The Supreme Command or Stavka — the term used under Nicholas II in the First World War — had also been established on 23 June. Stalin was initially disinclined to become its formal head. He was not eager to identify himself as leader of a war effort which was in a disastrous condition. So it was Timoshenko who as Chairman led a Stavka including Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Budënny, Zhukov and Kuznetsov. The others also tried to persuade Stalin to permit his designation as Supreme Commander. He refused even though in practice he acted as if he had accepted the post. The whole composition of Stavka was shaped by him,15 and it was noticeable that he insisted that leading politicians should belong to this military body. Not only Molotov but also Voroshilov and Budënny were basically communist party figures who lacked the professional expertise to run the contemporary machinery of war. Timoshenko, Zhukov and Kuznetsov were therefore outnumbered. Stalin would allow no great decision to be taken without the participation of the politicians, despite his own gross blunders of the past few days. He called generals to his office, made his enquiries about the situation to the west of Moscow and gave his instructions. About his supremacy there was no doubt.
He drove himself and others at the maximum pace until the early hours of 29 June, when Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria were the last to leave him. (V.N. Merkulov, who had headed the state security organisation for several months, had departed some minutes before.)16 At that point he started to behave mysteriously. His visit to the Ministry of Defence two days earlier had been a difficult one. When Timoshenko and Zhukov showed him the operational maps, he was shocked by the extent of the disaster for the Red Army. Having surmounted his bewilderment about Operation Barbarossa on 21 June, he suffered a relapse. Fellow members of the Politburo, Sovnarkom and Stavka had no idea what had happened to him. When calls were put through to the Blizhnyaya dacha, his chief aide Poskrëbyshev claimed not to know where he was. Yet he was indeed skulking at that dacha. Commanders and politicians were left to get on with the war with Germany as best they could. No one outside Blizhnyaya knew whether he was alive or dead.
The German advance quickened across the Soviet borderlands. Trained by Stalin to accept his whims, his military and political subordinates tried to run their institutions as if nothing strange was occurring. But they worried about doing anything without clearing it with him beforehand. The situation was changing by the hour. Stalin’s sanction had been essential for years and Stavka needed his presence at the centre of things. What was he doing? One possibility was that his morale had fallen so low that he felt incapable of continuing at his post. He had much reason to feel bad about his recent performance. Another possibility is that he was seeking to impress upon his subordinates that, however poorly he had performed, he remained the irreplaceable Leader. Stalin was an avid reader of books on Ivan the Terrible and to some extent identified himself with him. Tsar Ivan had once abandoned the Kremlin and withdrawn to a monastery; his purpose had been to induce boyars and bishops to appreciate the fundamental need for him to go on ruling. After some days a delegation came out to the Tsar to plead with him to return to the Kremlin. Perhaps Stalin was contriving a similar situation.
The truth will never be known since Stalin never spoke of the episode. His subordinates eventually plucked up courage to find out what was going on. Nikolai Voznesenski, the rising star in state planning bodies, was visiting Mikoyan when a call came through from Molotov for them to join him. Malenkov, Voroshilov and Beria were already with Molotov, and Beria was proposing the creation of a State Committee of Defence. Mikoyan and Voznesenski agreed. This State Committee of Defence was envisaged as supplanting the authority of both party and government and as being headed by Stalin. It was the first great initiative for years that any of them had taken without seeking his prior sanction.17
