One might surmise that Stalin’s extravagant demands vis-à-vis Hitler in November 1940 had been diabolically clever, for they managed to expose the irreconcilability of German-Soviet interests and, therefore, the de facto end of his mutually beneficial Pact with Hitler. But Stalin’s November 1940 pie-in-the-sky wish list was not a cynical ploy to flush out Hitler. Rather, the despot had instructed Molotov to negotiate a new pact. In doing so, Stalin egregiously overestimated his leverage. His exhorbitant demands for joining the Axis turned out to be his most momentous decision to date. Soviet military intelligence estimated at this time that between 76 and 79 German divisions were in former Poland, and 15 to 17 in Romania. Germany was thought to have 229 to 242 divisions in total (the real number was closer to 185).333 Even journalists were reporting that Germany was stationing its most mechanized divisions on the Soviet border, and that German construction of roads and infrastructure in the east had become furious. German military exercises for a possible war against the USSR, based on recently completed operational studies by General Friedrich von Paulus, took place in the latter part of November and early December.334
Stalin knew he had bungled the Finnish campaign, and he was meeting often with the new top commanders he had promoted in its aftermath, Timoshenko and Zhukov.335 The USSR now had an army of 4.2 million, triple its size just three years earlier, and the world’s largest. The transformation of the country’s economic base had been far reaching. Soviet steel production in 1927–28 had been around 4 million tons, and the 1932 plan target had been set at 10.4 million; the actual amount in 1932 was reported as 5.9 million, but by 1940 the regime reported steel production at 18.3 million tons—a huge leap, even allowing for exaggeration.336 In 1940, industry would produce 243 heavy, 833 medium, and 1,620 light tanks and more than 10,000 aircraft, including 4,657 fighter planes and 3,674 bombers.337 But the massive military reorganization still had a long way to go.338 On December 7, 1940, Timoshenko completed his evaluation, which proved to be a brutal indictment of Voroshilov’s leadership and a candid enumeration of the weaknesses of the massive war machine, which suffered from a severe lack of experienced commanders, low levels of training for masses of new conscripts, and a glut of now obsolete weaponry. Training was supposed to be year-round, but much army time was lost to working at collective farms during planting and harvesting, and on construction sites.339
Nor was it easy for a peasant country to continue supporting such a military. Even officially, the Soviet economic growth rate would drop precipitously, from 10–12 percent per annum in 1928–37 to a mere 2–3 percent per annum in 1937–40, and the key shortfalls occurred in strategic areas: steel, coal, chemical products, crude oil. The terror had exacerbated skilled labor turnover and managerial dearth, while often paralyzing survivors.340 Mass arrests for “wrecking” struck the highest-priority military factories, too.341 Military budgets were bloated. Whereas, in 1938, the military had consumed 23.2 billion rubles, or 18.7 percent of the 124 billion in state outlays, in 1940, from a total budget of 174.4 billion rubles, the military would get 56.8 billion, or 32.6 percent.342 Against GDP, Soviet military spending would rise in 1940 to probably 17 percent (as compared with 2 percent in 1928 and 5 percent in 1913).343 The Soviet regime’s ability to spend that quantity of money efficiently, or indeed to spend it all, was another matter.344 Moreover, Nazi Germany had been spending 15 percent of a larger national income on its military already since 1937, and that number had grown.345 Khrushchev, who was in Moscow when Molotov returned from Berlin, would remark, “In Stalin’s face and in his manner, one could sense agitation and, I would add, fear.”346
CHAPTER 14FEAR
It would be incorrect to say that [Stalin] underestimated him. He saw that Hitler had organized Germany in a short period of time. There had been a huge [German] Communist party and it had disappeared, wiped out!
VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV1
Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture.
ADOLF HITLER, Table Talk,
