Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days Of Wwii On The Eastern Front - Brossura

Pleshakov, Constantine

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0618773614 ISBN 13: 9780618773619

Casa editrice: Mariner Books, 2006

Riassunto

On June 22, 1941, radios all over the Soviet Union crackled with the announcement that the country had been attacked by Nazi Germany. But the voice on the airwaves was not the familiar one of Joseph Stalin; it was the voice of his deputy, Molotov. Paralyzed by Hitler's unexpected move, Stalin disappeared completely from public view for the crucial ten days of war on the Eastern Front. In this taut, hour-by-hour account, Constantine Pleshakov draws on a wealth of information from newly opened archives to elucidate the complex causes of the Soviet leader's reaction, revealing the feared despot's unrealized military stratagems as well as his personal vulnerabilities, while also offering a new and deeper understanding of Russian history.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Russian-born Constantine Pleshakov is the author of The Tsar's Last Armada The Flight of the Romanovs, and Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. He is a visiting prefessor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

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Stalin's Folly

The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern FrontBy Constantine Pleshakov

Mariner Books

Copyright ©2006 Constantine Pleshakov
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618773619
1 WAR GAME

JANUARY 2, 1941: THE KREMLIN
The end of 1940 was grim. Two armies, one clad in gray, the other in khaki,
were destroying the Old World. They had thrown themselves at Europe
abruptly and ferociously, like ants attacking a cake left on a garden table.
And like ants, they arrived in geometrically impeccable columns, never
questioning their right to devour the trophy.
The ants were of two different species. The grays took orders from
the German Führer, Adolf Hitler; the khakis closed ranks around the Soviet
leader, or vozhd, Joseph Stalin. Having been dismissed by cultured European
politicians, cartoonists, and sketch writers as pests that could be stamped
out by the civilized world in a flash, the ants had proved their worth by 1940.
France crumbled under the wheels of German tanks in less than
three weeks. The British force on the continent, expected to save the day,
was decimated at Dunkirk. As headlines shouted about the impending
demise of these two great powers, pillars of the West since the days of the
Crusades, smaller European nations such as Belgium, Holland, Denmark,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Norway wriggled under German occupation,
their cries unheard by the panicking world. At the other end of the continent,
the Red Army grabbed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and tore away chunks
of Poland, Finland, and Romania.
In both the west and the east, killings were performed speedily
and expertly: troops swept through the ancient cities, blind to decorum, and
the punitive squads followed immediately to scavenge, to cleanse, to kill.
Hitler"s men looked for Jews and Communists; Stalin"s went for
the "exploiting classes."
The proud and elaborate European order, which had taken
centuries to create, was smashed in less than a year, because the two
armies acted in accord. Hitler let Stalin do what he wanted to on the fringes
of Europe, and Stalin turned a blind eye to the plight of the West and even
reined in his fifth column abroad, the fanatically anti-Nazi Comintern. But this
was not a partnership of equals — Hitler snatched the best pieces, and
Stalin collected the crumbs. Kaunas was a poor match for Paris, the port of
Riga didn"t fare nearly as well as that of Rotterdam, and Romanian Cabernet
hardly deserved the name when compared to the French varieties.
At the end of 1940 a weird lull fell over Europe. The two armies
had reached an impasse. Germany"s hunger could not be sated by the
annexation of the few lesser countries, like Yugoslavia and Greece, that were
still stubbornly maintaining their sovereignty. The Germans had to launch a
spectacular conquest to justify their roll across Europe; that was what all
other empires had done at the peak of their might, and that was what Adolf
Hitler had promised the German people.
They had few options. One was to invade Britain, another the
Middle East; yet another was to strike at the Soviet Union. At the end of
1940 nobody knew which path Hitler would choose.
Virtually every person in the Soviet Union had heard about Mein
Kampf, Hitler"s manifesto, published years before and now distributed to
German newlyweds as a state gift. In the book Hitler promised the Germans
virtually unlimited living space, lebensraum, on the immense plains between
the Danube and the Urals, which now belonged to the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, formerly the Russian Empire. Since August 1939 the
two countries had been allies, but few Soviets doubted that the deal would be
short-lived. They also knew that almost every prominent general in the USSR
had been shot during the Great Purge, and the talent and vigor of the men
who replaced them had yet to be tested.
No matter how much the newspapers bragged about the
prosperity of the Communist motherland, people knew that just ten years
before, few households had had electricity and people had been signing
papers with an X because they couldn"t read or write. The workers building
power plants, factories, and dams still lived in wooden shacks and muddy
holes. In 1932 the government ordered so much grain from Ukraine, with its
unsurpassed black earth, that its people suffered a fierce famine. Meanwhile,
Germany was a nation of science, efficiency, and advancement.
None of this bode well for the nations that had been forcibly
herded into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics over the course of the
past twenty-three years. The Red Army, whose soldiers were drafted from
urbane Leningrad and arrogant Moscow, demure Byelorussia and warlike
Chechnya, Islamic Uzbekistan and Buddhist Buryatia, froze in suspense,
anticipating the vozhd"s instructions. But as yet no order had come its way.



In the fall of 1940 the Soviet people discovered that their woods were studded
with an amazing number of mushrooms. Highly prized as a delicacy by both
rich and poor, mushrooms rarely survived the month of September, since
they were enthusiastically picked and then pickled, boiled, fried, dried, and
sautéed. However, in 1940 the mushrooms were so plentiful that no matter
how many were gathered, many more sprang forth — not just the uninspiring
yellow chanterelles and the barely edible scarlet russulas, but also the czar
of the forest, the delicious and beautiful King Boletus.
In a country devastated by economic barbarism and political
ineptitude, such a surprising harvest should have been a welcome
supplement to a meager diet. It wasn"t. Every adult in that superstitious land
knew that the unusual abundance of mushrooms meant just one thing: war.



In the early evening of January 2, 1941, the generals were summoned to the
Kremlin.
The order came without warning. The generals were important,
and so was their mission in Moscow — they were attending an annual
conference — yet nobody was sure whether the "heir of Lenin," the "genius of
all times and peoples," Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, would deign to see them.
Regardless of the awe the leader inspired in their hearts, the
generals knew that he must have been alarmed by what was happening in
the west of the country. The strongest army in the world, Hitler"s Wehrmacht,
rustled and coiled along the border like a gigantic serpent, and it was hard to
believe that its intentions were peaceful.
The very fact that they had been summoned to the conference
indicated that the vozhd was concerned about the state of the army.
Conferences of military leaders were held annually, but this assembly was
extraordinary. Usually the gatherings were attended by district commanders,
their commissars, and chiefs of staff, but this time they were joined by a
number of army, corps, and even division leaders, and the meeting was to be
followed by a comprehensive strategic game.
The generals were uneasy. The most recent execution of military
leaders had occurred less than two years before. All of the participants in the
conference had benefited from the carnage, as the murders had created
lucrative vacancies. However, they could not be sure that the butchery would
not resume, this time destroying them as it had destroyed their predecessors.
Also, they were confused. Throughout the 1930s they had been
taught that Nazism was a belligerent and therefore dangerous ideology. Now,
however, their country was bound to Nazi Germany by a pact and also by the
joint conquest of Eastern Europe.
Throughout the conference week, five reports and fifty
presentations were made. One report definitely stood out: that supplied by
the commander of the Kiev Military District, Army General Georgy Zhukov,
on "The Nature of Modern Offensive Operation." Zhukov thought big. In his
view, to win a war, an army group had to use at least eighty-five rifle divisions,
four mechanized corps, two cavalry corps, and thirty air force divisions. In all,
Zhukov suggested, a strike would involve about 1.5 million men, 8,000
aircraft, and 5,000 tanks.
Nobody had ever fought a war like that. Whether the generals
agreed with Zhukov or not—and some found his presentation presumptuous—
he inspired respect. The man was remarkably vigorous, ambitious, and
blunt, qualities all but lost to the army in the recent purge. He looked like he
had stepped in from another, happier age, when ingenuity and risk-taking
were still the marks of the military man.
Zhukov was not the only star of the conference. The commander
of the Western Military District, Colonel General Dmitry Pavlov, also delivered
a rousing report. Pavlov compared tank operations of World War I to those
currently unfolding in Europe. The differences were staggering. During the
Battle of the Somme, Pavlov said, tanks had advanced two and a half miles
in three hours, and that had been trumpeted as a major success. In May and
June 1940, however, the German panzers had crushed all of France in
seventeen days. Pavlov sounded motivated and keen, and his presentation
was well received. In a way, his report complemented Zhukov"s, advocating
aggressive use of modern weaponry, but after Pavlov spoke the two generals
began to look at each other apprehensively, as their rivalry became clear.
On New Year"s Eve the junior corps and division commanders
were sent back home. Senior generals started preparing for the strategic
game, which would pit the "Reds" against the "Blues" — or the Soviets
against the Germans. Unexpectedly, before they began, the generals were
told that Stalin required their presence.



By 1941 the Kremlin was four and a half centuries old. The Italian architects
invited to build it must have felt overwhelmed by the task. For starters, the
grand prince of Moscow, Ivan III, needed a castle that could withstand any
deadly attack, and Muscovite Russia was endowed with unfortunate strategic
terrain: it was remarkably flat, with no significant natural obstacles to deter
an enemy"s onslaught. It was also landlocked by three assertive powers,
Sweden, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans" vassals, the
Crimean Tatars, looted Russia every spring, so they knew their way to
Moscow well; they had recently pillaged and burned the Russian capital. So,
among other things, the Kremlin had to be fireproof.
Ivan wanted the new castle to inspire artistic respect too. After the
collapse of Byzantium, he had married its heiress, Zoë Palaiologos, and he
regarded himself as a successor to the glamorous rulers of Constantinople.
In other words, the fortress had to look like a palace. There had never been a
shortage of land in Russia, so the prince designated a huge chunk of it for
this project, which made the architects" task even more challenging.
After their initial frustration, the Italians performed valiantly. The
new fortress was virtually impenetrable. Its walls were thirty feet high and ran
for almost a mile and a half, forming a firm ring atop a hill. That made the
Kremlin one of the largest structures in Europe. It was among the gloomiest,
too. The red brick with which it was built looked dull even on a sunny day,
and its towers were extremely tall and loomed menacingly over the city. Its
roofs were shaped like nomadic tents, giving the aura of a military camp. For
security reasons the castle was built as a huge triangle, so that the sentries
on its towers would have a good view of the walls, but its shape was
uncompromisingly sharp. On maps the Kremlin looked like a pointed tooth
biting into Moscow"s flesh.
Ironically, given the monolithic nature of the word kremlin today,
every major Russian city used to have such a structure. A kremlin — the
word means "citadel" in Russian — crowned a hill on a riverbank, and each
time nomads attacked from the steppes or a rival prince from the woods, the
townsfolk sought shelter behind its walls. There they could count on two
things, water and prayer, for every kremlin had a church and a well. As for
other essentials, like food and cover, these were reserved for the prince and
his army.
Gradually kremlins became extinct. The Kremlin devoured them.
The rulers of Moscow crushed their opponents and destroyed their
castles. Peter the Great, the illustrious westernizer, wanted every Russian
city to look like Amsterdam, so kremlins had to be torn down to provide the
space needed for baroque chapels and neoclassical mansions. Two
centuries after Peter, the Bolsheviks launched their own orgy of
reconstruction when revolution delivered Russia into their hands. Kremlins
gave way to factories, streetcars, and Marxist statues. But the Moscow
kremlin was spared: it became the seat of a government that was afraid of its
own people and therefore used the Kremlin"s protective walls and
watchtowers to powerful effect.
Few at the time of the revolution knew that Lenin was more
coward than hero. Politically courageous, he simply could not handle
physical danger. As soon as the civil war started, he fled the front in
Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called). A hastily commandeered train
took him and his accomplices to Moscow, where cars rushed them to the
Kremlin. Lenin didn"t like what he saw. The walls were indeed high and thick,
but the structure was populated by a coterie of palace servants, priests,
monks, and nuns. Lenin firmly ordered them out. He also called for the
destruction of the monasteries and Romanov monuments on the grounds and
gleefully participated in the demolition himself.
Soon the citadel was spacious and quiet. The only intruding
sound was the cawing of crows. In 1918, Russians were dying of starvation
and there was not much for the crows to scavenge in the garbage bins of
Moscow. But food could always be found in the Kremlin. Scanning the citadel
for leftovers, hundreds of birds assembled on its spires. The guards started
shooting them, but the noise upset Lenin even more than the crows" noise,
and the hunt was called off.
Uninterested in luxuries that he could easily afford, Lenin lived in a
tiny apartment with his wife and sister. His tastes were spartan, and the
apartment looked like a ward in an orphanage: tidy, gray, minimalist, with
narrow and bumpy iron beds, crippled tables, and shabby chairs. Lenin didn"t
spend much time there anyway, preferring his study, which was conveniently
located just across the hallway. That was where he did all his writing and
worked for the survival of his new utopian state.
At night the Kremlin felt particularly eerie. When the crows were
asleep and few people and cars were around, the citadel was completely
silent. The steps of a bodyguard pacing the cobblestone yard produced an
alarming echo. The engine of an automobile roared like a highland brook. The
Kremlin"s palaces were abandoned, its churches locked, its past discarded.
With its svelte white bell towers resembling lilies and its golden church
domes like thistle globes, the citadel bore the look of a petrified garden.
In the days of the czars, every Muscovite could see the ruler. All
anyone had to do was go to the Kremlin on a big church holiday — the czar
would be there, spectacular in his golden robes studded with jewels, possibly
even distributing candies and linen scarves to the faithful.
By the 1940s, though, very few people had access to the Kremlin.
Its image was printed on countless posters, stamps, and postcards, but for
most people the place was unreal, much like the mysterious demigod who
now inhabited it.



The generals walked into Stalin"s office at 7:30 p.m. Even the few who had
seen the vozhd in person couldn"t take their eyes off the man. From a
distance — say, in a convention hall — Stalin looked unimposing: a short,
stooping, thickset, visibly aged man. But in a smaller space he was an
overwhelming presence. The first thing people noticed was his bright light-
brown eyes, which were nearly yellow: weirdly intense, discomforting, almost
animalistic in their quiet alertness. All his other features — his low brow,
thick hair, mustache, pockmarks — seemed to fade away in the enigmatic
glow of his eyes.
The vozhd spoke slowly, quietly, and clearly, carefully punctuating
each sentence with a pause, almost never sitting down while he talked but
wandering around like a restless beast. Occasionally he would stop directly
in front of a visitor, deliberately entering his private space and staring him
right in the eye.
By Soviet standards, Stalin"s office was large, its walls richly
paneled with oak, the table covered by an ostentatious green cloth. Portraits
of Marx, Engels, and Lenin were the sole decorations on the bare walls.
The furniture was uncomfortable, and Stalin"s desk was littered
with piles of papers and maps. The only organized objects were the tele-
phones and a bunch of freshly sharpened colored pencils. Those close to
Stalin knew that he preferred blue ones.
That night the vozhd was in a bad mood. He barely nodded to the
generals before embarking on a long and scathing criticism of their leader,
Semen Timoshenko, the people"s commissar of defense. Stalin announced
that he had spent the whole night of December 30 going through a draft of
Timoshenko"s speech, editing it line by line, only to find that Timoshenko had
presented the unsanctioned version the following day. Now all his corrections
were useless. "Timoshenko has made a mistake," he snarled.
Each time the vozhd became angry, he got noticeably pale and
his eyes grew cold. Few dared to contradict him at those moments. The
generals could not understand what had annoyed him so much, since
Timoshenko"s concluding remarks at the conference had been extraordinarily
cautious. In all likelihood, Stalin had something else on his mind.
After lecturing the generals on the virtues of respect and
discipline, the vozhd finally asked, "When is the game?"
"Tomorrow morning," Timoshenko answered, visibly unnerved.
"All right, go ahead . . . But do not let the commanders relax . . .
Who will be playing for the Blues and who for the Reds?"
"Army General Zhukov will be playing for the Blues, Colonel
General Pavlov for the Reds."
Even Stalin must have appreciated the casting of the rival generals
in these roles, but he didn"t let on if so. At 9:45 the generals left the Kremlin,
feeling intimidated and depressed. The encounter had made Georgy Zhukov
all the more determined to win the following day. He was a Soviet poster boy,
and as such, he couldn"t afford to fail.



Continues...

Excerpted from Stalin's Follyby Constantine Pleshakov Copyright ©2006 by Constantine Pleshakov. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Mariner Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0618773614
• ISBN 13: 9780618773619
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 344
• Contatto del produttore: Messaggerie Libri; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italia