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

In this febrile atmosphere, Zhukov’s advocacy of a Soviet variant of blitzkrieg was akin to rolling a hand grenade under the conference table, as it came very close to the theory of “deep operations” espoused by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the mid-1930s that had, for a time, been official Red Army doctrine. Tukhachevsky, however, had been one of the most prominent victims of the Soviet purges: exposed as an alleged German agent, his interrogation file spattered with his own blood, he had been executed in 1937. Advocating his ideas, therefore, regardless of their military merits, could be construed as a profoundly political—even heretical—act.

Notwithstanding such concerns, however, the argument for more offensive military planning carried the day. Another general, Dmitry Pavlov, presented a companion piece to Zhukov’s: “The Use of Mechanised Forces in Offensive Operations,” in which he argued for the development of concentrated, massed tank units along the German model rather than their piecemeal use in infantry support, as the French had attempted earlier in the year.

Lastly, after a few more presentations, Marshal Timoshenko once again took the floor for a rousing closing address, in which he, too, advocated the adoption of a more offensive mind-set: “Defence is not the decisive means of defeating the enemy,” he said. “Only attack can achieve that.” He ended by calling for increased political education for Red Army soldiers so that they might demonstrate their “boundless loyalty to the party of Lenin” and be better prepared to “defend their socialist motherland.” With that, the conference was brought to a close.

ALTHOUGH THE HIGH COMMAND CONFERENCE’S PARTICIPANTS DID not yet know it, the martial spirit they were invoking would be required sooner than they imagined. Stalin had been kept abreast of the numerous rumors emanating from Nazi Germany over the previous months—the private speeches and aired frustrations of senior Nazi personnel. Indeed, even before Hitler gave the order for Operation Barbarossa, the new Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, had received an anonymous tip about the Führer’s aggressive intentions. It would have come as no surprise, therefore, when a document landed on Stalin’s desk on December 29—in the middle of the High Command Conference—claiming that “high military circles” in Germany had informed a Soviet agent that “Hitler has given the order to prepare for war with the USSR.” “War will be declared,” it went on, “in March 1941.”

Confirmation was sought from the Soviet military attaché in Berlin, and sources were checked and rechecked. Circumstantial corroboration was given by NKVD intelligence reports about German troop transfers in occupied Poland, the erection of barracks and fortifications, and the precipitate rise from late 1940 in border incidents along the German-Soviet frontier. An intercepted telegram from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Bucharest even suggested that the German army had “completed its full deployment” and was “confident of an easy victory.”

Stalin was unnerved. In the discussions that followed the conference, he was cold and unusually ill humored; Soviet foreign trade commissar Anastas Mikoyan even thought that he had become “unhinged.” As his policy of riding the Nazi tiger began to unravel, it was becoming clear that he would need all the military capability his High Command could give him. The urgency of the task was soon made starkly apparent. In the first weeks of the new year, two war games were conducted in Rudnev’s Defense Commissariat in which Zhukov fought his rival Pavlov, first as the Soviet defender and then as the Western attacker. The debrief that followed treated Stalin to a disconcerting insight into the mind of one of his senior generals, which demonstrated the difficulty he faced in reforming the Red Army.

Grigory Kulik was one of the few Soviet marshals to have survived the purges; yet his resistance to any technological or doctrinal innovation within the Red Army made him such a buffoonish liability that his survival can only be attributed to his closeness to Stalin. A bullying incompetent who sported an incongruous “Hitler moustache,” Kulik seemingly yearned for the simplicity of an earlier soldiering age. He railed against the idea of armored warfare (denouncing it as “degenerate fascist ideology”), deplored the development of the Katyusha rocket (favoring the horse-drawn gun), and described antitank artillery as “rubbish.” Yet, despite such antediluvian attitudes, he had been promoted to the post of deputy defense commissar, implausibly with responsibility for overseeing artillery development.

As if more evidence of his startling incompetence were needed, Kulik provided it at the debrief that followed the war games. While Stalin’s mood was not improved by a rather bumbling, evasive presentation from Chief of the General Staff Kirill Meretskov on the games themselves—which Zhukov had decisively won—Kulik’s intervention did nothing to help. Raging against mechanization, Kulik stubbornly espoused the use of horsepower for the military, complaining that the utility of tanks had been grossly exaggerated, before concluding, “For the time being, we should refrain from forming tank and mechanised corps.” He finished, embarrassing himself further, by showing his ignorance of basic procurement requirements. Stalin was uncharacteristically tolerant in his response. He reminded Kulik that “victory in war will be won by the side that has more tanks and more highly motorized troops,” before adding ominously, “The government carries out a program of mechanizing the armed forces, introduces the engine into the army, and Kulik comes out against the engine. It is as if he had come out against the tractor and the combine and supported the wooden plough.” It sounded like a death sentence.

Strangely, Kulik remained in his post, at least for the short term. Stalin had only recently ordered the general’s wife kidnapped and murdered for an unrelated indiscretion, so it is just possible that this stayed his hand. Nonetheless there were to be significant changes, most notably the promotion of Zhukov to the post of chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, replacing Meretskov. Despite the challenges that Kulik personified, therefore, Zhukov’s appointment signaled a step in the right direction.

One of Zhukov’s first actions as commander in chief was to oversee the promulgation of the Red Army’s revised mobilization plan, known as MP-41, in mid-February. Given that the plan had been in preparation since the previous summer, the extent of Zhukov’s direct influence over it must be questioned, but he certainly would have approved its main points, including the doubling of Red Army manpower to over 8 million, two-thirds of which would be stationed in the western military districts, and the stipulation that fully ninety divisions (nearly a third of the planned total) would be armored or motorized. In addition, that February saw the establishment of three front headquarters—the northwestern, the western, and the southwestern—on the USSR’s western border. Clearly, the Red Army was well aware of the threat that it might face.

That threat was indeed substantial. The strategic plan that Hitler and his generals had agreed on foresaw three separate army groups—north, center, and south, totaling over 3 million men—which would strike east into Soviet territory, enveloping and destroying the defending forces. It was expected that the Red Army would even aid the attackers’ cause by standing and fighting—rather than effecting a headlong retreat—as German planners considered that the Soviets could ill afford to lose such highly developed and industrialized regions as the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Leningrad. With its army destroyed and its western industrial heartlands and main cities conquered and occupied, the reasoning ran, the Soviet Union would surely collapse.