By contrast, in 1941, the USSR was in a very poor state for war. The Purge trials had exterminated the bulk of the general staff, including its most talented officers. Nor was the damage done by Stalin’s Purges limited to the military potential of the USSR. It dealt a terrible blow against the economy also. This is now recognised even by those who yesterday justified the Purges and everything else Stalin did. In a study published by Yale University about the same time, attention was drawn to the damaging effects of the Purges on the Soviet economy. This was reported without comment in the daily paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1980s:
“Moreover, in the Purges of 1937-38 many of the most able administrators and scientists in the chemical industry were imprisoned or executed,” writes Robert Amann. “For those who did not suffer directly the Purges had a numbing effect. The penalties for failure were so extreme that decisions involving risk, novelty and personal initiative were avoided at all costs.”
“It would be hard to exaggerate the extent to which these lingering attitudes have exerted a detrimental effect on the long-term development of the chemical industry, and on other Soviet industries.” Nor were defence industries immune: “For all that Stalin’s policies had built up Soviet military and industrial power, the Purges and repression of the 1930s greatly weakened the Soviet Union’s ability to defend itself,” writes David Holloway. (Morning Star, 5/8/82, my emphasis.)
The main factor that undermined the Red Army’s capacity to fight at the start of the war was the destruction of its finest generals and cadres in the Purges. The October Revolution had thrown up a whole layer of talented young officers, some of whom, like Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Gamir were brilliantly original military thinkers. It is not generally known that the theory of the Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) was not a German invention. The Wehrmacht copied it from the Russians. Long before the war, when the British and French army chiefs were still convinced that the next war would be a war of position, like the First World War, Tukhachevsky’s genius led him to conclude that the Second World War would be fought with tanks and aeroplanes. When Tukhachevsky and his comrades were murdered in the Purges, their places were taken by Stalin’s cronies like Voroshilov, Timoshenko and Budyonny, who thought that the coming war would be fought with cavalry! The second-rate and inept Voroshilov was put in charge of the Defence Commissariat, surrounded by others of the same ilk. These creatures of Stalin were promoted to key positions, not for their personal abilities, but for their servile loyalty to the ruling clique.
Former General Grigorenko, who served at the time as a lecturer in the central Soviet military academy, recalls the disastrous effects of the Purges on the quality of military training:
No sooner had the academy taken its first halting steps than the trumped-up trial of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Yakir, and others cast suspicion on all things planned by Tukhachevsky. Stalin saw the academy as an ‘anti-Stalinist military centre,’ and the pogroms commenced. Arrests began in winter 1936 and intensified in 1937. The highly-qualified teaching staff assembled by Tukhachevsky was almost totally annihilated.
Positions were taken by untalented or inexperienced people. In turn, some of the new teachers were arrested, which frightened the rest and left them with little enthusiasm for their new jobs. Texts that had been written by ‘enemies of the people,’ the first teachers, now could not be used. The new teachers wrote a hasty conspectus of each of their lectures, but fearful of being accused of proffering views hostile to Stalin, they filled their lectures with faddish dogmas. The theory of battle in depth worked out by Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Uborevich and Yakir was cast aside. (Grigorenko, op. cit., pp. 91-2.)
All this was admitted by Khrushchev in 1956:
Very grievous consequences, especially in reference to the beginning of the war, followed Stalin’s annihilation of many military commanders and political workers during 1937-1941 because of his suspiciousness and through slanderous accusations. During these years, repressions were instituted against certain parts of military cadres, beginning literally at the company and battalion commander level and extending to the higher military centres; during this time the cadre of leaders who had gained military experience in Spain and in the Far East was almost completely liquidated.
The policy of large-scale repression against the military cadres led also to undermined military discipline, because for several years officers of all ranks and even soldiers in the party and Komsomol cells were taught to ‘unmask’ their superiors as hidden enemies. (Movement in the hall.) It is natural that this caused a negative influence on the state of military discipline in the first war period.
And, as you know, we had before the war excellent military cadres which were unquestionably loyal to the party and to the Fatherland. Suffice it to say that those of them who managed to survive, despite severe tortures to which they were subjected in the prisons, have from the first war days shown themselves real patriots and heroically fought for the glory of the Fatherland; I have here in mind such comrades as Rokossovsky (who, as you know, had been jailed), Gorbatov, Meretskov (who is a delegate at the present Congress), Podlas (he was an excellent commander who perished at the front), and many, many others. However, many such commanders perished in camps and jails and the army saw them no more. All this brought about the situation which existed at the beginning of the war and which was the great threat to our Fatherland. (Special Report on the 20th Congress of the CPSU by N.S. Khrushchev, 24-25 February 1956.)
There are still many misconceptions about the Second World War, especially concerning the role of Stalin. According to Alec Nove (normally quite an astute commentator on Russia):
Germany’s colossal power was greater than Russia’s and she had at her disposal the industries of occupied Europe. Her armies were well equipped, and the equipment had been tested in the battlefield. Despite the very greatest efforts and sacrifices in the preceding decade, the Soviet Union found itself economically as well as militarily at a disadvantage. (A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, p. 273.)
As a matter of fact, at the time of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, the combined fire-power of the Red Army was greater than that of the Wehrmacht. Yet the Soviet forces were rapidly encircled and decimated. This unprecedented catastrophe was not the result of objective weakness, but of bad leadership. Having destroyed the best cadres of the Red Army, Stalin placed such blind confidence in his ‘clever’ manoeuvre with Hitler, that he ignored numerous reports that the Germans were preparing to attack. The Minsk fortified area, a mighty defensive line which had been built on the western border of the USSR in anticipation of a German attack was actually demolished on Stalin’s orders, presumably as a gesture of good faith to Berlin. Grigorenko, who had worked before the war on the building of these fortifications, describes his feelings of indignation when they were demolished:
[These] fortifications were to have reliably shielded the deployment of assault groups and repelled any attempts by the enemy to break up the deployment. When the army attacked, the fortified areas were to have supported the troops with fire-power. Instead, our western fortified areas did not fulfil any of these tasks. They were blown up without having fired once at the enemy.
I do not know how future historians will explain this crime against our people. Contemporary historians ignore it. I cannot offer an explanation myself. The Soviet government squeezed billions of roubles (by my calculations not less than 120 billion) out of the people to construct impregnable fortifications along the entire western boundary from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Then, right before the war in the spring of 1941, powerful explosions thundered along the entire 1,200-kilometre length of these fortifications. On Stalin’s personal orders reinforced concrete caponiers and semi-caponiers, fortifications with one, two, or three embrasures, command and observation posts – tens of thousands of permanent fortifications – were blown into the air. No better gift could have been given to Hitler’s Barbarossa plan. (Grigorenko, op. cit., pp. 46-7, emphasis in original.)
Had it not been for the criminal actions of Stalin, the USSR would not have been caught unawares by the German onslaught, as Khrushchev explained:
Did we have time and the capabilities for such preparations? Yes, we had the time and the capabilities. Our industry was already so developed that it was capable of supplying fully the Soviet army with everything that it needed. This is proven by the fact that, although during the war we lost almost half of our industry and important industrial and food-production areas as the result of enemy occupation of the Ukraine, Northern Caucasus and other western parts of the country, the Soviet nation was still able to organise the production of military equipment in the eastern parts of the country, install there equipment taken from the western industrial areas, and to supply our armed forces with everything which was necessary to destroy the enemy.
Had our industry been mobilised properly and in time to supply the army with the necessary material, our wartime losses would have been decidedly smaller. Such mobilisation had not been, however, started in time. And already in the first days of the war it became evident that our army was badly armed, that we did not have enough artillery, tanks and planes to throw the enemy back.
Soviet science and technology produced excellent models of tanks and artillery pieces before the war. But mass production of all this was not organised, and, as a matter of fact, we started to modernise our military equipment only on the eve of the war. As a result, at the time of the enemy’s invasion of the Soviet land we did not have sufficient quantities either of old machinery which was no longer used for armament production or of new machinery which we had planned to introduce into armament production.
The situation with anti-aircraft artillery was especially bad; we did not organise the production of anti-tank ammunition. Many fortified regions had proven to be indefensible as soon as they were attacked, because the old arms had been withdrawn and new ones were not yet available there. This pertained, alas, not only to tanks, artillery and planes. At the outbreak of the war we did not have sufficient numbers of rifles to arm the mobilised manpower. I recall that in those days I telephoned Comrade Malenkov from Kiev and told him, “People have volunteered for the new army and demand arms. You must send us arms.”
Malenkov answered me. “We cannot send you arms. We are sending all our rifles to Leningrad and you have to arm yourselves.” (Movement in the hall.)
Such was the armament situation. (Special Report on the 20th Congress of the CPSU by N.S. Khrushchev, 24-25 February 1956.)
Despite the fact that the combined fire power of the Red Army was greater than that of the Germans, the Purges had effectively crippled it. This was the decisive element which persuaded Hitler to attack in 1941. At the Nuremberg trial, Marshal Keitel testified that many German generals had warned Hitler not to attack Russia, arguing that the Red Army was a formidable opponent. Rejecting these Hitler gave Keitel his main reason – “The first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need.” On 9 January 1941, Hitler told a meeting of generals planning the attack on Russia: “They do not have good generals.” (Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 214.)
“Our initial defeat,” writes Grigorenko, “was caused by those in the very highest positions. Thousands of capable army commanders had been purged, our border air-dromes were poorly developed, we had inadequate anti-aircraft defence, our tank units and anti-tank defence had been sharply reduced (at Stalin’s whim) immediately before the war, our fortified areas had been blown up, and our troops had been trained on a peacetime basis. We were not prepared. We paid for this criminal unpreparedness both during and after the war. I pointed to Stalin as the chief culprit, but I also mentioned Voroshilov, Timoshenko, Golikov, and Zhukov. Our failures could not be blamed on the fascists but on ourselves.” (Grigorenko, op. cit., p. 332.)