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. #1

     Stalin 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
– made apology for his pact with Hitler – to save time he said – but of course he got territory as well;
– said Hitler was out to germanize and enslave Russians;
– called for a scorched-earth policy;
– compared Hitler with Napoleon.

     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!

– He told Harry Hopkins to tell FDR that he would welcome American troops on "any part of the Russian front under the complete command of the American army." Was he despairing? Hitler's troops had covered more than 450 miles in less than a month when he said this.
– In September, after Budienny's disastrous defeat on the Dnieper, two other visitors, Harriman and Beaverbrook, noticed signs of depression in Stalin; and Stalin then inquired whether the British would send some of their troops to the Ukrainian front.
– Later in the autumn, when the Germans were approaching Moscow, he betrayed his anxiety to Sir Stafford Cripps. He told the British Ambassador that Moscow would be defended to the last, but he also envisaged the possibility that the Germans might seize it. He went on to say that if Moscow fell, the Red Army would have to withdraw from the whole territory to the east of the Volga. He believed that even than the Soviets would be able to go on waging war, but that it would take many years before they could strike back across the Volga.

     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 it 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 to the 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 to the 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 his 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".

     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.

LEST WE FORGET
THE IMMORTAL FEATS OF OUR FOREBEARS

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FOOTNOTES and SOURCES

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#1 By Prof. Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College.
Original source: http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/stalin/lectures/Warlord.html

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