• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Stalin delegated to Molotov, who strove to overcome his stutter, the task of informing the Russian people that they were at war, in a national broadcast at 1215 on 22 June. In the days that followed, the Soviet warlord met repeatedly with his key commanders – there were twenty-nine sessions on the day of the invasion – and made some critical decisions, notably for an evacuation eastwards of industrial plant. The NKVD embarked on wholesale executions and deportations of ‘unreliable elements’, which included many people who merely bore German names. All privately owned radios were confiscated, so that Russians became dependent on broadcast news relayed into factories and offices ‘at strictly determined times’. For some days, Stalin clung to an absurd, self-justificatory flicker of hope that the invasion represented a misunderstanding. There is fragmentary evidence that NKVD agents in neutral countries sought to explore with German interlocutors the possibility of further negotiations, which were spurned.

By 28 June when Minsk fell, such fantasies were dispelled. Stalin suffered a collapse of nerve which caused him to retreat to his dacha in the forest outside Moscow. When a Kremlin delegation headed by Anastas Mikoyan visited him on the 30th, he greeted them with obvious unease, asking sullenly, ‘Why have you come?’ He appears to have anticipated his own overthrow by the minions whom his vast misjudgement had betrayed. Instead, those irredeemably cowed and subservient men besought their ruler to lead them. This, at last, Stalin roused himself to do; on 3 July, he broadcast to the Russian people. In a notable break with the uncompromising authoritarianism that defined his rule, he began with an emotional appeal: ‘Comrades! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and fleet! I address you, my friends!’ He called for a ‘Patriotic War’, the pre-emptive destruction of everything useful in the enemy’s path, and partisan warfare behind the front. Implicitly recognising the British as allies, without irony he declared the war to be part of ‘a united front of peoples standing for freedom’. Then he threw himself into personal direction of every detail of the Soviet Union’s defence as chairman of the Stavka (Staff HQ), the State Committee for Defence, the People’s Commissariat for Defence and the Transport Commission. On 8 August, he also appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Red Army.

Stalin would ultimately prove the most successful warlord of the conflict, yet no more than Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt was he qualified to direct vast military operations. Ignorant of the concept of defence in depth, he rejected strategic retreat. His insistence that ground should be held to the last, even when armies faced encirclement, precipitated their destruction. Following the early battles, thousands of officers and men deemed guilty of incompetence or cowardice were shot, including Western Front commander Dmitry Pavlov. Stalin responded to reports of mass surrenders and desertions with draconian sanctions. His Order 270 of 16 August 1941 called for the execution of ‘malicious deserters’, and the arrest of their families: ‘Those falling into encirclements are to fight to the last … Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by all available means.’ Order 270 was read aloud by commissars at thousands of soldiers’ assemblies.

In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion; many more were shot out of hand, without a pretence of due process. A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders – more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war. Even Russians who escaped from captivity and returned to the Soviet lines were seized by the NKVD and dispatched to Siberia or to staff battalions – suicide units – which became institutionalised a few months later, in the proportion of one to each Soviet army