Yet none of this proves that Stalin genuinely contemplated his own offensive in the immediate future. A military graduation ceremony in the Europe and Asia of mid-1941 was hardly an occasion for a political leader to moderate the combat mentality of future officers. They needed to be readied for war; they also had to see that they had a political leadership willing to wage war. Moreover, it would have been remiss of Stalin to fail to instruct Zhukov and Timoshenko to plan for an offensive. All armies need to undertake multiple planning and the Red Army was no exception. Stalin wished to be able to deal with every possible contingency. He was realistic about the need for at least a couple of years before his forces could take on the Germans. He did not exclude the possibility of attacking Germany if and when the Wehrmacht seemed weak. The Marxist–Leninist tradition in foreign policy prescribed that the USSR should exploit the political, economic and military rivalries among capitalist powers. This was how states of all kinds had behaved since time immemorial. If Germany looked weak, the Soviet mountain eagle would swoop down and take its prey.
Consequently Stalin’s priority in May and June 1941 was to avoid giving Hitler a reason to start a war. The General Staff had yet to complete a definitive comprehensive plan for defence.21 Diplomatic and economic appeasement remained foremost in Stalin’s mind. The analyses of military professionals in Berlin and Moscow had pinpointed the importance of beginning such hostilities in early summer in order to shatter the USSR’s defences before the onset of winter; and Stalin was hoping that all this was correct. Hitler had been prevented from invading the Soviet Union at the appropriate time because of trouble in Yugoslavia since the spring. But the secret decision had already been taken in Berlin: Hitler was going to attack as soon as he had amassed sufficient forces in German-occupied Poland. His confidence rested on ignorance of Soviet military capacity. Stalin’s secretiveness meant that the Germans had been kept in the dark about the USSR’s true strength. By the time such information started to reach Berlin, it was too late to persuade Hitler to call off the invasion.22
Stalin hoped against hope that his diplomatic manoeuvres were paying off as midsummer approached. He ignored the rising mountain of information that Hitler was up to no good on his borders. Zhukov was becoming frantic. In mid-June he made one of his recurrent attempts to snap Stalin out of his policy of appeasement. Stalin angrily pounced on him: ‘What are you up to? Have you come here to scare us with the idea of war or is it that you really want a war? Haven’t you got enough medals and titles?’23 This was a punch below the belt that made Zhukov lose his temper even with Stalin. But the moment passed and the appeasement policy was maintained. Thus the conditions for the greatest military disaster of the twentieth century were unwittingly prepared by the supremely confident Leader in the Kremlin.
In the hour before dawn on 22 June 1941 the German armed forces started Operation Barbarossa. There was no warning from Hitler; this was a classic Blitzkrieg and Stalin was in bed at the time in his Blizhnyaya dacha. In the diplomatic crisis of recent weeks he had judged that intelligence sources predicting a German invasion were just a provocation. Timoshenko as People’s Commissar of Defence and Zhukov as Chief of the General Staff thought him mistaken and had stayed up on duty all that last night. At 3.30 a.m. they received reports of heavy shelling along the Soviet–German frontier. They knew this for what it was: the beginning of war. Timoshenko ordered Zhukov to call Blizhnyaya by telephone. Zhukov obediently asked a sleepy Vlasik, the chief of Stalin’s bodyguard, to rouse the Leader.1
