On June 18 a German sergeant crossed over to the Soviet side with the warning that at 4 am on June 22 German troops would go on the offensive all along the Soviet border. The next day, as if in mockery of this warning, Pravda published an editorial entitled "Summer Vacation for the Toilers."
Stalin was still hoping that Berlin would invite him to the negotiating table. Even as late as the evening of June 21, when more and more alarming reports were coming in, Stalin told Defense Commissar Timoshenko: "We are starting a panic over nothing."
On June 21, at 11 PM another German, Private Alfred Liskof, defected to the Soviet side and warned that his army would attack at four the next morning. At the same time Soviet military intelligence received one more report from Berlin that the invasion was set for June 22. According to some estimates, the Soviet government received as many as eighty-four advance warnings of the German attack.161
Despite the immense resources invested in building fortifications on the western border, these works were in total disarray when the Soviet—German war began. The construction of fortifications along the old border (the one predating September 17, 1939) had begun in 1929 and went on until 1935, creating fortified lines of reinforced concrete to a depth of two to three kilometers. To give an idea of how outdated these fortifications were, it should suffice to say that they were built with redoubts armed with nothing more than machine guns and provided no protection against 155mm or 210mm artillery fire. In 1938 the modernization of these installations and their armaments, which had begun, was postponed in accordance with a decision to alter the entire system of fortified districts and lines of fortifications. No sooner had construction of new fortifications begun than the border was moved westward. Orders were issued to stop work on the fortification along the old border. Work began on fortified districts on the new border, but it soon turned out that the most important considerations—the potential strength of the enemy and of Soviet defenses in the fortified districts—had not been taken into account. More time was lost in drawing up new designs and specifications. Then the main effort was put into fortifying the Baltic Military District. The Soviet command wrongly assumed that the main enemy blow would come from East Prussia, aiming at the Baltic region. At the end of March 1941, when it turned out that a major concentration of German troops was concentrated south of Polesye, it was decided to fortify the Kiev Military District. At that point the necessary materials and equipment to strengthen the Kiev district were lacking. Of the 2,500 fortifications built along the new border, only 1,000 were fully equipped with artillery. The rest had machine guns only. The armaments had been removed from the fortifications on the old border and the installations turned into—storage sites for the local kolkhozes. The old border, along which Soviet troops could have established a second line of defense in the event of a retreat, was left bare, while the new border was insufficiently fortified and armed.
Matters were no better in regard to the building of new airfields or new airstrips at existing fields, or new railroads and terminals. A. Zaporozhets, head of the main political directorate of the Red Army, reported to Timoshenko: "The majority of the fortified districts along our western border are for the most part inoperative."
Official Soviet historians generally justify these grave shortcomings with the argument that the Soviet Union did not have enough time to prepare for the war. Such statements do not correspond to reality. For many years the officially stated policy was to keep the country in a state of permanent mobilization. The population had been taught for years that it should be ready to make any and all sacrifices in order to strengthen the nation's defenses, and real sacrifices had been made. The Soviet government did have both the time and the resources to prepare the country for war, but owing to the incompetence of the leadership the enormous resources extracted from the population were uselessly squandered and the gigantic investments failed to produce the results they should have.
In 1940 and early 1941 the government issued several decrees on the army's lack of preparedness and the inadequacies in the construction of fortifications and provision of arms and equipment. Only 50 percent of the armored formations and motorized units had new arms and equipment; for the air force in the border districts the figure was only 22 percent.162
The military high command also committed serious errors in its assessment of how the enemy forces were deployed and what their plans and intentions were. As Marshal Zhukov, the man who became chief of the General Staff in February 1941, later admitted in his memoirs, 'The most dangerous situation strategically was in the Southwestern Direction, that is, the Ukraine, and the Western Direction, that is, Byelorussia, for in June 1941 the Nazi command had concentrated its most important land and air forces in those areas."163
The Soviet high command wrongly believed that the main blow would come from East Prussia and would strike at Riga, Kaunas (Polotsk), and Minsk, and from the Brest region, along the Baranovichi—Minsk line. In reality the German high command had decided to strike its main blow just north of the Polesye region in Byelorussia. The Soviet command expected an offensive south of the Polesye. One must conclude that the Soviet leadership totally disregarded all of the information provided by its intelligence network, which had provided thoroughgoing details of the German plans.
The defense plan for the western border also had serious flaws. It envisaged an immediate counteroffensive as soon as the Germans struck. It did not foresee that the enemy would be able to penetrate deep into Soviet territory; yet the high command was well aware of the weakness of its border defense lines. Maneuvers in January 1941 had shown clearly, for example, that Soviet forces would find themselves in great danger if the enemy penetrated as far as Bialystok and Lvov.
In addition to all this, when fighting actually broke out, the commanders of the military districts on the border were paralyzed and deprived of all initiative when orders were issued not to fight back, so as to avoid giving any pretext for armed action by the Germans.
CHAPTER
THE WAR, 1941-1945
TO THE BRINK OF DEFEAT
To the very last, Stalin expected a sign from Hitler. On the evening of June 21, when he heard about the defector Liskof, Stalin reacted in his usual manner. "Haven't the German generals sent this defector over to provoke a conflict?" he asked Timoshenko, the commissar of defense.1 Stalin apparently could not imagine that Hitler would start a war against the Soviet Union. He preferred to believe that the German generals, intoxicated with their military successes, wanted to provoke such a war. Besides, Stalin knew only too well that his country was not ready, that Soviet military plans were geared to the year 1942. Also, Stalin was simply afraid. He grew indecisive; it seems that he desperately yearned to postpone the inevitable. Possibly he was hoping for a miracle.