Stalin: A Biography

How could it happen that our glorious Red Army gave up to the fascist forces a number of our towns and districts? Surely the German fascist forces are truly invincible forces, as the boastful fascist propagandists constantly trumpet?

Of course not! History shows that invincible armies don’t exist and have never existed. Napoleon’s army was considered invincible but it was crushed in turn by Russian, English, German forces. Wilhelm’s German army during the first imperialist war was also considered an invincible army, but it suffered defeat several times at the hands of Russian and Anglo-French forces and, finally, was defeated by Anglo-French forces. The same has to be said about the present German fascist army of Hitler. This army has not yet met serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance.

These words were delivered in an unyielding tone which confirmed that the fight would be taken to the Germans. The challenge was flung back at Hitler and the Wehrmacht.

Stalin’s rhetoric was woefully unrealistic about the kind of enemy facing the Red Army. He warned people that enslavement to ‘German princes and barons’ awaited them in the event of the USSR’s failure to beat the Wehrmacht.⁵ He ignored the specific nature of Nazism’s New Order. Not princes and barons but Gauleiters and the SS were the Third Reich’s enforcers. Racial violence, mobile gas-wagons and concentration camps were installed in the East and yet not once did Stalin refer to them. The First World War remained imprinted on his mind. He was also transfixed by the memory of the Civil War. In his speech on Red Square on 7 November 1941 — the anniversary of the October Revolution — he rambled on about foreign ‘interventionists’ as if they and the Nazis were threats to the Soviet state of equal importance.⁶ Equally adrift from the facts was his claim that Germany was racked by ‘hunger and impoverishment’.⁷ Stalin was dredging up outdated clichés of Bolshevik party pronouncements. As Soviet soldiers and civilians came into direct contact with the Wehrmacht and SS, they learned for themselves that Nazism had methods and purposes of unique repulsiveness. Stalin’s reputation as a propagandist was greater than his performance.

There were limits indeed to Stalin’s adaptability. Winston Churchill’s regular parliamentary speeches and Franklin Roosevelt’s weekly radio broadcasts stood in contrast with Soviet practice. Stalin delivered only nine public wartime addresses of any length. He did not write for the newspapers. Although he could have got others to compose pieces for him, he refused to publish in his own name what he himself had not written. Information in general about him was scanty. He passed up opportunity after opportunity to inspire people outside the format of his preferred modalities.

Pravda continued to mention him with cultic reverence. Photographers were seldom allowed to take his picture; it was mainly old photos which were published in the press, and even these were used sparingly.⁸ It was as if the decision was taken to treat him as a disembodied symbol of the USSR’s war effort rather than the living Supreme Commander. Posters, busts and flags continued to be produced. Booklets of his best-known articles and speeches were on sale at cheap prices. Commissars in the armed forces gave lectures on political policies and military strategy as well as on Stalin’s personal leadership. He let no details of his activities be aired in the mass media. He continued to handle his public image on his own terms, and he had never felt comfortable with the frequent communing with society which the leaders of the Western Allies found congenial. Nor did he change his mind on letting a subordinate — as Hitler did with Goebbels — manufacture a public image for him. As before the war, Stalin kept direct control of what was said on his behalf.