Stalin's General (17 page)

The document ended with a request that Stalin permit the “timely” and “covert” mobilization and concentration of the High Command's reserve armies.
⁹

The Red Army's offensivist doctrine and its preparations to wage an offensive war with Germany once hostilities began have misled
some historians into thinking that Stalin intended to launch a preemptive strike against Hitler in summer 1941. According to this view the untold story of June 22, 1941, is that the Red Army was caught unready by the German invasion not because it was surprised but because it was in the middle of its own preparations for attack. Is this May 1941 plan the smoking gun sought by the advocates of the preemptive strike hypothesis? One problem is that although the document was addressed to Stalin it is not clear it was ever sent to him. After the existence of the May plan became public knowledge in the early 1990s there were reports that Zhukov and Timoshenko had talked to Stalin about it, but these were all retrospective claims. The most common narrative deriving from these rather dubious post hoc claims links Vasilevsky's May redraft of the March 1941 war plan to a secret speech by Stalin to 2,000 graduates of the Red Army staff academies on May 5, 1941. By this time it was normal for every public or semipublic remark of Stalin's to be widely disseminated in the Soviet Union. On this occasion, however, there was no published text, only a short report in
Pravda
the next day under the headline “We Must be Prepared to Deal with Any Surprises”:

Not surprisingly rumors began to circulate about what else Stalin might have said to his graduating cadets. According to one report Stalin warned that war with Germany was definitely coming; according to another he advocated an offensive war to expand the socialist system. The version the Soviets leaked to the Germans was that Stalin talked about a new compromise with Hitler. The truth, as is usually the case, was more prosaic than any of the rumors. According to the text of Stalin's speech, which came to light in 1995, his main theme was as
Pravda
reported—the reform, reorganization, and reequipment
of the Red Army. However, the speech also contained a number of details about the reforms and about the Red Army's strength—not the kind of information to put in the public domain on the eve of war.

After the graduation ceremony there was a reception in the Kremlin at which Stalin, as usual, proposed several toasts. Some of his pretoast remarks have been preserved for posterity. According to the diary of Georgy Dimitrov, leader of the Communist International, Stalin “was in an exceptionally good mood” and said “our policy of peace and security is at the same time a policy of preparation for war. There is no defence without offense. The army must be trained in a spirit of offensive action. We must prepare for war.” Another observer recorded Stalin saying “good defence means attack. The offensive is the best defence.” According to the official record Stalin also said:

The supposition is that having listened to Stalin's speech and toasts Zhukov and Timoshenko decided to order a plan for a preemptive strike. At this point the story of the May plan takes two forks, with one group of historians arguing that Stalin rejected the draft and another saying that he accepted it and ordered the preparation of a preemptive strike for later in the summer of 1941. We may never know whether Stalin saw the May plan, or what he thought about it, but the document can be taken as indicative of what Zhukov and Timoshenko were thinking since Vasilevsky would never have prepared such a draft without the prompting of his superiors. But, as the historian Evan Mawdsley has argued, Zhukov and Timoshenko were probably not thinking about an immediate preemptive strike, but about putting the
Red Army in a position “to pre-empt the Germans
at a particular time in the future
, when the Germans were in the last stages of preparing an attack on the USSR,
and not before
.”
¹²
When that time would be, the May plan did not specify but, as we have seen, the GRU's intelligence reports indicated that the German attack was not imminent. In the meantime Zhukov and Timoshenko were concerned to speed up Soviet mobilization plans and Vasilevsky's document may have been intended—and may have been used—to persuade Stalin to step up the pace of mobilization. Whatever the case, nothing in particular happened as a consequence of the May plan. The steady buildup of the Red Army continued but at no stage were the High Command's reserve armies secretly mobilized in preparation for a preemptive strike. Among the mobilization measures undertaken were the following:

These measures were indeed quite extensive but, as Evan Mawdsley also pointed out, nowhere near sufficient to deliver the preemptive strike projected in the May draft plan.
¹⁴

During this period Zhukov regularly met Stalin in his Kremlin office. According to Stalin's appointments diary he saw Zhukov twenty-six times between February 1 and June 21, 1941. On all except one occasion Zhukov was accompanied by Timoshenko. One of the longest meetings (more than three hours) took place on May 24 when Zhukov and Timoshenko were joined in Stalin's office by a number of other senior military figures, including Vatutin and Pavlov, the chief of the Western Military District. It has been suggested that this was the meeting that decided on a preemptive strike against Germany in summer 1941, but it is much more likely to have been a discussion of ongoing mobilization measures. Moreover, Stalin did not meet with Zhukov, Timoshenko, or any of his generals for the next ten days, hardly behavior consistent with a momentous decision to start a war with Germany.
¹⁵

Ultimately, there is no evidence Stalin wanted or intended to start a war with Hitler in summer 1941 (whether he might have considered the possibility in 1942 when Soviet military preparations were complete is another question). On the contrary he strove to avoid war for as long as possible—indeed, for far too long in the opinion of many military analysts, including Zhukov. Until the very last day of peace Stalin continued to believe that war could be put off for a few more months and that when the Germans did attack Soviet defenses would hold, giving time to prepare for a counteroffensive.

While the Soviets might have been sanguine about the imminence of a German attack, throughout June the evidence accumulated that such an offensive might be coming sooner than they thought. From the western border districts came detailed intelligence on German preparations for an invasion. Of particular concern were reports that Romania and Finland were mobilizing for war, too.
¹⁶
Meanwhile on the political front the Germans spurned hints that the Soviets were interested in new negotiations between the two states. These hints took the
form of a statement from the official Soviet news agency, TASS, on June 13 denying rumors of an impending war between the USSR and Germany. The USSR, said TASS, was adhering to the Soviet-German nonaggression pact, as was Germany, and contrary reports were all lies and provocations. The statement denied that Germany had made any new demands on the USSR but implied that there could be negotiations were that to be the case. In the remaining days of peace the Soviets made a number of further conciliatory overtures to the Germans, but from Berlin there came only silence.
¹⁷
On June 15 the latest GRU summary report confirmed there had been a massive transfer of German forces eastward and that the Wehrmacht now had 120–122 divisions deployed along the Soviet border, a good number of them concentrated in the southwest.
¹⁸

In his memoirs Zhukov claimed that he and Timoshenko responded to the growing danger by going to see Stalin on June 14 to urge him to alert all border forces and allow the deployment of more troops close to the border—measures that would strengthen the defensive cover necessary to protect a full-scale Soviet mobilization when war came. But Stalin demurred on the grounds that such actions would be provocative and, in any case, the border forces were strong enough already. “We left the Kremlin with a heavy heart,” recalled Zhukov. “I decided to walk a little way. My thoughts were very depressing. In the Alexandrov Garden beside the Kremlin wall children were romping about without a care in the world. I thought of my own little girls, and realized keenly what an immense responsibility we bore for the children, for their future, for the whole country.”
¹⁹
A touching story, except that it is doubtful any such meeting took place. According to Stalin's appointments diary Zhukov and Timoshenko saw him on June 11 and again on June 18 but not in between. There is no contemporaneous documentary evidence—as opposed to post hoc memoir claims—that Zhukov and Timoshenko, any more than Stalin, had grasped the immediacy of the German threat, at least not until the very eve of the invasion. On June 19 Zhukov ordered the HQs of the western Fronts to move to forward command posts but with a deadline of June 23—the day after the actual German attack.

Historical discussions of this question have focused on issues such as Stalin's failure to interpret the intelligence correctly or his strong
belief that Hitler would not attack Russia before he had finished off Great Britain. These are valid considerations but the most important reason for Stalin's refusal to heed warnings of an imminent German attack was that he did not believe it mattered much if he miscalculated and Hitler caught him by surprise.
²⁰
Neither Stalin nor the General Staff believed the Germans would attack with massive military force from day one of the war. As Zhukov said in his memoirs, the Soviet expectation was that hostilities would begin with several days of relatively minor frontier battles. During this period the two sides would mobilize and then commit their main forces to battle. Like Stalin, Zhukov and the Soviet General Staff fully expected their frontier defenses to hold during this initial period of the war, thus buying time to complete the mobilization of the rest of the Red Army for the planned counteroffensive.