Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

The December 1940 military conference took place at the defense commissariat’s new building, completed two years earlier, which jumbled modernist, neoclassical, and kitsch motifs, including stylized tank bas-reliefs and a central tower topped by a red star. Stalin did not attend. Voroshilov was absent as well. Timoshenko, presiding over his first such meeting as defense commissar, opened with a greeting to the 270 attendees. Next came chief of staff Meretskov’s report, which gently took up Red Army shortcomings but reveled in how the imperialists were fighting a war among themselves, and how the USSR had managed to steer clear even as it had been able to “march westward” into new territories. Zhukov, commander of the Kiev military district, got the spotlight for a report accentuating the USSR’s commitment to offense. He argued for combining mechanized forces, close air support, and tactical surprise and flanking maneuvers to smash through an enemy’s frontline defenses and create havoc in its rear—the old concept of deep operations, a stirring of Tukhachevsky’s ashes.²²

Zhukov’s hymn to spirited offense glossed over the critical period right after the launch of the enemy attack. Precisely the period of the onset of hostilities had been analyzed in a penetrating book by the Soviet theorist Georgy Isserson about Spain’s civil war and Germany’s Polish campaign, New Forms of Combat (1940), which argued that enemy forces mobilized and deployed secretly would conduct operations far exceeding mere frontier skirmishes or spoiling attacks, and that these troops would not be vulnerable to a counteroffensive.²³ At the conference, General Pyotr Klenov, commander of the Baltic military district, mentioned having read Isserson’s book. “It offers hasty conclusions based upon the war between the Germans and Poland to the effect that there will be no start period for a war, that war today is decided simply—an invasion by readied forces, as was done by the Germans in Poland, deploying a million and a half men,” Klenov stated. He dismissed Poland as not analogous to the USSR, calling it a weak country that, moreover, had lost its vigilance, so that it had “absolutely no foreign intelligence as the Germans were undertaking a many-month concentration of forces.”

Klenov omitted mention of the German campaign in France. Zhukov did acknowledge Germany’s blitz in the west, but he characterized France as a weak state as well, whose experience was therefore supposedly inapplicable to the USSR.²⁴ Isserson excepted, the Soviets spent less time studying Germany’s new style of warfare than they did Anglo-American theories about wars of attrition, in which the USSR feared becoming bogged down.²⁵

The deputy general inspector of the air force, Major General Timofei Khryunkin, offered cautionary remarks from his experiences in the trenches of the Soviet-Polish campaign. He noted that air support had arrived too late, when the ground forces had already finished their task (or failed to do so). “We have the experience of the German command in coordinating with armored units,” he explained. “I studied it, and it is as follows: After armored units break through to the rear, 70–80 km, and perhaps 100 km, aviation gets its orders not from an aerodrome, but in the air; that is, the commander who directs the tank units that broke through and the aviation commander specify the target to air power by radio. Aviation the whole time is above its troops, and, through radio communication, it destroys pockets of resistance in front of the tanks.” Khryunkin added that radio “is the most important thing.” Barely thirty years old, not even supposed to have been present (his invited superior could not, or chose not to, attend), Khryunkin, in his incisive remarks—among the briefest of anyone—also managed to underscore the importance of having limited types of planes for efficiency (spare parts, training), which was what the Germans did, as opposed to the French, and the need for higher-caliber guns on Soviet aircraft in order to take out enemy tanks.²⁶