Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The “secret speech” also destroyed Stalin’s reputation as a military genius:

“During the war and afterward, Stalin said that the tragedy experienced by the nation in the early days of the war resulted from the unexpected attack by the Germans. But, Comrades, this is completely untrue.... By April 3, 1941, Churchill through his ambassador to the USSR, Cripps, personally warned Stalin that the Germans were regrouping their armed units to attack the Soviet Union.… Churchill stressed this repeatedly in his dispatches of April 18 and in the following days. Stalin took no heed of these warnings. Moreover, he warned that no credence be given to information of this sort in order not to provoke the beginning of military operations. Information of this kind on German invasion of Soviet territory was coming in from our own military and diplomatic sources.… Despite these particularly grave warnings, the necessary steps were not taken to prepare the country properly for defense and to prevent it from being caught unawares. Did we have time and resources for such preparation? Yes, we did. Our industry was fully capable of supplying everything the Soviet Army needed.… Had our industry been mobilized properly and in time to supply the Army, our wartime losses would have been decidedly smaller.… On the eve of the invasion, a German citizen crossed our border and stated that the German armies had orders to start their offensive on the night of June 22 at 3:00 a.m. Stalin was informed of this immediately, but even this was ignored. As you see, everything was ignored.… The result was that in the first hours and days the enemy destroyed in our border regions a large part of our air force, artillery, and other equipment; he annihilated large numbers of our soldiers and disorganized our military leadership; consequently we could not prevent the enemy from marching deep into the country. Very grievous consequences, especially at the beginning of the war, followed Stalin’s destruction of many military commanders and political workers during 1937-1941, because of his suspiciousness and false accusations.… During that time the leaders who had gained military experience in Spain and in the Far East were almost completely liquidated.… After the first severe disaster and defeats at the front, Stalin thought that this was the end. He said, ‘All that which Lenin created we have lost forever.’ After this, Stalin for a long time actually did not direct the military operations and ceased to do anything whatever.… Therefore, the danger which hung over our Fatherland in the first period of the war was largely due to the faulty methods of directing the nation and the party by Stalin himself. Later the nervousness and hysteria which Stalin showed, interfering with actual military operations, caused our army serious damage. He was very far from any understanding of the real situation which was developing on the front. This was natural, for, in the whole war, he never visited any section of the front or any liberated city.… When a very serious situation developed for our army in the Kharkov region in 1942, we decided to give up an operation seeking to encircle Kharkov to avoid fatal consequences if the operation continued.… Contrary to sense, Stalin rejected our suggestion and issued orders to continue the operation.... I telephoned to Stalin at his villa, but he refused to answer the phone, and Malenkov was on the receiver.... I stated for a second time that I wanted to speak to Stalin personally about the grave situation at the front. But Stalin did not consider it convenient to raise the phone and insisted that I must speak to him through Malenkov, although he was only a few steps away. After listening in this fashion to our plea, Stalin said, ‘Let everything remain as it is!’ What was the result of this? The worst that we had expected. The Germans surrounded our army concentrations and we lost hundreds of thousands of our soldiers. This is Stalin’s military genius and what it cost us.… After this party congress we shall have to reevaluate our military operations and present them in their true light.… After our great victory which cost us so much, Stalin began to belittle many of the commanders who contributed to the victory, because Stalin excluded every possibility that victories at the front should be credited to anyone but himself.… He began to tell all kinds of nonsense about Zhukov.… He popularized himself as a great leader and tried to inculcate in the people the idea that all victories won in the war were due to the courage, daring, and genius of Stalin and no one else.… Let us take, for instance, our historical and military films and some written works; they make us feel sick. Their real purpose is the propagation of the theme of Stalin as a military genius. Remember the film The Fall of Berlin . Here only Stalin acts; he issues orders in a hall in which there are many empty chairs, and only one man approaches him and reports to him—that is Poskrebyshev, his loyal shieldbearer. Where is the military command? Where is the Politburo? Where is the government? What are they doing? There is nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody; he pays no attention to them; he asks no one for advice. Where are the military who bear the burden of the war? They are not in the film; with Stalin in, there is no room for them.… You see to what Stalin’s delusions of grandeur led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality.… One characteristic example of Stalin’s self-glorification and of his lack of elementary modesty was his Short Biography published in 1948. It is an expression of most dissolute flattery, making a man into a god, transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader and most sublime strategist of all times and nations.’ No other words could be found to raise Stalin to the heavens. We need not give examples of the loathsome adulation filling this book. They were all approved and edited by Stalin personally, and some of them were added in his own handwriting to the draft of the book.… He added, ‘Although he performed his task of leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the whole Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit, or self-adulation.’ .… I’ll cite one more insertion made by Stalin: ‘The advanced Soviet science of war received further development at Comrade Stalin’s hands. He elaborated the theory of the permanently operating factors that decided the issue of wars.… Comrade Stalin’s genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.’

“All those who interested themselves even a little in the national situation saw the difficult situation in agriculture, but Stalin never even noticed it. Did we tell Stalin about this? Yes, we told him, but he did not support us. Why? Because Stalin never traveled anywhere, did not meet city or farm workers; he did not know the actual situation in the provinces. He knew the country and agriculture only from films. And these films had dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture. They so pictured collective farm life that the tables were bending from the weight of turkeys and geese. Stalin thought it was actually so.… Stalin proposed that the taxes paid by the collective farms and by their workers should be raised by 40 billion rubles; according to him the peasants are well off, and the collective farm worker would need sell only one more chicken to pay his tax in full. Imagine what this meant. Certainly, 40 billion rubles is a sum greater than everything the collective farmers obtained for all the products they sold to the state. In 1952, for instance, the collective farms and their workers received 26,280 million rubles for all their products sold to the government.… The proposal was not based on an actual assessment of the situation but on the fantastic ideas of a person divorced from reality.”