At the back of Stalin’s mind when making this speech might have been a recently read Tsarist-era history of Russia’s armed forces in which he noted the problems Peter the Great experienced when unsuccessfully trying to capture Finland during the Great Northern War against Sweden (1700–1721). Stalin loved statistics: Peter’s Finnish war had lasted twenty-one years and required the mobilisation of 1.7 million troops, 120,000 of whom had perished, while another 500,000 had deserted.273 The Red Army’s campaign in Finland in 1939–40 was equally disastrous, but it lasted only a few months and Stalin did defeat the Finns and capture territory deemed vital to the security of Leningrad, albeit at the cost of a quarter of a million Soviet casualties, including 70,000 dead.
Stalin returned to the theme of the Red Army as a contemporary army in a speech to 2,000 graduates of its staff academies on 5 May 1941. But this time Stalin stated that the Red Army had been transformed into a contemporary army – a mechanised and well-equipped army with the requisite amount of artillery, armour and air power. He also probed the reasons for Germany’s victory over France in summer 1940, arguing the Germans had reconstructed their armed forces and had avoided fighting a war on two fronts. The Germans had been victorious because they fought to liberate their country from the shackles of the Versailles Peace Treaty imposed on Germany by Britain and France in 1919. That success would falter if they transitioned to wars of conquest, which is what happened to Napoleon when he stopped fighting wars of liberation. Many people believed the German army was invincible, said Stalin. It wasn’t. There never was and never could be such an army.274
At the accompanying reception he proposed several toasts, including one recorded by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov: ‘Our policy of peace and security is at the same time a policy of preparation for war. There is no defence without offence. The army must be trained in a spirit of offensive action. We must prepare for war.’275
In his Red Army day order of February 1942, Stalin identified five ‘permanently operating factors’ that would determine the outcome of the war now that the advantage the Germans had gained from their surprise attack had passed: (1) stability of the rear; (2) morale of the army; (3) number and quality of divisions; (4) armaments; and (5) organisational ability of army leaders.276
Estimating the relative significance of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad and the great Soviet–German armoured clash at Kursk, Stalin reflected in November 1943 that ‘while the battle of Stalingrad heralded the decline of the German-Fascist army’, he said, ‘The battle of Kursk confronted it with disaster.’277
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.278
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 defence. 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.279
And 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.280
Before the Second World War, Clausewitz had been a figure of high esteem in Soviet military discourse, principally because Lenin viewed him favourably. In 1923 Pravda published Lenin’s ‘Notebook on Clausewitz’, which was reprinted in a 1931 collection of Lenin’s writings owned by Stalin.281
Then, in 1945, Voennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) – a journal published by the People’s Commissariat of Defence – carried an article by a Colonel G. Meshcheryakov on ‘Clausewitz and German Military Ideology’. Stalin read the article, noting three points. First, that Clausewitz’s ‘reactionary ideas’ had been popularised in Germany after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. Second, that Clausewitz had borrowed from Hegel his reactionary philosophical system as well as his dialectical method. In Clausewitz’s writings, Hegel’s concept of the absolute spirit, wrote Meshcheryakov, was transformed into that of absolute war. Third, Clausewitz favoured short, decisive wars because that was the only way that a small country like Prussia could win the total wars of the contemporary era.282
Colonel Yevgeny Razin, a lecturer at the Frunze Academy and the author of a four-volume textbook history of operational art, took exception to Meshcheryakov’s article and wrote to Stalin. Meshcheryakov, complained Razin, had revised the positive view of Clausewitz held not only by Lenin but by Engels, too. Attached to his letter was his own short thesis on war and the art of war. Stalin replied almost immediately but his response was not published until March 1947.
Unfortunately for Razin, Stalin agreed with Meshcheryakov’s critique of Clausewitz. Indeed, in a private meeting with the journal’s editors in March 1945, Stalin himself had spoken of German military ideology as an ideology of attack, plunder and the struggle for world domination.283
‘In the interests of our cause and the modern science of war, we are obliged not only to criticise Clausewitz,’ wrote Stalin to Razin, ‘but also Moltke, Schlieffen, Ludendorff, Keitel and other exponents of German military ideology. During the last thirty years Germany has twice forced a bloody war on the rest of the world and twice has suffered defeat.’ Clausewitz was out of date, said Stalin; he ‘was a representative of the time of manufacture in war, but now we are in the machine age of war’. As to Razin’s own ideas, Stalin was scathing:
The thesis contains too much philosophy and abstract statements. The terminology taken from Clausewitz, talking of the grammar and logic of war hurts one’s ears. . . . The hymns of praise to Stalin also pain the ears, it hurts to read them. Also, the chapter on counter-offensive (not to be confused with counter-attack) is missing. I am talking of the counter-offensive after a successful but indecisive enemy offensive, during which the defenders assemble their forces to turn to a counter-offensive and strike a decisive blow to the enemy and inflict defeat upon him. . . . Our brilliant Commander, Kutuzov, executed this when he destroyed Napoleon and his army by a well-prepared counter-offensive.284
According to Roy Medvedev, the publication of Stalin’s letter led to the colonel’s arrest, but Stalin relented when he came across Razin’s military art textbook while doing some homework in preparation for a meeting with China’s communist leader, Mao Tse Tung, who was considered an expert on ‘people’s war’. Stalin was so impressed by Razin’s book that he was released from prison, promoted to major-general and restored to his position at the Frunze Academy.285 A different version of Razin’s fate is that he was already under arrest for some wartime misdemeanours when he wrote to Stalin and Stalin’s letter actually led to his release. Either story could be true, such were the vagaries of the Soviet system, especially when Stalin was involved. What is certain is that Razin did return to teaching and to publishing books about military affairs. He died in 1964. As far as we know, he kept his own counsel, and never wrote or spoke about his famous exchange with Stalin.