Leningrad

Famously, the Soviet leadership was caught by surprise as well. ‘Stalin and his people remain completely inactive’, Goebbels confided to his diary a month before the invasion, ‘like a rabbit confronted with a snake.’9 Though historians still debate the rationale behind Stalin’s pre-war foreign policy, it is clear that Stalin both expected war with Germany and convinced himself that with appeasement it could be delayed at least until the following year. Reports from the Soviet ambassador to Berlin were ignored, as was military intelligence of troop concentrations west of the new German — Soviet border. British warnings were dismissed as disinformation, designed to turn the Red Army into ‘England’s soldiers’. Notoriously, the trade commissariat continued to send grain, petroleum, rubber and copper to Germany right up to the very night of the invasion.

Stalin’s plenipotentiary in Leningrad at the outbreak of war was Andrei Zhdanov, a plump, sallow-faced, chain-smoking son of a schoolteacher who had risen to be Party Secretary of Gorky (formerly and now again Nizhni Novgorod), thence to the Central Committee, and after the murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov (probably at Stalin’s hands) in 1934, to leadership of the Leningrad Party organisation and full membership of the Politburo. Devotedly loyal, and like Stalin a workaholic autodidact, he was one of the few people Stalin addressed with the familiar ty — equivalent to the French tu — rather than the formal Vy. Today he is best remembered for leading Leningrad’s defence and for a tragic-comic post-war stint as cultural commissar, during which he denounced Akhmatova as ‘half-nun, half-whore’, and tinkled politically correct tunes to Shostakovich on the piano. In truth, he was a mass murderer: as well as overseeing the Leningrad purges of 1937–9, he had, like other Politburo members, toured them to the provinces — in his case, to the Urals and Middle Volga. His signature, together with Stalin’s and Molotov’s, is to be found at the bottom of dozens of death lists.

Like Stalin, Zhdanov was so confident that talk of an imminent German attack was premature that on 19 June he left Moscow for a six-week break at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. ‘The Germans have already missed their best moment’, Stalin reassured him. ‘It looks as though they will attack in 1942. Go on holiday.’ Through the afternoon of Saturday 21 June, as Zhdanov settled in at the seaside, the border guards’ usual trickle of unsettling reports turned into a torrent: of yet more incursions into Soviet airspace, of covert movements of tanks and artillery, of pontoon bridges being built and barbed-wire entanglements cleared away. Shortly after nine in the evening, three deserters — a Lithuanian and two German Communists — crossed the River Bug to Soviet lines, and told interrogators of the orders that had just been read out to their units. The attack would begin at 0400, said the Lithuanian, and ‘they plan to finish you off pretty quickly’.10

In the Kremlin, apprehension still vied with denial. The German Foreign Ministry, the Berlin embassy reported, was refusing to take its half-hourly calls. Sometime in the late evening the commissar for defence, General Semen Timoshenko, rang Stalin with the news from the German deserters, at which Stalin ordered him to assemble an emergency meeting of Politburo members and senior generals. On their arrival he paused in his pacing and asked, ‘Well, what now?’ Timoshenko and the chief of staff, General Georgi Zhukov, insisted that all frontier troops should be put on full battle alert. Stalin disagreed: ‘It would be premature to issue that order now. It might still be possible to settle the situation by peaceful means. . The border units must not allow themselves to be provoked into anything that might cause difficulties.’ At half past midnight he finally allowed the order to go through — prefaced by a warning that the attacks might only be provocations, and calling for a ‘disguised’ response. The meeting broke up at 3 a.m. An hour later Stalin had just gone to bed when he received a call from Zhukov. The major cities of the western Soviet Union — Kiev, Minsk, Vilnius, Sevastopol — were being bombed. ‘Did you understand what I said, Comrade Stalin?’ asked Zhukov. He had to repeat himself before he got a reply. War, even Stalin had to acknowledge, had begun.11

The first rule of foreign policy, the dinner-party truism has it, is never to invade Russia. Why did Hitler, very conscious of the disaster that befell Napoleon there, decide to attack the Soviet Union?