Russia at war 1941-1945

And the very fact that Stalin should have talked about the unhappy beginning of a vast and terrible war without changing his vocabulary, and that he should have

spoken in his almost usual way about the great but not insuperable difficulties that would have to be overcome— this, too, suggested not weakness, but great strength.

"My friends", Sintsov repeated over and over again. And suddenly he realised that in all the great and even gigantic work that Stalin had been doing, there had been a lack of just these words: "Brothers and sisters! My friends!"—and, even more so, the feelings that stood behind these words. Was it only a tragedy like the war thatcould give birth to these words and these feelings? ... Above all, what was left in hisheart after Stalin's speech was a tense expectation of a change for the better.

This passage is all the more remarkable as it was written in 1958, when the general

attitude to Stalin had already become extremely critical; but Simonov was clearly

unwilling to distort history on this cardinal point. Other works written in the late 1950's, without exception, admit the extreme importance of Stalin's broadcast of July 3—even though some do not even mention his name, but merely speak of a "government

communication".

Chapter IV SMOLENSK: THE FIRST CHECK TO THE

BLITZKRIEG

The State Defence Committee, the formation of which Stalin had announced in his July 3

speech, was charged not only with the military conduct of the war but also with "the rapid mobilisation of all the country's resources". Among the decisions it made in these crucial days were many of far-reaching importance. They concerned the whole field of economic wartime organisation, including industrial mobilisation and the evacuation of whole

industries to the east as well as reorganisation within the armed forces.

Militarily, the State Defence Committee decided to decentralise the command system to some extent by dividing the enormous front into three main sectors, each with a

Command of its own. Voroshilov was appointed to command the "North-Western

Direction", including the Baltic and Northern Fleets; Timoshenko was appointed to the

"Western Direction", and Budienny to the "South-Western Direction", including the Black Sea Fleet. As principal members of their War Councils (i.e. the senior Party leaders for the areas concerned) they were given Zhdanov, Bulganin and Khrushchev

respectively.

On July 16 the military commissars were re-introduced. L. Z. Mekhlis, head of the

Political Propaganda of the Red Army, had fanatically supported this measure.

[ Mekhlis had been notorious in the past as one of the "purgers" of the Army, and was held directly responsible for the liquidation of Blucher. He was something of a

"politisation" fanatic, and had been on particularly bad terms with Timoshenko. A protégé of Voroshilov, he was unpopular with the "younger" generals, and finally, in 1942, after the disastrous Kerch operation in the Crimea, he was demoted. He was

sharply disliked not only by men like Zhukov and Rokossovsky, who did not favour the re-introduction of the officer-and-commissar dual command in the Army in 1941, but

also, on more personal grounds, by some top-ranking members of the Politburo, such as Shcherbakov. The eventual abolition of dual command should not be confused with the

Political Departments in the Army, which continued as before. On Mekhlis, see John

Erickson, The Soviet High Command, London, 1962.]