The Great Terror

As an old Soviet diplomat remarked, the two years gained by the Nazi-Soviet Pact were almost completely wasted. He commented sourly, “He suspected his own closest comrades, but he trusted Hitler.”³³

It has been said that so much genuine enmity had been focused on Trotsky that Hitler, in comparison, seemed a shadowy figure, a bogeyman for use in frightening the Party rather than a real threat. There may be an element of truth in this, psychologically speaking. But Stalin’s lack of contact with reality on the one point of the Nazi invasion had not been reflected in his attitude to Soviet–German relations during the earlier part of the Pact’s duration. In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union had bargained hard, had refused to make definite commitments, and, though providing the Germans with various services appropriate to an ally such as the U-boat “Base North” near Murmansk, had conducted even the lowest-level negotiations with all the self-centered closeness and suspiciousness later shown in relations with the Anglo-American allies of a subsequent phase of the war period. The complete withdrawal from reality in the face of unpleasant facts is very much the aberration of 1941.

It seems likely that Stalin, realizing the incapacity of his Army and his regime in the face of the Germans, hoped against hope at least for a further year or two’s grace. Everything had gone his way for years. He could scarcely, it seems, conceive of his luck failing. Be that as it may, the result of his attitude was the despairing and absurd messages which poured in from the frontier on 22 June—“We are being fired on. What shall we do?”

And yet the Soviet Army was larger in numbers, stronger in materiel, and at least as well equipped technically as the Germany invaders. There was only one element in which the armies were not comparable: the German Command, staff, and officer corps in general were of immensely superior quality. Although Hitler had removed a number of the higher officers, he had at least the sense to see that he could not fight a major war without a trained military cadre.

As the armies facing the Germans broke up under a task for which they had not been properly prepared or supported, Stalin reacted promptly. The Commander of the Western Front, Pavlov; his Chief of Staff, Klimovskikh; and his Signals and Artillery Commanders were shot. General Korobkov, commanding the battered Fourth Army, followed them. This did not save the three armies and four mechanized corps trapped between Minsk and Bialystok.

The Air Force, with 10,000 to 11,000 machines to the Luftwaffe’s 5,000,³⁴ was almost annihilated in the first days of the war. A large proportion of Soviet aircraft were not of modern type. And the other faults of Stalin’s rule in the Air Force reinforced the errors of industrial and design policy. First, training had been inadequate, and tactical methods were poor. Kesselring applied the term infanticide to the Luftwaffe’s destruction of Soviet bomber formations.

And all these long-established errors were compounded by Stalin’s last and most fateful blunder, the failure to believe in the imminence of attack. Large parts of the Air Force were caught on the ground and destroyed in the first hours. General Kopets, of the air arm, committed suicide, having lost 600 aircraft while imposing negligible damage on the Luftwaffe, and others were arrested and shot—for example, General Chernykh, commander of an aviation division in the Western Front, who had lost seven-eighths of his command, and General Ptukhin, commander of the Kiev District Air Force.³⁵ In all, between June and August 1941, about 8,500 Soviet planes were lost.³⁶

The Russians also had a great superiority in the number of tanks, 11,000 or 12,000 to 4,300,³⁷

and here design had not fallen behind. The original Soviet tank defeats can be attributed almost entirely to bad tactical methods and worse staff work.³⁸

In his biography of Stalin, Isaac Deutscher mentions that imprisoned officers (like survivors of the purged opposition) were “brought out of concentration camps and assigned to important work.”³⁹ This needs to be qualified.

Three hundred experienced officers were being held in the Lubyanka in October 1941 while at the front battalions were being commanded by lieutenants.⁴⁰ A Soviet account refers to two lists of “men inside” who were liquidated in October 1941 and July 1942, respectively, at times when Stalin “considered the situation to be desperate.” The October executions included, on the twenty-eighth of that month, and after severe torture, Colonel-General Shtern; three successive Heads of the Soviet Air Force—Loktionov, Smushkevich, and Rychagov—and a number of other senior officers, mainly artillery or Air Force (with three of their wives). They were shot without trial, on an administrative order from Beria.⁴¹