Stalin decided to send some signals of his own. Also on May 5, 1941, at 6:00 p.m., Timoshenko opened the graduation ceremony in the Grand Kremlin Palace’s combined Andreyev-Alexander hall (the venue for party congresses) for sixteen military academies and nine military departments in civil institutions, with some 1,500 attendees, including professors as well as defense commissariat, government, and Comintern personnel. The graduates had entered the academies in 1937 or 1938. When Timoshenko announced that Stalin would take the dais, the eruption would not die down until the despot glanced at Timoshenko, who quieted the hall. “Comrades, permit me in the name of the Soviet government and the Communist party to congratulate you on the completion of your studies and wish you success in your work,” Stalin began, going on to underscore, over the course of forty minutes, the enormous strides in the Red Army’s material base. But he criticized the academies’ curriculum. “I have an acquaintance who studied at the Artillery Academy,” Stalin noted. “I looked over his notes and discovered that a great deal of time is being spent studying cannons that were decommissioned in 1916.” This acquaintance was his elder son, Yakov, who was in the audience. “Is it like that, comrade artillerymen?” Shockingly, Lieutenant General Arkady Sivkov, head of the Artillery Academy, shouted from one of the front rows that the school’s curriculum was based on modern weaponry. “I ask that you do not interrupt me,” Stalin answered. “I know what I am saying. I read the notes of a student of your academy.”196
Stalin devoted most of his remarks to the Red Army’s technological transformation. “Now we have 300 divisions in the army,” he asserted. “Of the total number of divisions, a third are mechanized. That is not general knowledge, but you need to know it. Of the 100 [mechanized] divisions, two thirds are tank [divisions].” Someone in the hall shouted, “This is for the removal of Hitler.”197 Stalin’s numbers corresponded to the wishful thinking in MP-41 (all supposed to be in place somehow by January 1942).198 The despot went on to boast that the newest aircraft were faster than ever and that frontline tanks had armor three to four times thicker and could “break through the front.” He also addressed the questions on everyone’s mind. “Why was France defeated, and Germany victorious?” he asked. “Is Germany really invincible? . . . Why did Germany turn out to have a better army? This is a fact. . . . What explains it?” Germany, he answered, had rearmed with the latest technology, and studied the new methods of war and the lessons of history. “The German army, having been soundly defeated in 1918, studied up,” he explained. “The German army’s military doctrine advanced. The army rearmed with the newest technology. It studied the newest methods of conducting war.” By contrast, he said, the previously victorious French got complacent. Stalin added one revealing observation: “In 1870, the Germans smashed the French. Why? Because they fought on one front. The Germans suffered defeat in 1916–1917. Why? Because they fought on two fronts.”199
Stalin insisted that the current German army was not invincible. “There are no invincible armies in the world. . . . Germany started the war and initially did so under slogans of liberation from the Versailles peace. These slogans were popular, elicited support and sympathy from all those humiliated by Versailles. . . . Now the German army has . . . altered the slogan of liberation from Versailles to conquest. The German army will not be successful under a slogan of a war of conquest and annexation. . . . While Napoleon conducted a war under slogans of liberation from serfdom, he elicited support, sympathy, had allies, success. When Napoleon switched to wars of conquest, he accumulated many enemies and suffered defeat.” Stalin added: “In military terms, there is nothing special about the German army, neither in tanks, artillery, nor aviation.” Still, he concluded, “any politician, any political figure, who allows a feeling of self-satisfaction can succumb to surprise, like the catastrophe that befell France.”200
“It was a fantastic speech,” the government notetaker, an attendee, wrote in his diary. “The speech radiated confidence in our military people, in our strength, and dispersed the ‘aura’ of glory that enveloped the German army.”201
