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him to retreat to his dacha outside Moscow. When a Kremlin delegation headed by Anastas Mikoyan visited him on 30 June, 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 preemptive 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, 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 No. 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 No. 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—the equivalent of a Western Allied corps. As Hitler’s spearheads approached Moscow, more than 47,000 suspected deserters were detained in the city; hundreds of people were executed for alleged espionage, desertion or “fascist agitation.” Political officers at every level were granted powers matching those of operational commanders, a grievous impediment to decision making on the battlefield. Stalin sought to manage personally the movements not merely of armies, but of single divisions.

The German invasion prompted a modest surge of popular enthusiasm for Mother Russia: some 3,500 Muscovites volunteered for military service within thirty-six hours, as did 7,200 men in Kursk Province in the first month. But many Russians were merely appalled by their nation’s predicament. The NKVD reported a Moscow legal adviser named Izraelit saying that the government had “missed the German offensive on the first day of the war, and this led to the subsequent destruction and colossal losses of aircraft and personnel. The partisan movement which Stalin called for—that’s a completely ineffective form of warfare. It is a gust of despair. As for hoping for help from Britain and the United States, that’s mad.