Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin’s favourite among Soviet strategic theorists was Boris Shaposhnikov, a former Tsarist officer who had joined the Red Army in 1918. During the civil war he helped plan Red Army operations and then served in various capacities, including as head of the Red Army Staff, commandant of the Frunze Military Academy and chief of the General Staff (1937–40, 1941–3). He got on well with Stalin personally and is said to be the only Soviet general the dictator addressed using the familiar second person singular, ty, as opposed to the more formal second person plural, vy (like ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French).²⁵⁸

Like Stalin, Shaposhnikov was an intellectual as a well as a practical man of action. Before the First World War he attended the Tsarist General Staff Academy. A keen student of history, he was conversant with several foreign languages, including French, German and Polish. His Mozg Armii (Brain of the Army) was a study of strategic lessons from the First World War focusing on the role of General Staffs. Shaposhnikov’s combination of grand strategy and critical organisational detail were also the hallmarks of Stalin’s military and political leadership. Systematic and admirably lucid, Shaposhnikov’s exposition in Mozg Armii was also a paragon of political orthodoxy, with many citations from the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as well as western and Russian strategic theorists.²⁵⁹

The fundamental military lesson of the First World War, argued Shaposhnikov, was that General Staffs had prepared for a short, sharp war of annihilation but found themselves fighting a prolonged war of attrition. The lesson for future warfare was the necessity for prolonged economic and industrial mobilisation to fight protracted wars. Soviet preparations for the Second World War began even before Shaposhnikov had completed publication of Mozg Armii at the end of the 1920s. During the 1930s, defence’s share of the national budget increased from 10 per cent to 25 per cent. The Red Army grew from under a million to more than 4 million. By 1939, the Soviet Union had the largest and most extensively equipped army in the world and was annually producing 10,000 planes, 3,000 tanks, 17,000 artillery pieces and 114,000 machine guns.

In Mozg Armii, Shaposhnikov rehearsed at length the Clausewitzian commonplace that since war was a continuation of politics, war’s goals and overall direction were the prerogative of political leadership. On the one hand, General Staffs needed to understand the interrelations of domestic, foreign and military affairs while, on the other, political leaders required a good grasp of military matters. ‘In our times’, wrote Shaposhnikov, ‘the study and knowledge of war is essential for all state leaders.’²⁶⁰

One idea that Mozg Armii helped to popularise was that ‘mobilisation meant war’. Because of how modern armies must operate, mobilisation was, in effect, a declaration of war. When Russia’s armed forces were mobilised to support Serbia against Austria-Hungary during the July Crisis of 1914, it also meant war with the Hapsburg Empire’s German ally, whose Kaiser felt compelled to mobilise and attack not only Russia, but its ally, France.

When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, Stalin kept the USSR out of the war by signing the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact. Indeed, the pact contained a secret protocol in which the Germans agreed that eastern Poland (i.e. western Belorussia and western Ukraine) and the Baltic States were in the Soviet sphere of influence. The quid pro quo was a guarantee of Soviet neutrality while Germany fought Poland’s British and French allies. Stalin’s deal with Hitler worked well for a while, but by June 1941 it was clear Hitler would soon attack the USSR. The question was: should the Red Army mobilise in anticipation of that attack? Stalin feared premature mobilisation would act as a catalyst for war, bringing forward the outbreak of hostilities. When Defence Commissar Semen Timoshenko and General Staff Chief Georgy Zhukov proposed precautionary mobilisation, Stalin reputedly responded: ‘So, you want to mobilise the country, raise our armies and send them to the western border? That means war! Do you not understand this?’²⁶¹