Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

ON DECEMBER 23, 1940, THE SOVIET UNION’S SENIOR RED ARMY men descended on a snowbound Moscow. They were there to attend the annual military conference, where members of the High Command and other dignitaries would expound on the state of the Soviet Union’s defenses and the Red Army’s degree of readiness.

The conference was to be held in the People’s Commissariat for Defense, an elegant, strangely crenelated complex not far from Red Square that was one of the curiosities of interwar Moscow. Designed by the doyen of Stalinist architects, Lev Rudnev, and completed in 1938, the Commissariat for Defense was an uneasy combination of Italian Renaissance and modernist influences, with stucco walls, brutal basreliefs of stylized tanks, and an elaborate central tower sporting red stars instead of clock faces. Rudnev was very much the rising star of Soviet architecture, having completed the monumental Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in 1937—also with a decorative tank motif—and the massive Government House in distant Baku. In time, his star would rise still further, and his postwar authorship of the iconic Moscow State University building, as well as its unloved Polish cousin, the Warsaw Palace of Culture, would crown his career.

In the winter of 1940, however, Rudnev’s Renaissance brutalism played host to the High Command Conference. It was bitterly cold that winter, with a December record low of –38.8°C recorded in Moscow earlier in the month, but Muscovites were doubtless distracted by the usual diet of industrial statistics and war reports that filled the pages of Pravda . They would have been thrilled, for instance, by news of the increased production of tractors and by plans for larger and faster escalators to be installed in the Moscow metro. Elsewhere, the Moscow district Komsomol conference was attracting attention, as was a heated debate raging among critics about a new production of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , playing at the Kamernyi Theater, with Alisa Koonen in the lead role.

Naturally, military matters also dominated the press, with Pravda devoting a whole page each day to war reports from western Europe. The reciprocal air raiding between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force was soberly reported, with “exceptionally intensive” German raids on Liverpool and Manchester counterbalanced by British raids on Berlin and the Ruhr. Churchill was reported as making a direct radio appeal to the Italian people, recalling the traditional friendship between the two nations and blaming the war—which Italy had entered the previous summer—on Mussolini. Hitler, meanwhile, was said to have made a Christmas visit to the western front, touring positions on the French coast.

Although average Muscovites reading Pravda could glean much information about the world around them that December, they would have searched in vain for references to the High Command Conference taking place beneath their very noses. Such was the sensitivity of the meeting that it was evidently thought prudent to conceal it from public view. So, while it was reported that Red Army Marshal Semyon Timoshenko presented awards to young people at the Komsomol conference, the real reason for the marshal’s presence in the capital was not revealed.

For all the reflexive secrecy, the High Command Conference was to be very significant. Unlike in previous years, Stalin had ordered the conference’s remit to be expanded to cover all aspects of Red Army doctrine, organization, and training; consequently, invitations had gone out not only to the members of the High Command but also to many others, including the commanders of the military districts, as well as numerous army, divisional, and corps commanders. In all, some 270 senior officers of the Red Army and Red Air Force were expected to attend. Although Stalin himself did not grace the meeting with his presence, his Politburo confederate Andrei Zhdanov attended in his stead and reported proceedings to his master every evening. Despite this, according to one participant, the conference had something of a holiday atmosphere: “Results were generally satisfactory,” he recalled, “and we were in a cheerful and confident mood.”

The conference consisted of only six presentations, covering topics such as military training, offensive operations, the war in the air, and the role of the infantry, with each lasting up to two hours, to be followed by an extensive, open-ended discussion. Chief of the General Staff General Kirill Meretskov got proceedings underway with an examination of the Red Army’s combat and command training preparations. The previous year, he explained, had provided a “complex international environment” in which the imperialists had fought among themselves and sought, without success, to draw the Soviet Union into their conflict. In addition, he suggested that the Red Army had gained much precious experience from what he euphemistically called the “march westward” into the Baltic states and the “provocation” of the Finnish War. Yet, despite such positives, he believed that the war had nonetheless revealed “major shortcomings” in organizational, operational, and tactical matters, with all levels of the military requiring substantial modernization if the Red Army was to serve its political masters and be ready at any moment to “take the field.”

Later speakers revealed deeper failings. Delivering his presentation, “On the Nature of Offensive Operations,” General Georgy Zhukov made an impassioned plea for the Red Army to learn from the military successes of the previous eighteen months and adopt something akin to a blitzkrieg strategy. Recent wars, he said, had demonstrated the utility of the sudden, bold, and coordinated use of airpower, airborne troops, and concentrated armor: the defeat of the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939, for example, had shown the vital importance of air superiority, tactical surprise, and flanking maneuvers. Neatly sidestepping the lessons of the Finnish debacle, Zhukov moved on to analyze the German successes of 1939 and 1940, which, he suggested, were due to the “close interaction” between infantry, air, and mechanized forces and the key element of surprise, enabling deep, devastating thrusts into enemy lines. Only in this way, he concluded, by the use of “energetic, decisive and bold offensive operations,” could the Red Army “complete the tasks of the revolution.”

In his postwar memoirs, Zhukov was upbeat about the favorable reception his paper received and praised the conference for recognizing the “chief trends” in modern warfare and the pressing reality of German military might. Yet such reminiscences were rather rose tinted. In fact, Zhukov had come in for some hefty criticism from his colleagues, with one commentator, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, warning pointedly against “exaggerating the success of foreign armies.” Of course, Zhukov’s opinions shouldn’t have been remotely controversial: after all, he was only advocating that the Red Army should adopt the “best practice” demonstrated to have been successful elsewhere. Some of his rivals certainly perceived an implied slight of their own abilities in his thesis, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, the Soviet High Command in 1940 was no ordinary, objective body of men; rather it was an uneasy amalgam of the “political generals” who had Stalin’s ear and less-able commanders promoted as a consequence of the purges, with a minority of pure military men, like Zhukov, attempting to navigate a course between them. As a result of such tensions, as Nikita Khrushchev would later recall, the High Command was “like a kennel of mad dogs,” with all of those present “tearing at each other’s throats.”