Stalin полностью

Great powers usually can expect to have considerable room to recover from even the most egregious mistakes, but that room, in the late 1930s and into 1940, had vastly narrowed. Thanks to the Finnish resistance, the 105-day Winter War proved even more costly to Stalin than to the Finns. The despot did obtain a more secure border for Leningrad, as well as security for the ocean port Murmansk, while the Red Army, including its command, did get valuable, albeit painful, combat experience.²³⁶ Still, the Soviets lost an astonishing 131,476 dead and missing; at least 264,908 more were wounded or fell to illness, including the frostbitten, who lost fingers, toes, ears. Total Soviet losses neared 400,000 casualties, out of perhaps 1 million men mobilized—almost 4,000 casualties per day.²³⁷ (Later, Stalingrad would produce around 3,300 per day.) Another 5,486 Red Army troops were captured, most of whom, upon returning home, would be sent to the Gulag for the crime of falling into enemy hands. Of course, the giant scale of losses was kept secret, but during a discussion of the war’s lessons, one Soviet general nonetheless snapped, “We have won enough ground to bury our dead.”²³⁸

The shocking Red Army failures of December 1939 overshadowed not just the impressive corrections of February 1940, but even the fact that, in the end, the Soviets had won the war decisively and exceeded their objectives.²³⁹ Foreign intelligence services had been knocking themselves out trying to gauge the strength of the gigantic Red Army, and now they believed they had the answer: it was impotent. They overlooked the special circumstances of roadless, marshy terrain and deep-winter combat, just as Stalin and his commanders had overlooked them at the outset. The German general staff wrote on New Year’s Eve 1939–40 that the Red Army was “in quantity a gigantic military instrument,” but “the Russian ‘mass’ is no match for an army with modern equipment and superior leadership.”²⁴⁰ Even after the Soviets had turned the tide, the Germans, as well as the British and the French, remained confirmed in their prejudice that the Soviet Union was a colossus of clay. On March 31, 1940, Hitler, in a closed speech in the Chancellery to his commanders, called the USSR a “tenacious adversary” but went on to say that “the Russian is inferior,” and the Soviet army “without leadership,” undermined by Jewish-Bolshevik lies.²⁴¹

Soviet military doctrine, in its most sophisticated versions, had long stressed aggressive counterattack, decentralized command, and organizational flexibility, but within such a rigidly hierarchical political despotism, only the first principle was realized in practice. In Finland, shocking chaos in the rear services had severely handicapped military operations, and hypercentralization and the inexperience of commanders meant they could not adapt or take initiative on the battlefield. Both the horrific casualty count and the immense expenditure of ordnance testified to the depth of the problems. But Timoshenko had managed to improve both coordination and flexibility, implementing combined attacks of air and armor, as well as continuous vertical and horizontal communications with superiors and neighboring staffs and services. At the same time, Stalin, relying on Mekhlis, had political indoctrination recalibrated to emphasize the discipline and traditions of the Imperial Russian Army. From late 1939 into 1940, the Soviet press published articles on the military genius of Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century generalissimo, as well as Great Russian nationalism, and transformed Finland into a “patriotic war.”²⁴²

The contribution of that notable shift, in the case of Finland, remains hard to gauge. The conscript soldiers—peasants from collectivized villages or workers from factory barracks—on their first trips abroad, with the mission of “liberating” the exploited Finnish people from “White Finns,” encountered the well-built, well-equipped homes of ordinary Finnish people. The Soviet lads, and especially their commanders, as in Poland in 1939, madly looted sewing machines, gramophones, bicycles, kitchen utensils, silk stockings, women’s dresses, shoes. That said, despite record-breaking frosts, horribly inadequate supplies, and incompetent commanders, Red Army morale had not cracked. Soviet conscripts and reservists often fought on even after having been encircled, entrenching their tanks as makeshift pillboxes.²⁴³ True, NKVD detachments blocked retreat, and even then there were desertions. But the Soviet troops’ failure to crush the Finns had aroused a widespread desire to defend their honor. On the front lines, Soviet colonels and captains, themselves conscripts, knew the Red Army could fight.