territorial and economic claims to the Soviet Union... All this is nothing but clumsy propaganda by forces hostile to the USSR and Germany and interested in an
extension of the war.
TASS is authorised to state: 1) Germany has not made any claims on the USSR, and
is not offering it any new and closer understanding; there have been no such talks.
2) According to Soviet information, Germany is also unswervingly observing the
conditions of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, just as the USSR is doing.
Therefore, in the opinion of Soviet circles, the rumours of Germany's intention to tear up the Pact and to undertake an attack on the USSR are without any
foundation. As for the transfer to the northern and eastern areas of Germany of
troops during the past weeks, since the completion of their tasks in the Balkans, such troop movements are, one must suppose, prompted by motives which have no
bearing on Soviet-German relations.
3) As is clear from her whole peace policy, the USSR intends to observe the
conditions of the Soviet-German Pact, and any talk of the Soviet Union preparing
for war is manifestly absurd.
4) The summer rallies now taking place among Red Army reservists and the
coming manœuvres have no purpose other than the training of reservists and the
checking of railway communications. As everyone knows, such exercises take place
every year. To represent them as something hostile to Germany is absurd, to say the least.
[ In the recent History Stalin is taken severely to task for this TASS communiqué: "Up to the last moment I. V. Stalin tried to prevent a German attack and tried to influence the German Government. In order to test Germany's intentions and to influence her
government, Stalin caused TASS to publish this communiqué... It reflected Stalin's
incorrect assessment of the political and military atmosphere. Published at a time when war was already on our threshold, the TASS statement misguided Soviet public opinion and weakened the vigilance of the Soviet people and of the Soviet Armed Forces."
(IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 404.)]
The History is no doubt quite right in saying that it was much too late in the day to "test"
Germany's intentions; but, on the other hand it seems deliberately to exaggerate the TASS communique's soporific effect on the Soviet people.
The Russians were sufficiently used to reading between the lines of government
communications not to overlook the innuendo of the phrase: "These troop movements, one must suppose, are prompted by motives which have no bearing on Soviet-German relations." Far from being unduly reassured by this TASS communiqué, a very high proportion of the Russian people spent the next few days anxiously waiting for Berlin
"reactions" to it. According to Gafencu, the Rumanian Minister in Moscow, thousands of people were glued to their wireless sets listening to news from Berlin. But they listened in vain. The German Government did not respond in any way to the TASS statement, and
did not even publish it. When, on the night of June 21, Molotov asked Schulenburg to call on him, it was too late.
Schulenburg, apparently wholly uninformed of Hitler's plans, was unable to give any
answer to Molotov's anxious questions as to "the reasons for Germany's dissatisfaction"; and not until he returned to the Embassy did he receive Ribbentrop's instructions to go to see Molotov and, "without entering into any discussions with him" to read out to him a cabled document which, framed in Hitler's most vituperative manner, was in fact a
declaration of war.
[As Shirer says, "It was a familiar declaration, strewn with all the shopworn lies and fabrications at which Hitler and Ribbentrop had become so expert... Perhaps ... it
somehow topped all the previous ones for sheer effrontery and deceit" (op. cit., p. 847).]
Sick at heart, the Ambassador drove back to the Kremlin just as dawn was breaking, and read the document to Molotov. According to Schulenburg's account, the Foreign
Commissar listened in silence, and then said bitterly: "This is war. Do you believe that we deserved that?"
PART TWO
From the Invasion to the Battle of Moscow
Chapter I SOVIET UNPREPAREDNESS IN JUNE 1941
In the early morning hours of June 22, 1941, Plan Barbarossa—on which Hitler and his generals had worked for the last six months— came into action. And the Russians were not prepared for the onslaught.
The three-pronged German invasion, aiming at Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the
middle, and the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the south, with the ultimate object of
occupying within a short time practically the whole of European Russia up to a line
running from Archangel to Astrakhan, was to prove a failure. But the first weeks of the war and, indeed, the first three-and-a-half months were, to the Russians, an almost
unmitigated disaster. The greater part of the Russian air force was wiped out in the first few days; the Russians lost thousands of tanks; hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in a series of spectacular encirclements during the first fortnight, and by the second week of July some German generals thought the war as good as won.
How was this possible? Stalin's interpretation of these initial disasters—which was to remain the official version for many years afterwards—was that the element of surprise had been overwhelmingly in the Germans' favour. No doubt, Stalin himself later admitted that "certain mistakes" had been made on the Russian side; but there was no mention of these "mistakes" at first, and the only explanation given in July was the "suddenness and perfidious-ness" of the German attack.
This explanation did not entirely satisfy the Russian people at the time; they had been told so much for years about the tremendous might of the Red Army that the non-stop
advance of the German steam-roller during the first three weeks of the war—to
Smolensk, to the outskirts of Kiev and to only a short distance from Leningrad —came as a terrible shock. There was much questioning and heart-searching as to what had gone wrong. But, in the face of the fearful threat of the destruction of Russia, and despite much sotto-voce grumbling, this was not a time for recrimination, and, whatever had gone wrong, and whatever the mistakes that had been made, the only thing to do was to fight the invaders. The mystique of a great national war, of a life-and-death struggle took deep root in the Russians' consciousness within a very short time; and the "national war"
motifs of Stalin's famous broadcast of July 3 made such a deep impression precisely
because they expressed the thoughts which, in the tragic circumstances of the time, the Russian people—consciously or unconsciously—wanted to hear clearly stated. Here at
last was a clear programme of action for a stunned and bewildered nation.
But the fact remains that at first Russia proved totally unprepared to meet the German onslaught, and that in October 1941 the Germans very nearly won the war.
While Stalin was alive, no serious attempt was made openly to analyse the numerous
long-term, as well as immediate causes of the military disasters of 1941; and it was not, in fact, till after the 20th Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in 1956, and Khrushchev's sharp, and at times even exaggerated, criticisms of Stalin's