"In our war against the Finns," said Khrushchev,
we had an opportunity to choose the time and the place. We outnumbered our enemy, and we had all the time in the world to prepare for our operation. Yet even in these most favorable conditions it was only after great difficulty and enormous losses that we were finally able to win. A victory at such a cost was actually a moral defeat.
Our people never knew that we had suffered a moral defeat, of course, because they were never told the truth.117
The top leaders of the party and government, Stalin, Molotov, and the other Politburo members, could not help but see that the war with Finland was a sharp warning of danger ahead. Although Voroshilov was removed as people's commissar of defense, he remained a member of the Politburo, when he should have been tried by a military tribunal. The top leadership knew that for years he had neglected his duties as head of the armed forces. His subordinates (Tukhachevsky among them), while still alive, had taken care of all administrative functions; Voroshilov himself had not the slightest idea of the real condition of the Red Army.
Voroshilov was replaced as people's commissar of defense by Marshal Timoshenko, the former commander of the Kiev Military District. There were other changes, too, but none of them could fundamentally alter the sorry state of affairs in the army's high command, since the best generals had been liquidated or sent to prisons and concentration camps. General Shtern, one of the ablest Soviet military leaders, was shot in April 1941,
after his successful part in the Finnish campaign. The officers promoted to the highest positions lacked experience in commanding large units. Officers on the middle and lower levels also left much to be desired. As of May 1, 1940, Soviet infantry units lacked as many as one-fifth the officers they required. Officer training at the military academies was of very poor quality. At company and squad level, 68 percent of the commanders had only five months of military training for the rank of second lieutenant.118
At the beginning of the war with Germany, only 7 percent of the officers had higher military education, and 37 percent had not completed their secondary education. Approximately 75 percent of the commanders and 70 percent of the political commissars had less than one year's experience in the positions they then held.119 In mid-1940 the Soviet government suffered serious arms shortages. By mid-1940 the Soviet government was fairly well aware of seriously neglected aspects of the country's preparations for war, despite the practically unlimited spending for military purposes (in 1941, for example, allocations for defense alone amounted to 43.4 percent of the state budget). Industry, for example, was not producing enough modern weapons, and mass production of up-to-date military aircraft was only in the preparatory stages.
In the 1930s the Soviet government proceeded from the assumption that sooner or later the USSR would be drawn into a world war. Soviet military doctrine, and with it the official propaganda machine, told the population that any future war would be fought on enemy soil and would not be costly in human lives. The war would inevitably be an offensive, not a defensive one. That was why, in negotiating with the French and British, the Soviet side repeatedly sought free passage for the Red Army through Polish and Romanian territory in the event of war with Germany. The absence of a common border with a potential enemy as dangerous as Nazi Germany had been a positive factor of prime importance, for it meant that a surprise attack by Germany from the west was ruled out. The Soviet Union was separated from Germany, let us recall, by Poland, the Baltic countries, and Romania. The Soviet leadership had often denounced these states as a cordon sanitaire erected by the west against the Bolshevik revolution. This assertion contained an element of truth, but the cordon sanitaire also worked in reverse. It was impossible to launch a surprise attack on the Soviet Union since it was necessary, first, to pass through these intermediate states.
After Stalin's "ingenious" conclusion of his pact with Hitler, the situation changed. Now Germany had a common border with the Soviet Union. All the immediate advantages the USSR obtained from the Stalin—Hitler pact were minor compared to this negative consequence. With the partition of Poland and the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, Stalin placed himself on a 3,ООО-kilometer border with a potential aggressor, every point on which was vulnerable. This was a fatal mistake.
Soviet historians do not say a word about this, of course, and for good reason. To acknowledge this error would lead to further acknowledgments. Thus far the official position has been that the refusal of France and Britain to sign a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union left it with no choice: it was obliged to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany and stay out of the war; otherwise, it would have been drawn into a war on two fronts, against Germany in the west and Japan in the east.120
Let us take a closer look at these arguments.
One reason the British and French hesitated to conclude a military alliance with the USSR during the talks in the summer of 1939 was that they had doubts about the military capacity of the Soviet army, which had been weakened by the mass extermination of its officers in the 1930s. The Soviet government, for its part, had little confidence in Chamberlain, author of the Munich accord. But did Hitler, who violated the Munich agreement and invaded Czechoslovakia, inspire greater confidence as a political partner?
Official Soviet historians contend that if the USSR had failed to sign the nonaggression pact with Germany, the German army would have marched into the Soviet Union after occupying Poland, with the blessing, perhaps even the support, of England and France. This does not correspond to reality. Without the Stalin—Hitler pact, it is highly unlikely that Germany would have dared to invade Poland, since it would have risked confronting a coalition of Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Even the belated conclusion of an alliance between Britain and Poland on August 25 disconcerted Hitler enough to make him postpone his attack until September l.121 Thus, within days of the Soviet—German agreement, Hitler was questioning the correctness of his calculations.
It is a myth that the Soviet government had only one alternative in August 1939. As we have seen, Astakhov himself, in his conversion with the Bulgarian envoy Draganov, outlined three possibilities facing the Soviet Union: agreement with Britain and France; agreement with Germany; no agreement of any sort with anyone, that is, a policy of waiting, of delaying, in short, a policy of neutrality.122 This means that the Soviet leadership had considered the policy of neutrality. (Astakhov certainly did not raise it on his own initiative.) Indeed neutrality, staying out of the European conflict altogether, could have been the best course for the Soviet Union.
Let us suppose, however, that Hitler the adventurist had decided to settle accounts with Poland, despite the lack of an agreement with the Soviet Union, on the assumption that Britain and France would not stir in Poland's behalf any more than they had for Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Still, if the Soviet Union had backed Poland, would Hitler have risked a war? At that point it was impossible. Germany lacked the human and material resources for such a war. A simple comparison of Germany in 1939 with Germany in 1941 proves the point.
Against Poland Hitler was able to marshal a force of fifty-seven divisions (to Poland's forty-seven divisions and brigades), 2,000 tanks (to Poland's 166), and 1,800 planes (to Poland's 771). In addition, Germany had thirty- three understrength divisions in the west, to counter any attack by France and Britain.123 We should add that Germany's war industry was only beginning to develop and was suffering from major shortages of oil and other strategic raw materials.