33. Gefter, Iz etikh i tekh let, 262–3.
34. Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 179.
35. The notion of Stalin’s willful blindness to coming war retains the stature of folklore. The accusation, engagingly delivered in Nekrich, 1941, 22 iuinia, gained weight when Nekrich was persecuted and his book removed from Soviet libraries. But already by 1939, the Soviets counted more than 10,000 aircraft (versus less than 1,000 in 1931), and nearly 3,000 armored vehicles (from a mere 740 in 1931). From the signing of the Pact through mid-1941, another 18,000 fighter planes and 7,000 armored vehicles and tanks had come off assembly lines. In 1941, the defense share of the state budget was set to exceed 40 percent. Davies et al., Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 299; Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, II/i: 65–80.
36. Anfilov, Doroga k tragedii, 104.
37. To evaluate Soviet strength, the Nazi regime relied partly on Germans who had been born in the Soviet Union or lived there but were then expelled, and, “like émigrés everywhere, they underestimated the strengths of their former place of residence and overestimated the animosity of the people against their own government.” Herwarth, Against Two Evils, 187.
38. “Stalin was not a cowardly person,” wrote Zhukov, “but he well understood that the country’s leadership, which he headed, had been manifestly tardy with the fundamental preparations for the country’s defense in such a big war against such a powerful and experienced enemy as Germany.” Admiral Kuznetsov noted—in a passage excised from the book version of his memoirs—that Stalin’s “mistake was in miscalculating the date of the conflict. Stalin directed war preparations—extensive and many-sided preparations—on the basis of very distant dates. Hitler disrupted his calculations.” Zhukov, Vospominaniia, I: 368; Bialer, Stalin and His Generals, 198 (Kuznetsov). See also Pospelov, Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, I: 479. “We of course cannot manage to avoid war before 1943,” Stalin was said to have told Meretskov in Jan. 1941. “We are being dragged in against our will. But it is not out of the question that we can stay out of the war until 1942.” Meretskov, Na sluzhbe narodu (1984), 197–8.
39. The Red Army had perhaps 13,000 tanks in western border regions, of which 469 were KV-1s and 832 were T-34s (they had begun to arrive in May–June). The Red Army had a large edge in combat aircraft. Morukov, Velikaia Otechestvennaia, I: 6; Pospelov, Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, I: 415, 475–6.
40. Stepanov, “O masshtabakh repressii.”
41. Only one in fourteen had higher military education. All these percentages were lower than they had been in 1937 for the far smaller officer corps. Another 1 million officers were in the reserves, perhaps a third of whom had some training. The officer corps had grown by more 2.5 times from 1937 to 1940, through the purges. Reese, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers; Cherushev, “Nevinovnykh ne byvaet . . . ”; Kalashnikov et al., Krasnaia Armiia, 10–1.
42. Kuznetsov added of Stalin: “He brushed facts and arguments aside more and more abruptly.” Kuznetsov, however, has been disingenuous. In his telling, on June 21 he met Rear Admiral Mikhail Vorontsov, the Soviet naval attaché in Berlin, whom he had recalled to report in person and who had managed to travel by train from Berlin to Moscow. Vorontsov was full of details about the deployed German war machine, and Kuznetsov claimed he reportedly this immediately to Stalin. In fact, the naval commissar conveyed it as an example of a likely provocation. Kuznetsov writes in his memoirs that the last time he saw Stalin before the war was “June 13 or 14,” but he is in the logbook for June 21. Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 348–9, 355; Shustov, “No Other Ambassador,” 167; Bialer, Stalin and His Generals, 579n5 (citing Der Spiegel, March 20, 1967: 135).
43. Khrushchev, Memoirs, I: 269, 273–4, 287–91. Soviet military journals in 1940–1 presented a frightening picture of German capabilities. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, 258–9; Konenenko, “Germano-pol’skaia voina 1939 g.”; Konenenko, “Boi v Finlandii”; Konenenko, “Kratkii obzor voennykh desitvii na zapade”; Khorseev, “VVS v germane-pol’skoi voine”; Desiatov, “Operatsii v Norvegii”; Ratner, “Pororyv na Maase”; Belianovskii, “Desitviia tnkovykh.” Zhukov would later state: “When I asked him [Stalin] to allow bringing the troops of the western frontier districts to full combat readiness . . . he brought me to the map and, pointing to the Near East, said ‘that’s where they [the Germans] will go.’” This could have been perhaps Stalin’s way of blunting Zhukov’s pressure without discussing with him the anticipated ultimatum. In any case, the despot had long abandoned any credence to an attack on British positions in the Near East. Anfilov, Doroga k tragedii, 195.
44. Kuznetsov, Nakanune, 357 (citing a conversation with Pronin) and in the first edition (1966), 329. See also Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, 108. The Moscow province party committee was holding a plenum (June 20–1). Pravda, June 22, 1941. Yakov Chadayev, the government notary, was quoted as stating that Stalin “summoned them.” Neither Shcherbakov nor Pronin appear in the office logbook; they could have been received in the apartment, which seems unlikely given their low stature. The prohibition on use of electric lighting applied to residences as well. As of 1941, only 68 families, 239 people, still resided in the Kremlin, most of them widows and pensioners (such as the widows of Sverdlov and Orjonikidze); this was down from 374 people in 1935 (not including service personnel and guards) and 2,100 in 1925.
45. Voronov, Na sluzhbe voennoi, 175; Tiulenev, Cherez tri voiny (1960), 138. As Zhukov wrote, “The Soviet Government did everything possible so as not to give any justification for Germany to start a war. This determined everything.” Zhukov, Vospominaniia, I: 340.
46. As of June 1, 1941, Golikov estimated German divisions arrayed near the joint frontier at 120–2, along with 122–6 arrayed against Britain in the West, Norway, Italy, Crete, and Africa, plus 44–48 of reserves. He noted that in “transferring significant forces from Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria to Romania, the Germans are to a great degree strengthening their right flank”—in the direction of Ukraine. Gavrilov, Voennaia razvedka informiruet, 520, 646–7 (TsAMO, f. 23, op. 7237, d. 2, l. 114–6).
47. These Soviet divisions, to reach full strength, needed more than 1 million reservists to join them. Zolotarev et al., Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia otechestvennaia, XIII (II/i): 7–8, 11, 77, 581; Zhukov, Vospominaniia, I: 359. Another source gives a figure of 3,900 German aircraft, 60 percent of their air force, plus 1,000 planes of Romania and Finland. Pospelov, Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, II: 9.
48. The totalitarian Soviet state, with its vast armed forces, was the only one not fully mobilized, “an absolutely impossible, improbable situation,” as one analyst noted. Mark Solonin, “Tri plana tovarishcha Stalina,” 71. On June 18, the Soviet Union observed the fifth anniversary of Gorky’s death. Pravda, June 18, 1941; Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 474 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1041, l. 8). At the defense commissariat on June 19, Major General Mikhail Kazakov, commander of the staff of the Central Asian military district, who had been summoned to Moscow, and others were shown a German film of the Wehrmacht being greeted warmly in the Balkans by Slavic females bearing wine and flowers. Kazakov would recall that Vasilevsky told him, “We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t begin in the next fifteen to twenty days.” Kazakov, Nad kartoi bylykh srazhenii, 69–70; Bialer, Stalin and His Generals, 188–9.