Stalin полностью

Back in Moscow, at a follow-up military conference on the Winter War (April 14–17), Stalin scapegoated his head of military intelligence, Proskurov.²⁵⁹ In the war’s run-up, Soviet military intelligence had produced a photo-and-sketch album of the Mannerheim Line (possibly based on maps delivered by the Germans after the 1939 Pact signing). This album lay on Meretskov’s desk.²⁶⁰ True, there had been subsequent modernization of the defense belt. But Meretskov misunderstood or ignored the implications of the fortifications for his battle plan.²⁶¹ That said, extreme hypersecrecy seems to have kept some centrally held intelligence from being shared with the Leningrad military district, to which Stalin had handed the war effort.²⁶² More broadly, one young military intelligence officer on the front, who later defected, observed, plausibly, that “the maps of Finland supplied to us by military intelligence were extremely poor, an indication of sloppy work. . . . Ironically, we soon found that the maps of that part of the Soviet Union were just as poor.”²⁶³ Proskurov, in the discussion at the military conference, pushed back against the criticisms leveled by Stalin, Mekhlis, and Meretskov, whose own head was on the line.²⁶⁴ Meretskov complained that the army command had no access to foreign newspapers, with their wealth of information about the course of military matters. “An intolerable situation,” Stalin interjected. Proskurov pointed out that information from foreign newspapers was translated into Russian, just not circulated. “Why?” Stalin asked. Proskurov: “It contains slander against the Red Army.”²⁶⁵

Proskurov, a hero aviator, took the fall (and, later, a bullet to the neck).²⁶⁶ Stalin did criticize himself, too, albeit indirectly. “We expected to bag an easy win,” he stated (April 17, 1940). “We were terribly spoiled by the Polish campaign.”²⁶⁷ It was the royal “we.” His main theme was that the Russian civil war “had not been a real war, because there was no artillery, aviation, tanks, and mortars used.” One more heroic cavalry charge was not going to drive off tanks and artillery. “What hindered our commanding staff from conducting the Finnish war in a new way—not by the civil war style, but in a new way?” Stalin asked rhetorically. “What hindered us, in my view, was a cult of the traditions and experience of the civil war. How did we evaluate commanders: ‘Did you take part in the civil war?’ ‘No, you did not take part—then get lost.’ ‘That one, did he take part?’ ‘He took part—let’s appoint him.’” Stalin urged everyone—really, himself—“to renounce the cult of the civil war, which only reinforces our backwardness.”²⁶⁸

Stalin’s closest civil war crony, Voroshilov, suffered guilt, anger, and anguish over the regime’s massacre of so many innocent officers in the Red Army and his complicity therein. One night at the Near Dacha, during the Finnish events, the despot and his defense commissar went at it. They all must have been even drunker than usual. Stalin “was in a white-hot rage and berated Voroshilov severely,” Khrushchev recalled. “He got irate, jumped up, and [verbally] went after Voroshilov. Voroshilov also blew up, got red in the face, rose, and hurled Stalin’s accusation back in his face. ‘You’re to blame in this! You annihilated the military cadres.’” True enough, although Voroshilov had signed 185 extant execution lists—fourth behind Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich. After Stalin answered him in kind, “Voroshilov picked up a platter with a roast suckling pig on it and smashed it on the table.”²⁶⁹ That pig, in a way, was plucky little Finland—the “pig rooting around in the Soviet garden,” in the dismissive phrase used on the eve of the war—but now it was also Voroshilov’s military career and, by association, Stalin’s military dilettantism.

LEARNING

With its strong incentives for lying and an absence of institutionalized consultation or corrective mechanisms, despotism is particularly prone to strategic blunders, and yet despotic systems—and despots—can learn. The Winter War launched Stalin’s belated military reeducation, which was a long time coming.²⁷⁰ Prior to the Finnish experience, the Spanish civil war had delivered valuable firsthand experience in sabotage operations behind enemy lines, had battle-tested Soviet weapons systems, and had enabled study of Nazi Germany’s arsenal. The initiative to collect this valuable information was taken by Soviet military men whom Stalin then mostly murdered, but the data and analyses remained for their successors. Case studies of individual battles in Spain became available for study at Soviet military schools, in order to assimilate the tactical and operational lessons for artillery, tanks, airplanes, navy, and combined operations, much of which was published in the army newspaper, Red Star, for the broadest possible audience. Voroshilov and his aides selected key material on Spain to present to Stalin.²⁷¹