
head of the Moscow military district. Soon the general heard Stalin’s “muffled
voice” asking, “Comrade Tyulenev, what is the situation concerning Moscow’s
antiaircraft defenses?” After a brief report, Stalin said, “Listen, the
situation is unsettled and therefore you should bring the antiaircraft defenses
of Moscow up to 75 percent of their readiness state.”
Poskryobyshev thumped the latest intelligence, delivered by
field courier, onto Stalin’s desk. Rather than purloined documents, almost all
of it was hearsay. From London, Ambassador Maisky, despite having been given
British intelligence about German force concentrations (gleaned, unbeknownst to
him, from Enigma codebreaking), wrote to Moscow (June 21) that he had told
Cripps, “As before, I consider a German attack on the USSR unlikely.” But from
Berlin, Ambassador Dekanozov—who also knew the view in the Kremlin and the
consequences of contradicting it—was finally reporting, under the influence of
the best spies in the Soviet network, that Germany’s actions signaled an
imminent invasion. Stalin evidently concluded that his Berlin envoy had been
fed disinformation by British agents and stated, “Dekanozov is not such a smart
fellow to be able to see that.”
From Tokyo, Max Clausen (June 21) radioed yet another
message from Sorge, this one composed the day before: “The German ambassador in
Tokyo, Ott, told me a war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable.” The
dispatch gave no start date. For Stalin, the question was not whether war with
the Nazi regime was inescapable, but whether it was inescapable this year.
Scores and scores of invasion warnings had accumulated on his desk, but just
about every reported date—including at least fourteen specific ones—had passed.
These ranged from the earliest, such as “March 1941” (transmitted on December
29, 1940), “May 20,” “April or May,” “April 6,” “April 20,” or “May 15 to June
15,” to the more recent: “either in May or after defeating Britain,” “not today
or tomorrow,” “May 18,” “May 25,” “in late May,” “summer 1941 before the
harvest gathering,” “at the beginning of June,” “no later than June 15,”
“around June 15,” “June 15,” and “June 15–20.” The only remaining possibilities
were “June 22–25” (reported on June 16) and “June 21 or 22.”24 The invasion
window would soon shut; Stalin was virtually home free for another year.
Never mind the secret intelligence: warnings were splashed
across the front pages of the global press. But knowing how he himself used
newspapers, Stalin took the screaming headlines to be planted provocations. He
reasoned that Britain (and the United States) wanted nothing more than for the
USSR and Nazi Germany to become embroiled in war—which was true—but as a
result, he dismissed all warnings of a German attack. He knew that Germany was
experiencing severe shortages—again true—so he reasoned that it needed even
more supplies from him, and that a German invasion would be self-defeating
because it would put those supplies at risk. He knew that Germany had lost the
First World War because it had fought on two fronts—also true—and so he
reasoned that the Germans understood that it would be suicidal for them to
attack the USSR before defeating Britain in the west. This logical reasoning
had become Stalin’s trap, enabling the Germans to spread a seemingly
all-encompassing explanation for what they could not conceal: their colossal
troop buildup. It was supposedly not for war but for extorting Soviet
concessions. When Stalin intemperately damned his intelligence as contaminated
by disinformation, he was spot-on. But the despot had no idea which parts were
disinformation, and which might be accurate intelligence. He labeled as
“disinformation” whatever he chose not to believe.
The Nazis’ brilliant disinformation campaign generated reams
of Soviet intelligence reports saying both that war was coming and that there
would be blackmail—and if the latter was true, the former need not be. The fake
ultimatum became for Stalin the ultimate truth, something that, given his lack
of confidence in the Red Army’s prospects against the Wehrmacht, he desperately
needed to be true.
Blackmail certainly fit Hitler’s profile. Early on, the
British had dismissed the German buildup in the east and the accompanying
rumors of a military showdown there as “wishful thinking.” Then they latched on
to the Hitler-ultimatum theory, which many British officials did not relinquish
even after decrypted Enigma intercepts exposed real-time German war orders.
While Göring told his high-placed, notoriously indiscreet British contacts that
he had personally drawn up a list of demands to be presented to the Soviets so
that Germany could continue the fight against Britain, Goebbels’s men launched
rumors that the Führer would soon demand a ninety-nine-year lease on Ukraine.
Stalin found himself in the reverse of the role in which he had placed Finland
in 1939. The crucial difference was that, whereas he had issued his demands to
the Finns and sought to negotiate, he was still waiting upon Hitler’s, and
Hitler had no intention to negotiate. In the meantime, Germany had attained the
buildup necessary for an invasion.
#
Colonel Georgy Zakharov, a decorated fighter pilot, had been
ordered to conduct a full daylight reconnaissance of the border region on the
German side, and he reported that the Wehrmacht was poised to invade. The NKGB
had discovered that German saboteurs brazenly crossing into the USSR had been
instructed that “in the event German troops cross the frontier before they
return to Germany, they must report to any German troop unit located on Soviet
territory.” Soviet counterintelligence noted vigorous German recruitment of
disaffected Belorussians, Balts, and Ukrainians, who were forming underground
groups and engaging in terrorism long after Stalin’s supposed annihilation of
the fifth column in the terror. Overburdened Soviet rail lines that were needed
to transport troops westward were swamped with tens of thousands of
“anti-Soviet elements” being deported eastward from the annexed territories. On
June 21, Merkulov issued an order to Ukraine for a new wave of preemptive
arrests to interdict sabotage: “Immediately telegraph by what deadline the
indicated operation could be readied by you, and provide an overall orientation
about the number of people who could be removed, with a breakdown by
categories.”
Stalin paced and paced. Actually, it was more like a waddle
as he swung his hips around awkwardly, the result of that childhood collision
with a horse-drawn carriage. He wore, as ever, his signature baggy breeches,
which he tucked into his well-worn black leather boots, as well as matching
khaki tunic, buttoned at the top, simple and functional, and different from the
bourgeois suits favored by Lenin. The despot’s clothes were martial in look
without being an actual military uniform, a style first popularized in Russia
by Alexander Kerensky as well as, yes, Trotsky. His former nemesis had survived
sixteen years beyond Lenin’s death—an eternity, burning its way into the Little
Corner with his acid pen. But what had Trotsky marshaled—a few thousand
dispersed followers?—before Stalin’s assassins managed to drive that ice pick
through his skull in the run-down Mexican villa? German tanks, warplanes, and
pontoon bridges had been advanced into the barbed-wire-protected inner zone of
the border, and the barbed wire itself was being removed. The click and whir of
German motors resounded across to the Soviet side.
At the centerpiece of the Little Corner, the felt-covered
conference table, the despot had held countless sessions devoted to war
preparations. “Stalin had an enormous capacity for work,” observed Molotov,
who, despite his demotion from head of government, had kept his reserved seat
at the table. “If the subject was cannons—then cannons; if tanks—then tanks.”
He had forced into being upward of 9,000 new industrial enterprises during the
three Five-Year Plans, and Soviet military production grew even faster than GDP
for a decade. He had overseen the formation of 125 new divisions just since
1939, and the Red Army now stood at 5.37 million troops, the largest in the
world. It had 25,000 tanks and 18,000 fighter planes, three to four times
Germany’s stocks. Stalin knew that Germany was underestimating this massive
force out of prejudice as well as ignorance, so he had arranged German visits
to Soviet aviation and tank factories, and even allowed Göring’s planes nearly
unimpeded reconnaissance of Soviet troop concentrations, airfields, naval
bases, and fuel and ammunition depots. Stalin also had his spies spread rumors
that, if attacked, Soviet aircraft would assault Berlin with chemical and
biological agents. In Hitler’s shoes, Stalin would have been deterred.
Of course, if your own country really was so well armed, why
not let the foolish enemy underestimate you? Because the Winter War with
Finland had exposed Soviet military weaknesses not just to Hitler, but also to
Stalin. The Red Army was still in the middle of its gigantic, protracted,
contradictory post-Finland rearmament and reorganization.
Stalin’s early commitment to mass armament production, amid
rapid technological change, meant that more than 10,000 Soviet tanks (T-26s and
BT-7s) were now too light, while the more advanced, heavier T-34
(45-millimeter-thick armor) and KV (75-millimeter armor) numbered only around
1,800 units. Similarly, the most advanced warplanes (Yak-1, MiG-3, Pe-2) made
up just one quarter of the air force. Stalin’s war preparations also bore the
mark of his executions of thousands of loyal officers, especially top
commanders like Vasily Blyukher, whose eye had been deposited in his hand
before he died under torture, and the gifted Mikhail Tukhachevsky, whose blood
had been splattered all over his “confession” to being a German agent just
before Stalin signed the Pact. Now, 85 percent of the officer corps was
thirty-five or under, while those older than forty-five constituted around 1
percent. Fully 620 generals were under forty-five, 393 under fifty-five, and
only 63 older than fifty-five. Many had been majors a short time earlier. The
Red Army had one officer for every nine soldiers, versus one for every nineteen
in Japan and one for twenty-nine in Germany, but Soviet officer ranks were
swelled by those in the army’s political apparatus. Of the 659,000 Soviet
officers, only around half had completed a military school, while one in four
had the bare minimum (a few courses), and one in eight had no military
education whatsoever.
Lately, the despot’s morose side had gotten the upper hand.
“Stalin was unnerved and irritated by persistent reports (oral and written)
about the deterioration of relations with Germany,” Admiral Kuznetsov would
recall. Stalin’s face gave away stress—even fear—to the point that he sometimes
failed to fill his pipe with the Herzegovina Flor cigarette tobacco that had
stained his teeth and mustache yellow. “He felt that danger was imminent,”
recalled Khrushchev, the party boss of Ukraine, who was in Moscow until June
20. “Would our country be able to deal with it? Would our army deal with it?”
#
Since May 1941, nighttime use of electric lighting in the
Kremlin had been forbidden. But June 21 was the summer solstice, the longest
day of the year. At around 5:00 p.m., Stalin ordered Alexander Shcherbakov,
party boss of Moscow province and city, and Vasily Pronin, chairman of the
Moscow soviet executive committee, to keep all ward party secretaries at their
posts.44 At 6:27 p.m., Molotov entered the Little Corner, the first visitor, as
usual. At 7:05, in walked Voroshilov, Beria, Voznesensky, Malenkov, Timoshenko,
Admiral Kuznetsov, and Grigory Safonov, the young deputy procurator general,
who was responsible for the military courts on railroads and in the fleets. The
discussion apparently revolved around recent developments pointing toward war,
versus Stalin’s dread of provocations that might incite it. Germany had
achieved the buildup necessary to attack. Filipp Golikov, of Soviet military
intelligence, estimated Germany’s concentration of forces against the USSR at
only 120 to 122 of around 285 total divisions, versus 122 to 126 against
Britain (the other 44 to 48 were said to be reserves).46 In fact, there were
around 200 divisions arrayed against the USSR, including 154 German ones—a
total of at least 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers and half a million troops from
its Axis partners, as well as 3,600 tanks, 2,700 aircraft, and 700,000 field
guns and other artillery, 600,000 motor vehicles, and 650,000 horses. The
Soviets had massed around 170 divisions, perhaps 2.7 million men in the west,
along with 10,400 tanks and 9,500 aircraft. The two largest armies in world
history stood cheek by jowl on a border some 2,000 miles long.
Such immense Soviet troop concentrations testify to both
Stalin’s understanding that Germany represented a monumental danger and his
misunderstanding of blitzkrieg. But only one of the two vast armies on the
frontier had occupied its firing positions. Stalin had allowed covert strategic
redeployments westward and lately had finally yielded to Timoshenko and
Zhukov’s insistence that the Red Army commence camouflaging of aerodromes, tank
parks, warehouses, and military installations (which in many cases would
require repainting). But he would not permit assumption of combat positions,
which he feared would only play into the hands of German
militarist-adventurers, who craved war and schemed to force Hitler’s hand, the
way they had pushed the Wehrmacht beyond the agreed-upon German-Soviet line in
Poland in 1939. Soviet planes were forbidden from flying within six miles of
the border. Timoshenko and Zhukov, subject to the despot’s admonitions and the
watchful eye of Beria and his minions, made sure that frontline commanders did
not cause or yield to “provocation.” Beria also tasked the assassin Sudoplatov
with organizing “an experienced strike force to counter any frontier incident
that might be used as an excuse to start a war.”
Soviet intelligence was reporting that not just Germany but
also Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland were at full war readiness. But
Stalin, having long ago ceded the initiative, was effectively paralyzed. Just
about anything he did could be used by Hitler to justify an invasion. On June
20, the head of the Soviet Union’s Riga port had telephoned Mikoyan to report
that all 25 German ships docked there were preparing to leave en masse on June
21, without having finished loading or unloading, and had asked whether to detain
them. When Mikoyan hastened over to the Little Corner with the news, Stalin had
ordered him to let the German vessels go, because if the Soviets detained them,
Hitler could regard that as a justification for war. While all German vessels
departed safely on June 21, a Soviet freighter, the Magnitogorsk, hastily sent
a panicked radiogram, not even using ciphers, informing the Baltic Commercial
Fleet in Leningrad that it was being prevented from departing the German port
of Danzig, without explanation. More than forty Soviet merchant ships were
immobilized at German ports.
At 7:00 p.m., Gerhard Kegel (“X”), the Soviet spy in the
German embassy, had slipped out for the second time that day to tell his Soviet
handler, Leontyev (“Petrov”), that German personnel living outside the facility
had been ordered to relocate into it immediately, and that “all think that this
very night there will be war.” At 8:00 p.m., Golikov had a courier dispatched
to Stalin, Molotov, and Timoshenko, with this new piece of intelligence in
sealed envelopes. In the Little Corner, Timoshenko, Kuznetsov, Safonov, and
Voznesensky were dismissed at 8:15. Malenkov was dismissed five minutes later.
Nothing significant was decided.
Zhukov phoned in to report that yet another German soldier
had defected across the frontier, warning of an invasion within a few hours.
This was precisely the kind of “provocation” Stalin feared. He ordered Zhukov
to the Kremlin, along with the just-departed Timoshenko. They entered Stalin’s
office at 8:50, accompanied by the old Stalin crony Marshal Budyonny, a deputy
defense commissar. Whereas the two pince-nez minions Molotov and Beria provided
an echo chamber for Stalin’s denials that Hitler was going to attack, the two
peasant commanders could see that Germany was coiled to invade. Still, when
Stalin insisted otherwise, they presumed that he possessed superior information
and insight. In any case, they knew the costs of losing his trust. “Everyone
had in their memory the events of recent years,” Zhukov would recall. “And to
say out loud that Stalin was wrong, that he is mistaken, to say it plainly,
could have meant that without leaving the building, you would be taken to have
coffee with Beria.”
Nonetheless, the pair evidently used the latest defector to
urge a general mobilization—tantamount, in Stalin’s mind, to war. “Didn’t
German generals send that defector across the border in order to provoke a
conflict?” Stalin asked. “No,” answered Timoshenko. “We think the defector is
telling the truth.” Stalin: “What do we do now?” Timoshenko allowed the silence
to persist. Finally, the defense commissar suggested, “Put the troops on the
western border on high alert.” He and Zhukov had come prepared with a draft
directive.
Where was the ultimatum? Stalin had continued to try to
engage Hitler after the TASS bulletin gambit fell flat. “Molotov has asked for
permission to visit Berlin, but has been fobbed off,” Goebbels wrote in his
diary (June 18). “A naïve request.” Dekanozov had appeared at the German
foreign ministry that same day without an appointment, mentioning nothing of a
Molotov visit but inducing terror all the same. “The main political worry here
is not to afford Stalin the opportunity for some kind of generous gesture to
upend all our cards at the last minute,” state secretary Weizsäcker,
Ribbentrop’s deputy, had written in his diary, but then he noted that the inept
Soviet envoy had “merely brought up a few current matters of lesser importance.”
Weizsäcker had cleverly laid out a map of the Near East, as if Germany’s
attention was on British positions. “The ambassador took leave of me without
anything whatever having been said about German-Soviet relations.” On the
morning of June 21, Molotov had sent a telegram instructing Dekanozov to
hand-deliver an attached diplomatic protest of German border violations to
Ribbentrop, and to use it to elicit clarifications. “Several times that day
Moscow telephoned, pressing us to carry out our instructions,” an embassy duty
officer recalled. But Ribbentrop had deliberately vanished from the capital and
sent instructions to inform Dekanozov that he would be contacted as soon as the
Nazi foreign minister returned, whenever that might be. The Soviet duty
officer, remaining behind after other employees had departed at around 7:00
p.m., kept calling the German foreign ministry every thirty minutes.
