From time immemorial, the month of March in the eastern Slavic lands brought the spring thaw, deep mud, and impassable roads, an improbable moment for a military invasion. Still, HQ took the report seriously. On the document, Major General Mikhail Panfilov, deputy head of military intelligence, wrote, “It is necessary to clarify who are the highly informed military circles. To whom, concretely, was the directive issued.” On January 4, 1941, “Meteor” reported from Berlin that “‘Aryan’ confirmed that he obtained this information from a military man known to him, and that this was based not on rumor, but on a special directive of Hitler, which is deeply secret and about which very few people know.” “Aryan” had further stipulated that the head of the eastern department of the German foreign ministry had told him that Molotov’s visit to Berlin could be compared with Polish foreign minister Beck’s—which had been followed by a German invasion. “Aryan” added that “preparations for an offensive against the USSR had begun much earlier, but they had been halted because the Germans had miscalculated the resistance of England. The Germans had reckoned on bringing England to its knees in spring and freeing their hands in the East.” He concluded that “Hitler thinks the condition of the Red Army precisely now is so low that in spring he shall have undoubted success.”30
“Aryan”’s report constituted a stunning achievement—the German officer corps did not yet know of Barbarossa.31 On the evening of January 7, 1941, Golikov summoned Major General Vasily Tupikov to Znamenka, 19, the three-story Chocolate House that served as military intelligence HQ. An offspring of deep Russia (Kursk province) and a graduate of the Frunze Military Academy, Tupikov (b. 1901) was the chief of staff in the Kharkov military district, though he had served abroad as a military attaché (Estonia, 1935–37). He was now appointed military attaché in Berlin, code-named “Arnold,” and tasked with ascertaining the precise location of German forces across multiple theaters. He quickly apprehended that “the sources we have in Germany for the most part do not have serious opportunities to get hold of documentary evidence regarding the armed forces of Germany.”32 Neither “Aryan” nor other Soviet spies secured a physical copy of Barbarossa. No foreign intelligence service did.33
WAR GAMES
Following its military conference, the Red Army conducted two war games on charts at general staff headquarters. The Pact had scrambled Soviet war planning. Germany still possessed the greatest destructive potential, and remained the focus of attention, but Poland’s disappearance had rendered the entire GP series of plans moot.34 Annexation of the Baltic states altered the calculation for the northwest as well. Romania remained a likely partner of Germany, to which had been added Finland, Hungary, and Slovakia. There was, however, very considerable internal dispute about whether the principal enemy thrust would come north of the impassable Pripet Marshes, toward Minsk, Smolensk, and Moscow on the central axis and Leningrad on the northernmost axis, or south of the Pripet, toward Kiev and the Caucasus. The January 1941 exercises incorporated both possibilities.35
Both iterations of the games glossed over the initial period of war. (Against neither Japan at the Halha River nor Finland had the initial phase been decisive.) The games assumed, in line with Soviet military doctrine, that the enemy (“blues”) would initiate hostilities and would not be able to penetrate more than a few score miles before being driven back to prewar frontiers by the Soviet side (“reds”), setting the stage for the onset of the games, which notionally began on the fifteenth day of hostilities. No battles in the games took place on Soviet soil. Almost all the toponyms in the war games documents were Polish and Prussian settlements, rivers, hills. In the first game (January 2–6), Zhukov commanded the blues, attacking north of the Pripet. The reds, led by Pavlov, launched a counterattack into East Prussia, reaching the Neman and Narew rivers, but Zhukov’s blues in East Prussia outmaneuvered Pavlov’s attempted encirclement and won. The second game (January 8–11) shifted the fighting south of the Pripet into former southern Poland and Silesia, and this time Zhukov commanded the reds and Pavlov the blues. This version pivoted on initial blue penetration in the direction of Lvov and Ternopol and a red reversal, followed by Zhukov’s deep operation to punch through and advance beyond the Carpathian passes toward Kraków and Budapest. Pavlov failed to block Zhukov’s thrust, but the game was ended before the outcome had been fully decided.36
