Michael J. Carley, professor of history at the Université de Montréal, is the author of Stalin’s Great Game, forthcoming by University of Toronto Press in April 2025. This is the third volume of his trilogy on Josef Stalin and Soviet foreign policy, which examines the origins and early conduct of the Second World War. The book provides a thorough and insightful analysis of key events during the years 1939-1941, which were crucial for how the war against Hitler would be conducted and how it would eventually end.
We are pleased to excerpt some interesting passages from this volume. Please consider supporting the work of Professor Carley by purchasing a copy.
News from the Front
[Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, had begun in the early morning hours of 22 June 1941]. The Nazi advance continued, with large operational victories. German forces were closing in on Leningrad, while a great battle for Smolensk, the western gateway to Moscow, was taking place. Smolensk fell early in the fighting, but the battle to block a further westward advance went on for about two months, until mid-September. It was then that Hitler ordered advances on the northern and southern flanks. The Wehrmacht got close to Leningrad and cut it off, but they could never take it. In the south, there was a catastrophe at Kiev, which fell in mid-September. Generals Mikhail Petrovich Kirponos and [Vasilii Ivanovich] Tupikov, remember, the latter the Soviet military attaché in Berlin, wanted to withdraw to avoid encirclement. In this, they were supported by [Georgii Konstantinovich] Zhukov, among others, but not Stalin. His learning curve cost dearly in terms of Red Army losses, in this case, 665,000 prisoners of war. Brave soldiers, Kirponos and Tupikov were killed in action.
In spite of the military catastrophes, in early September there was a first Soviet success at El’nia, a town a hundred kilometres or so southeast of Smolensk, where German forces were pushed back. It was a temporary success, but the Germans were learning that the Red Army was not French. Small units ambushed the Germans at crossroads, from wheat fields and forests. Red Army men played possum among dead comrades, attempting to kill one last fascist. Their heroism was unknown except among the invaders. Churchill would have understood it, for he had said that if the Huns invaded England, the last thing you could do was take one with you. Everywhere on the Eastern Front was fire, smoke, and the odours of death and burnt villages and fields. Dust kicked up by huge convoys of tanks, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons got into machinery and ground engines to a halt. It seeped into one’s clothes, mixing with sweat and carbon residue from weapons fired. Summer heat bore down, along with swarms of mosquitos and horse flies. “Frits” advanced but not without losses, leaving behind increasingly large cemeteries marked by birch wood crosses and dirt mounds. US intelligence picked up the news from Berlin and passed it on to the Soviet high command that Soviet resistance had upset Nazi war plans. [Reich Marshal Hermann] Goering’s relations with Hitler were reported to be cool because the former had recommended delaying war in the east until war in the west had been settled. The optimistic predictions of victory in four to six weeks had proved to be a pipe dream.
Soviet resistance was becoming evident in Britain and the United States in spite of purblind anti-communist officers who predicted the early defeat of Soviet forces. The perceptive cartoonists Low and Illingworth recognized early on that Russia was becoming a quagmire for the Wehrmacht. Low evoked the ghost of Napoleon haunting the Germans, and Illingworth had the Germans struggling in a Russian bog. Political cartoonists are usually good indicators of public opinion. Harry Hopkins [Franklin Roosevelt’s right arm] returned to Washington convinced that the Red Army would not quit the fight. [British ambassador Sir Stafford] Cripps believed that Soviet armed forces would fight on the line of the Urals if necessary. There would be no surrender.
Intelligence reports supported these views in different ways. A Swedish account in mid-August advised that conditions in the German-occupied territories were hellish. Shelter for German troops was a big problem. Destruction from the fighting or scorched-earth tactics meant housing was scarce. What remained was “over-run with bugs.” Nor was potable water readily available. Water mains were damaged, and wells poisoned. Hospitals were destroyed, medical equipment “vanished.” Physicians had also disappeared, no doubt evacuated or gone into hiding, except for a few retirees too old to be mobile. Local populations were left without medical care, and German doctors were forbidden to treat them. German wounded were sent to Denmark and Norway, where hospitals were cleared to accommodate them. “This is only beginning,” the report noted. “The consequences of a winter campaign with all its horrors must be faced.”
It was also only the beginning of the horrors for the civilian population left in the German-occupied zones to be massacred by Nazi death squads. On the Soviet side of the front, however, morale was holding. “Although the whole weight of the war now lies on Russia,” said one report, “Russian self-confidence has not been broken.” People were stoic; nichego seemed the common feeling. The population was determined, on guard. “Foreigners and unknown Russians are controlled at once… This is not a healthy place for spies, fifth columnists and parachutists.” Reservists were being mobilized. “They go to the front seriously but calmly. The women see off their husbands and sons without crying.” “Beat the fashisty” was a call to arms. This intelligence came from the Czechoslovak military mission in Moscow. There was cautious optimism but also concern that the Soviet front might be broken.
General [Noel Mason-] MacFarlane [head of the British military mission in Moscow] finally got a visit to the front at the end of August. He was favourably impressed. He visited a division, which “had had [a] hard fight on [the] preceding day.” Combined operations appeared effective. The division had captured at least four German field batteries. “Most of the dead already buried but samples of Germans left for me to see.” Morale was good. The soldiers had a “universal hatred of Fascisti… [the] term by which Germans are always known.”
Word was getting back to Moscow about German atrocities in the occupied territories. “Outrages, bullying, robbery, and murder of the population occupied by the Germans continue with the same cruelty [since the beginning of the war].” Nazi forces entering settlements abandoned by the Red Army hunted for communists, Komsomol members, and Soviet and collective farm officials, identified and betrayed by former kulaks and other “counter-revolutionary elements,” shooting them down “without mercy.” The NKVD prepared detailed reports of German atrocities and of robbery of local peasants of cattle, pigs, bread, and other food stocks, as well as the activities of local collaborators and in particular ounovtsy, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The latter claimed that the Germans had already beaten the Red Army and that the USSR no longer existed. In western Ukrainian districts, Red Army deserters were said to be preparing to fight Soviet partisans, since the deserters were considered to be traitors.
At the front, the Red Army was still taking frightful losses. There were big Nazi victories, but they did not break the Soviet will to resist. Cripps reported that Soviet sappers had blown up Dnieprostroi hydroelectric dam in the Ukraine to deny it to the enemy. It was a sign that the Soviet government had “no intention” of quitting the fight.
Still, in Moscow, impatience with British inaction was intensifying. The War Office sent instructions to MacFarlane on how to respond to Soviet allegations that Britain was not “cooperating fully” with the USSR. That was a euphemism. Shirking the fight was a more direct formulation. Say that Britain has been “fighting the whole might of Germany… You should point out that when the French… were knocked out, we lost the whole of the military equipment of the B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force], and had then to start to rebuild our military machine under the constant threat of invasion and under a heavy scale of air attack.” The Channel, “the anti-tank obstacle,” which kept the Wehrmacht out of England, “now operates the other way round.” According to the chiefs of staff, “we are doing our very utmost to draw the weight off the Russians.” That meant air attacks against Germany but no possibility of any landing on the French coast.
******
The Reality of War
If Stalin’s mood was sometimes gloomy, he had good reason for it. The war was going badly, and he bore a large responsibility for the catastrophe. Morale was reported as good, but sometimes it was not, and the wounded were starting to come back to Moscow from the front. They had stories to tell their families. One wonders whether Stalin felt any shame for leaving so many Soviet citizens to the genocidal violence of the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen. Stalin was not someone who put a high value on human life, but even he worried about Red Army losses, if only in terms of his order of battle. The war was not just about the loss of divisions, cities, munitions plants, iron and coal mines. On the ground, the Nazis launched a terror, a genocide, against civilians in the occupied territories. Word spread of Nazi atrocities; detailed reports flooded into the NKVD. Hard as nails though he was, who could say the vozhd’ was left unaffected by the accounts of Nazi massacres of citizens in the occupied territories? During the summer and autumn, mass murders of civilians began in the Ukraine. At Babi Yar, near Kiev, women and children were made to strip naked and then queue for execution at the edge of large pits. Other mass killings occurred in Kamianets-Podolsk, Lvov, Odessa, Vinnitsa, Drohobych, also in the Ukraine; in the Baltic territories; and in Minsk in Byelorussia. Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators assisted in the roundups and executions. They often abused the naked women before killing them. [Foreign Office official Victor] Cavendish-Bentinck called the collaborators “Quislings” – that is, traitors. It was best to let Soviet authorities “deal” with them, he opined. Advancing Nazi soldiers often killed villagers to the last soul, their bodies left to decompose in the summer sun among burntdown cottages. Jews were targeted, but so were other Soviet citizens, POWs, Communist Party members, Soviet officials, and Red Army officers.
The first lot of Soviet propaganda posters portrayed the Nazis as monsters, wild beasts to be slain without mercy. “Blood for blood; death for death.” Mothers were stern-faced, sending their sons off to war: “Synok, beat the fascists.” As elsewhere, Soviet propaganda recognized women for taking over the work of men in factories and fields. They made the weapons that killed the “fascists,” and they produced the grain and meat that fed the armies and the country. The propaganda was reflective of the mood in the country, which made it even more powerful. It meant that the Soviet people could accept death in battle for the protection of the nation, an intangible the Germans had not taken into account.
Soviet journalists played their part in reporting the war. One of the most important was Vasilii Semenovich Grossman, who wrote for the Red Army paper, Krasnaia Zvezda. He was often at the front and was shocked by the losses and the poor preparations made to meet the Nazi invasion. He reported on the life of common people and soldiers. “Stories about being cut off,” Grossman wrote to his journal. “Everyone who has escaped back can’t stop telling stories about being encircled, and all the stories are terrifying.” A pilot got back through enemy lines, wearing only his underwear but he still had his sidearm. Grossman witnessed the people, stalwart, stoic, brave, sometimes cowardly. A dedushka (grandfather) asked him: “Where are you retreating from?” Grossman encountered a deserter, who had turned traitor for the “fascists” for a hundred marks. “He isn’t a human being any more, all his movements, his grin, his glances, his noisy, greedy breathing – all that belongs to a creature that senses a close and imminent death.” The traitor was shot soon thereafter. It was hard to move about, or to retreat, constantly threatened by Nazi bombers. They were “like lice,” said Grossman. “The blackness of air is filled with their humming. Bombs are crashing down. Villages are burning all around.” Death was commonplace; mourning became a relic of other times, except for the orphaned children crying out for their parents killed by the fascists. Grief morphed into hatred of the invader, the “fascist fuckers”! It is hard to imagine so many lives lost, men, women, and children, and so many bodies. Entire families were wiped out without anyone to remember them. There were millions of dead. Millions. Almost everyone lost someone, family members, even Stalin, his son Iakov. Personal loss and the desire for vengeance strengthened popular resolve to defend the USSR. There was no romanticism in it.
Memories and grief over lost family members would have to wait for victory. In Moscow, Cripps could only imagine the horrors taking place at the front or in the Nazi-occupied territories. Moscow was bombed from time to time, but diplomats still slept in their beds. Dinner might occasionally be disturbed, wine glasses trembling or windows broken from nearby explosions but, after all, it was a just an inconvenience. The juxtaposition between the comforts of diplomats and the hardships of soldiers and civilians facing the Nazi menace must draw per force the reader’s attention.
******
“Step on It”
In August, in Washington, it was hot and humid, as it always was during the summer. [Soviet ambassador Konstantin Aleksandrovich] Umanskii encountered difficulties in obtaining US war materiel. Roosevelt offered his support, but his bureaucrats had minds of their own, hostile to the USSR. Umanskii met the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who had been former president [Herbert] Hoover’s Secretary of State, and got a hostile reception. [General Filipp Ivanovich] Golikov went to Washington to help Umanskii; they signed a telegram on 31 July complaining of continued obstruction. Delays were endless; it looked like stalling. The Americans said that the British had experienced similar problems at the beginning. It is not the same, Umanskii replied; time is vital. Everything was being held up by “intolerable delays,” because of opposition of the bureaucracy, especially the War and State Departments. Hopkins’s promise to set up a separate aid administration to bypass the usual authorities had not been kept. Neither the Americans nor the British showed any signs of wanting to redistribute supplies to the USSR. In short, the old anti-communist opposition – isolationists and Catholics – was sabotaging the new relationship. Roosevelt was the boss, and he needed to intervene to stop the “sabotage.”
On 1 August, Umanskii with Golikov brought their complaints directly to FDR. It was one thing for him to give orders; it was quite another to make sure they were carried out. They were still talking about two hundred fighters, but as Stalin had explained to Hopkins in Moscow the day before, they were a drop in the bucket. At one point, Golikov sought to excuse his directness by saying he was not a diplomat. FDR joked that neither was he and that furthermore he did not have time for diplomats. Golikov repeated the urgency of the situation at the front and the need for help. Roosevelt again promised his backing. He was true to his word:
I raised the point in Cabinet on Friday that near six weeks have elapsed since the Russian war began and that we have done practically nothing to get any of the materials they asked for on their actual way for delivery in Siberia. Frankly, if I were a Russian I would feel that I had been given the run around in the United States [emphasis added]. Please get out the list, and please, with my full authority, use a heavy hand – act as a burr under the saddle and get things moving!… Step on it.
Umanskii knew who had power in Washington, and a few days later he met the Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau told him that he had seen the president and had raised the question of “sabotage” by the War Department bureaucracy, among others. At the weekly meeting of the cabinet held on the same day, 1 August, Roosevelt spoke sharply on this subject, indicating that he would not tolerate sabotage.” This account was supported by Roosevelt’s own words. His message was directed at Stimson and Summer Welles, the Under Secretary of State. According to Morgenthau, the discussion went on for fortyfive minutes, and no one had any doubts about what the president wanted or expected from his subordinates. At one point, Roosevelt slammed his fist on the table and warned that he would ask for daily reports on Soviet orders to make sure that the “sabotage” stopped. Keeping up the pressure, Morgenthau advised Umanskii to bring him concrete cases of sabotage, which Morgenthau would take directly to FDR.
Umanskii was dogged and continued his lobbying. He and Golikov met Secretary of State [Cordell] Hull, who had been on a two-month sick leave. That meeting went well. Hull said that he had advised Roosevelt of the need for a fundamental reappraisal of US policy towards the Soviet Union and the adoption of a policy of assistance. The Nazi invasion changed everything. Umanskii repeated his complaint about the delays in processing Soviet orders and being sent hither and thither trying to get supplies moving. Hull promised to help, saying that Roosevelt had already intervened to remove the blockages. And the blockages were removed. The USSR had powerful allies in FDR, Hopkins, Morgenthau, and even Hull. Umanskii had two long meetings with Roosevelt during the second week of September as tensions increased between Britain and the USSR. Soviet lobbying produced results. Even Stimson was coming around. Roosevelt explained the options on obtaining credit for Soviet supplies. Roosevelt intended to introduce a bill in the Congress giving the USSR access to Lend-Lease. There were still problems. Roosevelt complained about “anti-Soviet intrigues” from religious sources, “especially the Catholics and their people in the Congress.” He had sent his personal representative to meet the pope in Rome, to try to neutralize the “pro-fascist influence, in effect, of Catholics in the USA” and to prevail upon the pope to loosen up on matters concerning the USSR.
According to the US record of conversation, “the President explained in some detail to the Ambassador the extreme difficulty of getting the necessary authority from Congress on account of the prejudice or hostility to Russia and the unpopularity of Russia among large groups in this country who exercise great political power in Congress.” FDR made special reference to religious groups and that the Soviet government should publicize “freedom of religion” in the USSR. The US record of conversation confirmed Umanskii’s report to Moscow. The Soviet government, Umanskii said, “is bitter about the credit situation.” It needs $140 million, whereas Amtorg Trading Corporation, which handled Soviet business in the United States, had only $160,000 in the bank. We will work on unblocking credits, FDR replied. Help is on the way, he wrote to Stalin in introducing Averill Harriman, who was then en route to Moscow. “I am very sure that Hitler made a profound strategic mistake when he attacked your country.”
On 28 September, [Lord] Beaverbrook [for Churchill] and Harriman arrived in Moscow to work out an agreement with the Soviet government for the supply of war materiel. The meetings were not without their difficult moments. Stalin was impatient, as well he might have been, because of continued setbacks in the fighting against the Wehrmacht, but he also bargained hard for supplies. A “first protocol” for arms deliveries was signed for the period 1 October 1941 to 1 July 1942. It marked an important step forward in consolidating trilateral relations, though it was not the end of inter-allied troubles by any means. The isolationists, the Catholics, and various anti-communists were still kicking up a fuss, but it was getting harder to do. In October, merchantmen began to leave for Arkhangelsk, with fighters, tanks, trucks, and various sorts of weapons. A hundred Hurricanes, 140 heavy tanks, 200 anti-tank rifles, and so on did not seem to be a lot to throw into the brazier of fighting on the Soviet front, but it was a definite beginning. In Washington, Roosevelt used his presidential powers to get ships moving towards the USSR. His commitment to support the Soviet war effort was unquestionable. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he instructed Hopkins. He became the godfather of the Grand Alliance.
