Stalin's Folly:
The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front
Constantine Pleshakov
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. ISBN: 0-618-36701-2. Pp. 326, index, blibliography
Review © 2005 Branislav L. Slantchev
Stalin, June 29, 1941 (p. 214)
When I read Suvorov's Icebreaker, the idea that Stalin was preparing to strike Nazi Germany and that Hitler had preempted him by mere weeks, if not days, was new to me and quite startling. I was not aware of the controversy it had generated among historians, and heard Suvorov's analytical approach being summarily dismissed by many historians. Yet, his arguments made sense, and so the question remained open in my mind. It appears that the consensus has now shifted toward an acceptance of Suvorov's main thesis even if argument continues about the details: was Stalin really planning to strike in 1941 or was it really for 1942?
Mr Pleshakov does not structure his book around the preemptive strike thesis but simply takes it as a given despite acknowledging a frustrating lack of direct evidence about the crucial plans and the June 21 meeting when Stalin supposedly set the attack date in several days' time. In other words, he insists that Stalin was, in fact, preparing an invasion of the West, a "liberation" of vast territories there, and the resulting spread of Communism. I am willing to accept this thesis tentatively for otherwise a great many things remain inexplicable except as gross folly. In particular, the Red Army's woeful lack of preparation, the dismantling of the formidable Stalin Line of fortifications, the forward stationing of units right next to the border, the failure to camouflage the planes, and the truly bizarre insistence that Hitler was not going to strike. That is, all of those things that cumulatively ensured the nearly complete annihilation of the regular army within two weeks of the German invasion.
The traditional take ever since Khrushchev has been to blame Stalin for gross negligence, incompetence, and his policies, especially the purges of the officer corps, for the astounding collapse of the enormous force he had amassed. Instead of seeking to explain why a rational leader would pursue such blatantly deficient plans, these accounts simply take their stupidity as evidence of megalomania and irrationality. It was Suvorov who first pointed out that perhaps these plans made sense if we changed our basic assumption, namely, that the Soviet Union was a peaceful nation bent on protecting its homeland, and that all of the security measures it took had this goal in mind. In this framework, the forward deployment truly makes no sense. But how could we have been so blinded by the Soviet propaganda to believe this basic line? After all, in 1939-40, the USSR fought a bloody aggressive war with Finland, and gobbled up territories in the Baltics and in Poland. Not quite the champion of peaceful coexistence, really.
What is even more startling in the traditional account is the rehabilitation of the likes of Zhukov who, under that interpretation, were either blind and foolish (and so did not realize just how vulnerable these deployments had rendered the USSR) or else cowed by fear of Stalin (and so did not dare contradict his orders). In his later work, Suvorov comes out very strongly against Zhukov and his supposed military genius. He even goes as far as to argue that Zhukov should have flatly refused Stalin's "criminal" orders and insist that the vozhd either give him the necessary authority to implement the required strategy or have him shot. Mr Pleshakov is not that extreme: in his version, Zhukov, although quite afraid of Stalin (and with good reason, given the 11th hour purges right before the war) and although willing to carry out orders that he disagrees with, nevertheless finds the courage to stand up to the vozhd on occasion. At any rate, his opposition to the forward deployment vanished as soon as he understood what Stalin was up to. In other words, whereas Zhukov probably would have done some things better, the preparation for offensive war left him with few options.
Still, both he and Timoshenko repeatedly warned Stalin about the impending Nazi strike, and requested that he allow them to order some elementary preparatory measures, which the vozhd flatly refused. It is here that the frustrating lack of footnotes makes it difficult to evaluate the thesis. On one hand, one can hardly blame Stalin: his spies had been warning him of an imminent strike for over a year now; Germany had not even bothered to mobilize its resources, it had not put its industry on war-time footing, it was fighting with Britain, it had not developed fuel that would not freeze in the Russian winter, it had not even prepared winter clothes for its soldiers. Surely even Hitler could not be so arrogant as to open a second front long months after the beginning of campaign season and hope to defeat the vast Soviet Union in the space of a couple of months? The longer the Führer delayed the invasion, the less credible the threat became.
So Stalin may have had very good reasons to dismiss such warnings as panic-mongering. And yet it does not excuse his neglect of basic measures he could have ordered to prevent the Red Army from finding itself blinded, deaf, stuck, and helpless on June 22. For example, he could have had the planes camouflaged so that they would not be such easy targets for the Luftwaffe. He could have had the cables guarded so that German saboteurs would not have been able to cut them and throw the organization of defense into chaos. He could have at least given permission that the army defend itself when attacked. Instead, he forbade them all. So why didn't Zhukov and Timoshenko order some of these precautionary measures anyway? We are told (source unknown, likely their own memoirs) that they tried talking sense to Stalin but failed. What were they to do? For one thing, they could have done as some local commanders did, like Admiral Oktiabrsky who managed to defend Sevatstopol by risking issuing orders on his own authority. And so it is hard to excuse the vaunted Zhukov for such obedient negligence.
It is intriguing how Mr Pleshakov deals with Stalin's famous gullibility on the eve of the war. Why did he choose to disbelieve so many warning signs? I alluded to some rational reasons already but the author stakes out a slightly different position, preferring to stick with a psychological explanation (p. 91). Stalin, we are told, had taken quite a liking to Hitler (of the admiration variety), and so believed that all border incidents were provocations by German generals who were disobeying the Führer. He even tried to get Molotov to straighten this out, believing that if Hitler learned about these activities, he would discipline his military. (Incidentally, Hitler came to regret not having purged his own military in a Stalinist fashion.)
And this brings us to the purges. We all know about this monstrosity: the seemingly random killing of people, and the systematic elimination of nearly the entire officer corps. Mr Pleshakov presents it as rational policy that Stalin implemented in order to secure his base, after all too may of these officers had seen the birth of the new country, had participated in the Civil War and the conflict in Spain, and their loyalties were uncertain (never mind that Bukharin and Trotsky were long gone). Mr Pleshakov is rather more interested in the effects of the purge. On one hand, it undeniably did the country enormous harm: commanders lost all initiative, too afraid to make any decisions without explicit authorization, and too dependent on monitoring by the attached commissars; they were afraid to tell the truth when the information reflected badly on themselves or on the Party/Soviet leadership, and so they falsified reports, making it awfully hard to direct military operations; many of them were promoted too recently, had no experience, lacked education, and were in many cases simply stupid; they executed orders that made no sense to them, that they knew to be wrong, preferring to send men to certain death rather than contradict a directive obviously given without knowledge of the true situation. All of this explains much about the fanatic counter-attacks that the generals pursued in the first days of the war; an ill-advised strategy that resulted in incredible destruction and loss of life, and came near to endangering the very existence of the regime as well.
Mr Pleshakov tells many stories that support this. He even reports how men like Zhukov and Timoshenko hid the reality from the vozhd when it was too unpalatable, and how the mighty Zhukov, the man who did not hesitate to order people summarily executed, cowered like a private (p. 253). Of course, the military is built on a principle of obeying orders and following the chain of command, but that still does not explain why so many commanders would even refuse to ask for clarifications when they received vague orders, or why they would not even attempt to let their superiors know why the actions they were being ordered to undertake made no sense.
In fact, so bad was Stalin's performance that he became enraged at himself (cf. the quote above), lamented that the country was "short of smart people" (p. 254), and fully expected a coup to depose him (p. 218-20). Mr Pleshakov argues that the top leadership came perilously close to removing him, but reconsidered because doing so would render them personally vulnerable as well. The new regime depended on Stalin too much to have him removed from power without causing a major cataclysm on the top. And this is the one virtue of the purges that Mr Pleshakov is prepared to concede: they had turned the people that would have normally been potentially very dangerous into pliant supporters, they had ensured that despite the mind-boggling losses, the country would continue to function, that no coup would take place, and that the fighting would continue (p. 221). As the author puts it,
Dictatorial regimes can be terribly inefficient they rarely feed their soldiers well, they're often slow in accepting new technology, they send army units to the wrong locations, they sometimes even fail to stop foreign commandos from dismantling their most vital communication systems. However, they do one thing extremely well: they deprive people of their will. Since the Enlightenment, mainstream Western thinkers have been arguing that an ineffective regime that destroys its people's initiative and brainwashes them instead of educating them will crumble in time of crisis. This may be true in some instances, but it was emphatically not the case in the Soviet Union in June 1941. (p. 273)
And herein lies Mr Pleshakov's main point: all the astounding strategic miscalculations, the egregious errors, the criminal negligence, the unbelievable losses, all these things that should have brought a normal country to its knees, and rightly so, all of these things were offset by the regime's willingness to pursue its goals with ruthless determination and exceptional brutality. Mr Pleshakov does not intend this to sound as a vindication of the vicious purges, after all, had the country retained competent people in positions of authority and had it allowed them breathing space enough for them to take initiative, many of the evils that the Soviet people had to overcome during the war would not have happened. Still, the success of repression is absolutely unbelievable. Witness the behavior of all those people that the regime had previously sent to Siberia to toil under inhuman conditions, and whom it was forced to recall when the appalling losses in the West started to exhaust the seemingly interminable supply of human fodder the vast country had. Almost all of these fought heroically, driven not just by Beria's penal battalions, but by a genuine desire to "wash their sins against the Party" with blood, to prove that they truly were good Communists, unjustly accused! One also has to recall how Rokossovsky, himself purged, tortured, and nearly executed, behaved toward subordinates (not to mentioned how this ethnic Pole had no qualms about quashing Poles with tanks when he was the Soviet military governor in Poland in the 1950s, all in the name of a system whose establishment figure, Stalin, had already died).
Mr Pleshakov's book is an excellent read even if it is clearly intended for the general public. It offers a glimpse into the beginning of the Great Patriotic War that many will find unsettling. I, for one, learned a great deal about people like Riabyshev and Popel, two remarkable men whose memoirs I now want to read. I was quite partial to the short account of Stalin's attempt to offer Hitler peace terms early in the war (pp. 189-90). I did not know about this (he was apparently ready to cede the Ukraine, the Baltics, Finland, and Romania, along with whatever else Germany might want), and it was also an interesting tidbit for personal reasons. On Stalin's orders, Beria attempted to contact the Germans to send the message, and to do this he went through Ivan Stamenov, the Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow who had close ties to German intelligence. Stamenov refused to deliver the message insisting that the USSR would win the war anyway, but in fact he was trying to pursue a nationalist policy that would secure Bulgaria's autonomy. It's not that Hitler would have listened at this point (after all, he wanted to exterminate most of the population, turn the rest into slaves, and populate the country with Germans... and he was winning), but it's sort of funny to think that a Bulgarian would thwart a peace feeler.
November 8, 2005