Beat, heart!
Hammer away—no matter how tired.
Listen!
The city has sworn that the enemy will not enter.
THE FIRST DAYS OF WAR SET IN TRAIN A DEADLY SEQUENCE of events within the Kremlin. Two men shared primary responsibility for the catastrophe which struck Russia—losif Stalin and his Leningrad lieutenant, the man whom most believed he had chosen as his successor, Andrei Zhdanov.
It was Stalin who had held his country on the path of collaboration with Nazi Germany, who had refused to believe on the war’s eve that Hitler would betray him and who was confident down to the last hours that, if Germany was bent on attack, some way out could be found, even if a huge price had to be paid.
It was Zhdanov who had been the architect of Stalin’s policy vis-à-vis Germany, the man who had conceived the idea of opening a diplomatic initiative with Germany, the man who had said again and again, after the outbreak of war in 1939, that Germany “cannot and will not fight on two fronts.”
Now the Nazi attack sent Stalin into a state of psychic collapse which verged on a nervous breakdown. He was confined to his room, unable or unwilling to participate in affairs of state. And Zhdanov was neither in Leningrad nor in Moscow; he was on vacation in the Crimea. For days the great Soviet state was virtually leaderless, drifting like a rudderless dreadnought without a pilot, in the face of mortal danger.
Zhdanov’s responsibility for the crisis was deep. It was he who had first publicly sounded a note of skepticism over the possibility of Russia’s reaching agreement with England and France on the eve of war in 1939. It was he who wrote and published in Pravdaon June 29, 1939, an article in which he expressed what he described as his “personal views” that England and France were not serious about an alliance with Russia, that they were engaged in a maneuver to entrap Russia into war with Hitler. He conceded that “some of my friends” disagreed with this assessment but added that he would attempt to prove its validity.
The fact that Zhdanov had been named by Stalin to be chairman of the Party Central Committee Department of Propaganda and Agitation and was, of course, generally known to be Stalin’s heir apparent left no doubt as to the significance of the article. It was a warning to the West that Russia might look elsewhere for arrangements to guarantee her security and was so interpreted by the Germans, already deep in preliminary conversations with the Russians. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact on August 23, 1939, Zhdanov emerged as the author of the new Soviet policy of alignment with Germany. Diplomats in Moscow called him the “architect” and Molotov the “builder” of the German-Soviet treaty.
The exact nature of the divisions within Stalin’s Politburo over the German pact has never been revealed. That there were differences was never doubted and, indeed, was explicit in the wording of Zhdanov’s article of June 29, 1939.
The Politburo under Stalin (and after him) was the scene of acute rivalries, tensions and ambitions. Zhdanov was the rising star, but there were other men of great power and skill in intrigue. There was Beria, the police chief, who was busy completing the “purge of the purgers"—the liquidation of the old police apparatus which had carried out the final phase of Stalin’s mad repression of the 1930’s, the so-called “Y ezhovshchina” Beria had come up to Moscow from Stalin’s native Georgia in December, 1938, after a decade as chief of politics and police in his native Caucasus. Now he was bidding for broader powers and already had deeply involved himself with foreign affairs. One of his closest lieutenants, Dekanozov, had been installed as First Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs under Molotov, and in November, 1940, Dekanozov was sent to Berlin as Soviet Ambassador, there to remain during the last fatal months. Another Beria lieutenant, Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the infamous prosecutor of the purge trials, had also been placed in the Foreign Commissariat as deputy to Molotov.
There was another powerful contender for influence within the Politburo. He was Georgi M. Malenkov, then the newest of Stalin’s secretaries, a daring young man who was being set into very rapid orbit by Stalin. Malenkov, too, was deeply involved in the new German policy.
In political prestige Zhdanov held many advantages over Beria and Malenkov. He had occupied a high Party post since December, 1934, when he was summoned from the comparative obscurity of provincial Nizhni-Novgorod on the Volga to take over leadership of Leningrad after Kirov’s assassination. Zhdanov was Stalin’s choice to bring stability and order to the city of the Revolution’s birth, a city and a milieu which Stalin found difficult, unfamiliar and dangerous.
Stalin’s relationship to Leningrad was anomalous. While he had lived in Petrograd and St. Petersburg, as an underground Bolshevik and briefly as a very junior editor of Pravda before World War I, he never visited it between the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 and that of Kirov in 1934. Actually, Stalin rarely left Moscow for any reason except for vacations to the Crimea or Sochi. He made one trip to Siberia during the 1920’s. He visited his native Georgia two or three times, principally to see his mother. Aside from these excursions he usually kept to a narrow path that led from the Kremlin to his dacha on the Mozhaisk Chaussée and back again.
There were many who thought that Stalin felt that the northern city might challenge, and perhaps had already challenged, his power. Possibly a lurking feeling of inferiority toward Leningrad’s superior culture and vivid revolutionary tradition may have played a role in Stalin’s attitude toward that city.
Zhdanov had built himself into Stalin’s confidence in his six or seven years in Leningrad. He not only was unchallenged in Leningrad; he was extraordinarily close to Stalin. He often spent weeks at a time in Moscow or accompanying Stalin on extended stays in the Crimea or in Sochi. Stalin seemed to like Zhdanov and the Zhdanov family and even entertained hopes for a closer association—ultimately fulfilled when his daughter, Svetlana, married Zhdanov’s son, Yuri.
Zhdanov played a special role with Stalin in the launching of the most savage of the purges of the 1930’s. Khrushchev made public in his secret speech of 1956 a telegram dispatched over the names of Stalin and Zhdanov from Sochi September 25, 1936, to the other members of the Politburo in Moscow.
The telegram said:
We deem it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be nominated to the post of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda [the police chief who carried out the earlier phase of the purge] has definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinov-yev bloc. The OGPU is four years behind in this matter. This is noted by all Party workers and by the majority of the representatives of the NKVD.
Khrushchev’s implication was explicit. Zhdanov shared with Stalin full responsibility for launching the worst of the purges—the Yezhovshchina.
Zhdanov was a dark-haired man with brown eyes and, in his early years, considerable physical attraction. But as with many Soviet functionaries the ceaseless hours of work (often at night because of Stalin’s habit of keeping late evening hours), the lack of physical exercise, the multitude of ceremonial banquets took their toll. By the eve of the war Zhdanov was overweight, pasty-faced and prey to severe asthmatic attacks. He was a chain smoker, lighting one Belomor after the other until the pepelnitsa on his desk was cluttered with stubs. He was forty-five years old and had come a long, long way from his boyhood in Mariupol on the Black Sea shores. Like many prewar Bolsheviks his background was bourgeois. His father was an inspector of schools and possibly a member of the “white” or secular Orthodox clergy.
Zhdanov’s preoccupation with foreign affairs dated from 1938, when he became head of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Commission. He had watched the events of the 1930’s with concern. He was acutely aware of the threat which Hitler posed. But he was also confident that a policy could be devised which would avert that threat—at least for a time.
Speaking with Admiral Kuznetsov during a long trip which the two made to the Soviet Far East between March 28, 1939, and April 26, 1939—at a time when the air was filled with repercussions of Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia and his occupation of Memel—Zhdanov expressed conviction that Europe was headed for war. He said that he doubted that “such a fatal turn of events” could be avoided.
Admiral Kuznetsov, who shared this opinion, was alarmed. The Soviet Union was just embarking on a very ambitious long-term program of naval construction. Would there be time to complete it if events were hurrying toward so fateful a conclusion?
“The program will be completed,” Zhdanov said firmly.
Kuznetsov (unknown to himself, he was being sized up by Zhdanov, who was soon to recommend to Stalin that the Admiral be named Navy Commissar) formed a favorable opinion of Zhdanov during the long train journey. The two spent hours, sitting in their compartment, gazing out as the Siberian taiga flowed past, discussing politics and personalities. Kuznetsov had headed the Soviet naval mission to the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. There was talk about Spain and of men whom Kuznetsov had known well there—Marshal Kirill Meretskov, Marshal N. N. Voronov, General D. G. Pavlov and others. Zhdanov was a font of questions concerning naval commanders. Kuznetsov spoke his mind freely and frankly. The two men were delighted to find that in most instances their views coincided. Occasionally, however, a chill came into the conversation—or so it seemed to Kuznetsov as he looked back twenty-five years later. Once Zhdanov casually remarked that he had never dreamed that Admiral M. V. Viktorov, former fleet commander in the Baltic and the Pacific, could be “an enemy of the people.” The names of other naval “enemies of the people” swam in and out of the conversation. Judging by his tone of voice, Kuznetsov recalled, Zhdanov’s feeling in these matters was one of surprise. Certainly there was no hint of skepticism or disbelief.
Zhdanov spoke little of himself. As the train crossed the long bridge over the Kama River at Perm, he remarked that he had fought over this territory in the Civil War days and had started his Party work in this region.
“In general,” he remarked, “I am more of a river man than a seaman. But I love ships and enjoy naval affairs.”
At the end of July, 1939, almost on the eve of war and of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Zhdanov accepted Admiral Kuznetsov’s invitation to join him on a brief cruise in the Baltic. They boarded a cruiser at Kronstadt and headed out to sea. Kuznetsov drew to Zhdanov’s attention the fact that they could not go a hundred miles without threading their way through Baltic islands—Seiskari, Lavansaari, Gogland—all belonging to Finland, all potential enemy bases in event of war, all in a position to observe the slightest move by the Leningrad fleet. The next day they sailed past Tallinn and Helsinki, two great ports long linked to the glory of Russian naval power, now both in other hands, Estonian and Finnish. Two senior commanders who had served in the Imperial Navy in World War I, L. M. Galler and N. N. Nesvitsky, pointed out to Zhdanov the area in which mine fields had been laid down in 1914, from the island of Naissaar off Estonia to the Porkkala peninsula in Finland, to bar German access to the Russian bases at Kronstadt.
The talk with Zhdanov centered not on ancient history, however, but on the problems which would confront the Baltic Fleet in event of war. The Baltic Fleet was Russia’s strongest. But how could it get to sea? Even when the ships were at anchor at Kronstadt, they lay under direct observation from the Finnish shore near Sestroretsk. A man with a pair of binoculars could see exactly which ships were at harbor, when they were preparing to go to sea and when and if they returned. What would happen if war should come?
The admirals and Zhdanov may well have talked about the possibility of coercing Finland, by military threat or diplomatic maneuver, into making concessions which would increase the security of the chief Russian naval base, Kronstadt, and the chief Russian fleet, the Baltic.
There is no record of such conversations. But the topic must have come to mind. The admirals were showing Zhdanov the kind of protective barriers the czarist Imperial Navy possessed. They would hardly have been human had they not suggested that the time was at hand when the Soviet Union must have similar protection for the Soviet fleet.
It seems logical to suppose that the genesis of the winter war with Finland, which lay only a few months distant, can be found in this pleasant summer cruise in the wooded islands and blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. For Zhdanov was destined to play the leading role in that war. If he was not the inspirer of the policy which led to hostilities with Finland, he was the man who was chargéd with the ill-fated effort to carry it out, using the local forces of his Leningrad Military District.
To many of his associates Zhdanov was a difficult, domineering individual. They found little in his character to attract them and seldom had occasion for personal or confidential chats with him. In the memoirs of men who worked with him through the long, difficult years of World War II in Leningrad there is a paucity of anecdote and an absence of warmth, but much respect for his ability to carry enormous burdens of work and responsibility. It is likely that many of those in the higher echelons of government and Party were reluctant to come too close to Zhdanov, fearing his power and his role in the terrible and self-destructive purges. Admiral Kuz-netsov was in a somewhat different situation. He had not infrequent opportunities for probing Zhdanov’s views. In a way he was Zhdanov’s protégé, and he was thrown constantly with Zhdanov in his work on naval questions.
During most of 1940 Zhdanov held firmly to the belief that both sides in the West were fully enmeshed in war. There was nothing to fear from them. The Soviet Union could quietly go ahead with its own business.
During the December, 1940, military seminars held in the Defense Commissariat every member of the Politburo attended some sessions, but Zhdanov was in constant attendance. Later on, staff members recollected that he was present at almost every meeting.
By February, 1941, Admiral Kuznetsov was filled with concern over Soviet policy, over the reliability of the Nazi-Soviet pact, over the growing possibility of a Nazi attack. He sought a private talk with Zhdanov and specifically asked him why he thought the Germans were moving troops to the east and whether they were not preparing for war.
Zhdanov held to his previous position. He insisted that Germany was in no condition to fight on two fronts. He cited the German experience of World War I and contended that this demonstrated clearly that Germany did not have the strength to conduct war in the east and the west at the same time. He cited the well-known views of Bismarck to back up his evaluation. As for German reconnaissance flights and troop movements, he suggested they were either precautionary measures by the Germans or a kind of psychological warfare, nothing more.
Kuznetsov pressed his points. He noted that the Germans were moving troops to Rumania and Finland and flying over Hangö and Polyarny. Zhdanov did not budge. Kuznetsov could not understand the Leningrad chief. Perhaps Zhdanov based his confidence on private knowledge of the enormous defense works which were being undertaken on the Western frontiers.1 Perhaps he knew something from Stalin which was top secret. Many Soviet general officers believed that Stalin had convinced himself Hitler would not attack Russia until he had finished with England. Whatever may have been his reasons, Zhdanov did not explain them. Kuznetsov never understood the basis for Zhdanov’s evaluation. That it remained unchanged up to the eve of war was, however, demonstrated by Zhdanov’s action in leaving Leningrad on June 19. It was not conceivable that he would have departed the northern capital at that moment had he believed German attack was imminent.
Zhdanov’s authority in Leningrad was very nearly as absolute as that of Stalin in Moscow—subject always, of course, to the diktat of Stalin.
This meant, in effect, that not the smallest detail of Leningrad business was transacted without Zhdanov’s approval. He had several capable assistants, headed by his principal deputy, Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov, young, vigorous, energetic, kept the city at his fingertips. He was a competent deputy. But he was trained never to act without authority from above.
The totality of this prohibition on independent action became evident only in the emergency on the eve of the war. Because of the absence of Zhdanov from Leningrad, Secretary Kuznetsov found himself literally incapable of taking the normal steps which a deputy would be expected to carry out.
In his total subordination to Zhdanov he reproduced, in miniature, the total subordination of the members of the Politburo to Stalin’s dictatorship. In Leningrad no one challenged Zhdanov. In Moscow no one challenged Stalin. Out of this absolutism, medieval in concept, was to flow the principal source of the tragedy in Russia’s military ordeal, now beginning.
Without Stalin who was to lead? The Defense Commissariat was so much Stalin’s creature that Timoshenko and Zhukov could hardly be expected to give genuine shape and movement to an extraordinarily complex military effort. A new Stavka, or Supreme Command, was set up June 23, but it was nothing but a paper reorganization of the existing High Command. Of course, mobilization of the country’s manpower was fairly simple since, in general, it must follow predetermined lines. But strategy, tactics and diplomacy were another matter. New arrangements, new treaties were pressing. Yet Russia’s diplomats got no instructions for at least a week—clear evidence of the total paralysis of the decision-making apparatus.2
Admiral Kuznetsov was a member of the Stavka and has given a picture of its “work” in the early days of the war. Stalin was not present at any meetings in June and probably not until nearly the middle of July.3 Marshal Timoshenko, Defense Commissar, acted as chairman of the Stavka, but the role was only nominal. “It was not difficult to observe,” Kuznetsov recalled, “that the Defense Commissar was not prepared for the role that he had to play. Nor the members of the Stavka either.”
The function of the Stavka was not clear. It had little connection with reality. The members of the Stavka were not subordinate to Timoshenko. Instead of Timoshenko calling upon them for reports, they demanded that he report to them what he was doing. The Stavka’s deliberations concerned only land armies. Only once did Kuznetsov report on naval matters. That was when he advised the Stavka that the cruiser Maxim Gorky had been damaged by a mine and that Soviet forces had abandoned Libau. Zhdanov was a permanent member of the Stavka, but his post seems to have been more ceremonial than real.
The first clear-cut action to emerge from the Kremlin was a series of decrees dated June 27, 29 and 30. Those of June 27 and June 29 were general, designed to mobilize the resources of the country. But the wording was suggestive of the difficulty in which the uncertain leadership found itself. The decrees emphasized that despite the “serious threat” to the nation a number of Party, government and social organizations had not yet realized its gravity.
The next day, June 30, a decree was promulgated naming a Committee for State Defense, headed by Stalin. The members of this committee were Molotov, Marshal Voroshilov, Georgi Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria. There is no evidence that Stalin participated actively in their decisions. On June 27 the British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, returned to Moscow from London with Lieutenant General F. N. Mason-Macfarlane and other military specialists for high-level discussions. To his surprise, he and his group were received by Molotov rather than Stalin.4
The Committee for State Defense, in essence, was a junta. It was given all powers of state, and from what is apparent about Stalin’s condition it appears to have been a junta to run the state with or ’without Stalin. Its membership is a prime clue as to what was happening within the Kremlin, who was in a position of power, who was not.
Voroshilov’s membership on the committee may be disregarded. At no time in his long career did Voroshilov display political initiative. He was Stalin’s crony and creature, and by July he had been sent off to take command in Leningrad. The active members of the junta were Molotov, Malenkov and Beria. Molotov’s role may have been equivocal. Those of Beria and Malenkov were not. These two men were not even full members of the Politburo, the highest political organ of the Communist Party. They were very junior. Indeed, they were among the newest candidatemembers of the Politburo—a very junior status, Beria had attained that stature only two years earlier when Stalin brought him up from Georgia to head the secret police. And Malenkov had been made a candidate member only in February, 1941, a scant four months previously. The core of the junta, thus, was Molotov, Beria and Malenkov, but the two junior members were in a position to outvote the senior one, Molotov.
How these two junior men were able to insinuate themselves into a position of such great influence is not precisely clear. But despite his junior status Beria controlled the police and was an extremely powerful man. The police had infiltrated the Red Army and held a major role in the Foreign Service, in the espionage service and in the Party itself. It is likely that the alliance of Beria and Malenkov, which came fully to light only after Stalin’s death in 1953, had already been forged. In a time of crisis the security forces in any country come to the fore. With Russia at war and in deathly peril, with Stalin incapable of conducting affairs, Beria and Malenkov turned matters to their personal advantage.
If the precise mechanism which they employed is not clear, one thing is plain. While Nazi Panzers ripped apart the country and Stalin was locked in his room in a state of nervous collapse, intrigue, plots and maneuvers held the day within the Kremlin. When the Florentine byplay was over, Zhdanov had lost his role as Stalin’s heir. He was dispatched back to Leningrad to link his personal fate with that of the northern capital, sink or swim.5
It is more than possible that his colleagues saddled Zhdanov with responsibility for the incredible disaster of Soviet foreign policy, of which he had been a leading architect—for the gargantuan error in miscalculating Hitler’s appetites and psychology. The question may even be posed whether Malenkov and Beria—both of whom opposed putting Soviet forces on combat alert and both of whom (with Molotov) had full access to the intelligence warnings of the German attack—did not deliberately permit their country to drift into war with Germany out of some motive of intrigue or ambition. Kremlin politics bars nothing—nothing in the realm of possible goals, nothing in the realm of possible means. Malenkov and Beria may have seen a chance to seize the government and, possibly, negotiating behind Stalin’s back, to extricate Russia from the war by suing for peace with Germany. The cost would be enormous, but their hands would inherit the power.
Whatever the game, whatever the motive, with the creation of the junta the senior members of the Politburo were deliberately excluded from the inner circle. L. M. Kaganovich, A. A. Andreyev (long since forgotten, but in those days often spoken of as a possible successor to Stalin), Anastas Mikoyan, Kalinin, Khrushchev, and the candidate members, N. M. Shvernik, Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksandr Shcherbakov—all were excluded.
But most notable was the exclusion of Zhdanov. Later on, all this would change. Stalin would resume his primacy. Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Bulganin and Voznesensky would be added to the State Defense Committee. It would cease to be a junta. But Zhdanov would never be named to the charmed circle.
1 These works were, indeed, conceived on a vast scale. By spring of 1941 a force of 135,714 workers was engaged on the task, including 84 special construction battalions, 25 construction regiments, 201 engineer and sapper battalions, etc. However, by the outbreak of war fewer than 1,000 of 2,300 major artillery emplacements had been completed or equipped. (Review of N. A. Anfilov, Nachalo Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, Moscow, 1963, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 8, August, 1963, p. 84.)
2 Maisky in London was dumfounded at his inability to get any response from the Foreign Commissariat.
3 Marshal Andrei Grechko spent the first twelve days of war in the General Staff. It was his task to keep the operations map up to date—no easy matter. He reports that General Georgi K. Zhukov, then Chief of Staff, frequently came to the operations room, studied the map, then took it off to Stavka “to report to I. V. Stalin.” It does not seem likely, in fact, that Stalin participated in Stavka decisions during this period. (Grechko, Voyenno-Istorischeskii Zhurnal, No. 6, June, 1966, p. 12.) Incredible as it may seem, Admiral Kuznetsov in a new version of his memoirs published in 1968 insists that Stalin worked “energetically” on June 22 and 23 and that he saw him at a Kremlin meeting June 24, (Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968, p. 138.)
4 Stalin’s first quasi-public appearance was a radio broadcast July 3 at the unlikely hour of 6:30 A.M. He received the British group July 12, his first meeting with nonintimates after the outbreak of war. (Cassidy, op. cit., pp. 57–66.)
5 Undoubtedly Zhdanov was severely handicapped by his absence from Moscow and Leningrad. By the time he got back from the Crimea the basic decisions probably had been made.