Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts – a resumé and review – Part 10
Germany attacked the USSR by launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. By the end of 1941 the Nazi Wehrmacht had reached the outskirts of Moscow and penetrated deep into Ukraine and southern Russia.
One of the lies told by Khrushchev in his anti-Stalin tirade was that the initial success of the German surprise attack was to cause Stalin to suffer a nervous breakdown. As Roberts correctly states, there is “no contemporary evidence” to support this fairy tale. “All the documentary evidence, notably, Stalin’s Kremlin appointments diary, show he remained in command both of himself and the situation and delivered a masterly radio broadcast” (pp.158-9).
On the day of Hitler’s attack, Molotov broadcast on the national radio, saying: “When Napoleon invaded Russia, our people responded with a patriotic war and he was defeated. Now Hitler has declared a new march on our country. The Red Army and the whole people will once again wage a patriotic war for the motherland, for honour and freedom’.”
In his broadcast, Stalin drew the same Napoleon and Hitler comparison.
In the very first days of the war, Stalin read Mikhail Bragin’s book Commander Kutuzov – the general who led the defeat of Napoleon. The restoration of Kutuzov’s standing as a war hero began in the mid-1930s; students at the higher party school were taught a glowing account of Kutuzov’s role in the ‘people’s war’ of 1812.
Three years before the Nazi invasion, Stalin complained about the narrow horizons of the Soviet officer corps, pressing on them the need to study the exploits of Russian commanders, especially those of Kutuzov and Suvorov. He criticised civilian historians who placed Kutuzov below Suvorov in the line-up of military greats. Kutuzov’s own account of the defeat of Napoleon, how he drew Napoleon into capturing Moscow and then wore Napoleon’s army down after its withdrawal from the city were double-margined by Stalin.
K Osipov’s [pseudonym of the Soviet writer, Joseph Kuperman] biography of Suvorov was another book published just as the German armies invaded Russia. Stalin can be presumed to have read it since he edited in January 1942 the draft of a review by the military historian Colonel Nikolai Podorozhny. Stalin changed the review title ‘The unsurpassed master of war’ to ‘Suvorov’, but retained the phrase in the first paragraph. Stalin inserted a paragraph attributing to Suvorov the idea that if you can frighten the enemy and make him panic, you have won the battle without even setting eyes on him. He further cited Suvorov’s belief that victory was not won by capturing territory but by destruction of enemy forces.
In June 1940, Stalin reviewed a film script about Suvorov. He wrote that the script was inadequate. It was tedious and insubstantial and depicted Suvorov as a “kindly old man who occasionally crows cock-a-doodle-do and keeps repeating ‘Russian’, ‘Russian’. What the film should do was show what was special about Suvorov’s military leadership: the identification and exploitation of enemy weaknesses, bold commanders; the willingness to promote by merit not seniority; the maintenance of iron discipline among the ranks of the armed forces.”
“Stalin’s criticisms did not impede production of the film, which premiered in January 1941. Its two directors – Mikhail Doller and Vsevolod Pudovkin – were awarded Stalin prizes, as was the actor who played Suvorov, Nikolai Kherkasov.
“In the 1940s Stalin made a number of notable general statements about war that distilled his reading of strategy and military history books and synthesised it with the practical experience of supreme command. At an April 1940 conference on the lessons of the recently concluded ‘Winter War’ with Finland, Stalin delivered a long speech in which he explained to his generals why the Red Army had suffered such high casualties”. Learning from the lessons of the ‘Winter War’, the Red Army had been transformed into a contemporary army, with artillery being the main thing, followed by masses of planes, tanks and mortars – which was not the case at the time of the ‘Winter War’.
In a speech on 5 May 1941, Stalin outlined the reasons for Germany’s victory over France in the summer of 1940, arguing, among other factors, that the Germans had been victorious because they fought to free themselves from the shackles of the Versailles Peace Treaty imposed on Germany by Britain and France in 1919. That success could falter if they transitioned to wars of conquest, which is what happened to Napoleon when he stopped fighting wars of liberation. He added that many people believed the German army was invincible. It wasn’t. There never has been and never could be such an army.
In his Red Army day order of February 1942, Stalin pinpointed five “permanently operating factors” that would determine the outcome of the war now that the advantage that Germany had gained from their surprise attack had passed: first, stability of the rear; second, morale of the army; third, number and quality of divisions; fourth, armaments; and fifth, organisational ability of the army leaders.
Evaluating the relative significance of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad and the titanic Soviet-German armoured clash at Kursk, Stalin reflected that in December 1943, whil the battle of Stalingrad heralded the decline of the German fascist army, the battle of Kursk confronted it with disaster.
In the annals of Soviet history, 1944 became known as the year of the ‘ten great victories, and in his November 1944 speech, Stalin gave a “masterly display of the narrative technique of military history when he structured an account of that year’s events around a sequential series of battles and operations that pushed the Germans out of the USSR”.
He returned to the theme of the role of objective factors in war in his election speech to Moscow’s voters in February 1946: “It would be wrong to think that such a historical victory could have been achieved without preliminary preparation by the whole country for active defense. It would be no less wrong to assume that such preparation could have been made in a short space of time, in a matter of three or four years. It would be still more wrong to assert that our victory was entirely due to the bravery of our troops. Without bravery it is, of course, impossible to achieve victory. But bravery alone is not enough to overpower an enemy who possesses a vast army… it was necessary to have fully up-to-date armaments” (p.163).
The above remarks of Stalin are a masterful refutation of the baseless and absurd accusation, levelled at Stalin by USSR haters, that the Soviet Union was unprepared for the war in 1941.
At a private meeting in April 1947 Stalin distinguished ‘military science’ from ‘military art’:
“To understand military science means to understand not only how to conduct war i.e. military art, but also to know the economy of a country, its potential, its weak and strong sides, and also how it is developing. To know the material and human resources, both your own and those of the enemy. Only by knowing . . . military science is it possible to count on the achievement of victory in war. . . . The former leaders of fascist Germany did not understand military science and were unable to administer the economy of their country.
TO BE CONTINUED