Information continued to roll in from his spies and foreign governments, including Britain and the United States.50 One recent Russian analysis provides a table of fifty-six intelligence reports from January to June 1941, each growing more specific. By early May the sources were (correctly) giving June 20 to 22 as the exact day of the attack.51 One said the Germans were deliberately and ostentatiously making preparations, in order to intimidate the Soviets.52 The Red Army’s general staff knew from month to month exactly where the German forces were and how they were marshaling on the border.53
Stalin curiously resisted drawing the obvious conclusion and at the end of May lamely told exasperated military leaders that he was “not sure” about Hitler’s intentions. Not until three days before the invasion did Soviet leaders order serious efforts to camouflage military installations, tanks, and aircraft on the ground. Even those belated measures were not due to be completed for more than a month.54 In his memoirs, Molotov tried to defend Stalin and himself by saying they had hoped to delay the inevitable attack. He does not, however, explain why they allowed the Red Army to become so exposed that it almost lost the war before it began.55
Later in life Red Army leaders said they had not tried hard enough to convince their leader of the country’s vulnerabilities.56 These officers admitted that Stalin’s “authority was unquestioned, all believed in his infallibility,” so no one dared object when he continued dismissing the mounting evidence of the impending attack.
Stalin had deceived himself in believing that the Nazis would not attack the USSR until they had finished off Britain. His prize Marxian theory was that the capitalists would fight one another first and become exhausted, after which the Soviet Union would come in for an easy victory.57 Why did his supposed paranoia let him down when he needed it most? What did the voice within say? True, he was isolated from the “real world,” but his remoteness did not hinder him from formulating astute negotiating strategies with statesmen who visited Moscow. So his distant position behind the thick walls of the Kremlin does not explain his efforts to appease Hitler.58
For years Stalin had, incorrectly, posited that Hitler was little more than an “agent of capitalism” who did the bidding of the industrialists and bankers. The Soviet dictator regarded the racist aspects of Nazi ideology as a jumble of irrationalities, and no doubt they were. But for all that, they drove Hitler’s vision of a racial “paradise,” which fueled his passion of eliminating the Jews and destroying Communism. These fantasies were conflated in the slogan Hitler chose for the invasion of the Soviet Union, a crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism.” On June 22, with battles already raging, the German ambassador in Moscow passed a formal note to Molotov explaining the reasons for war. High on the list was the need to defend Germany and to stop Moscow from organizing the Communist International and “Bolshevizing” Europe.59
Some revisionist historians maintain that Stalin was merely biding his time and preparing an offensive of his own, which Hitler supposedly stopped with his “preventive war.”60 The sliver of evidence often used is Stalin’s speech on May 5, 1941, in which he spoke to the Red Army about how it had learned from history, become stronger in the last three years, and might go on the offensive.61 However, reading through the Soviet documents for the year leading up to June 1941, one has to be struck by the Red Army’s reactive stance. On May 14, Commissar of Defense Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Chief of the General Staff General Georgi Zhukov sent orders “of special importance” to the military commanders on the front line facing Germany to prepare a “new plan” for the defense of the western borders. They were to take a whole series of detailed defensive steps by May 20.62
When Stalin mentioned the option about taking to the offensive in the future, it was intended to shore up army morale in the face of Hitler’s continuing successes all over Europe. The Soviet Union would bide its time and strike after the capitalist powers exhausted one another.63
Stalin’s mistaken belief was that the Nazis were driven only by economics and a lust for booty. That led to the false conclusion that if the USSR provided essential goods—such as foodstuffs, raw materials, and oil—then a costly war would make no sense to Hitler. Indeed, under the trade treaty with Germany of February 11, 1940, the Soviets agreed to send within the year, among many things, 1 million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of fuel, 100,000 tons of cotton, 100,000 tons of chrome arrant, and 500,000 tons each of phosphate and iron ore.64 The chairman of the German economic delegation to the Soviet Union, Karl Schnurre, said at the time that only the personal intervention of Stalin had made it possible for negotiations to succeed. In spite of all the difficulties, Schnurre was impressed by “the desire of the Soviet government to help Germany.” As he saw it, the new trade agreement “means a wide open door to the East for us.”65 Indeed, already by the summer of 1940, the USSR had become the most important source of Germany’s raw materials.
Nevertheless, the Soviets could not possibly provide enough to meet the inflated ambitions of some members of the German big business community and the top echelons of the armed forces and economic administration. Moreover, they would soon begin to see not opportunities but dangers in becoming too dependent on Soviet deliveries.66 In 1940 alone, no less than 52 percent of all Soviet exports went to Germany, which was delinquent in sending manufactured goods in return, as was part of the deal. Although the treaty permitted the USSR to reduce its exports proportionally or raise prices, the Germans were surprised that no such countermeasures followed.67
Under the more recently renewed trade agreement of January 10, 1941, between the two countries, the Soviet Union committed to sending 2.5 million tons of grain, enough to solve Germany’s food problem and, in addition, 1 million tons of fuel, 200,000 tons of manganese ore, and assorted other vital minerals. Indeed, by April “hundreds of wagons with grain, fuel, minerals, and other raw materials congested on the Soviet side of the frontier stations,” held up because the German railway could not cope with it all. Stalin knew perfectly well that the deal was lopsided in favor of Germany, which was allowed to get away with inflating the prices for its manufacturing goods, without the Soviets responding in kind, either by slowing deliveries or increasing their own prices.68
Stalin was directly involved in these arrangements, and he must have assumed that if Germany obtained all it needed by trade, then the threat of war from Hitler would all but vanish. He failed to understand—and hence ignored all the warning signs—that ideology and economics were entwined in Hitler’s foreign policy thinking and grandiose plans. In fact, the supplies delivered to Germany tended to firm up Hitler’s decision to invade.69
Nevertheless, as late as mid-May 1941, the economic experts in the German Foreign Office thought the USSR was keeping to its treaty obligations and that any shortfalls resulted because of Germany’s failure to provide sufficient rolling stock for transportation. Soviet deliveries to Germany for 1941 were going to be substantiaclass="underline" for example, 632,000 tons of grain, 232,000 tons of oil, 23,500 tons of cotton, 50,000 tons of manganese ore, 67,000 tons of phosphates, and so on.70 For all that, Hitler and the German elite of big business and the military worried more about becoming reliant on Soviet trade and goodwill. They opted for war, emboldened by the thought (widely held, even in the United States), that the Red Army could be defeated in a few weeks.71 Even “pragmatic” members of the German elite were supportive of Hitler.72