Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

Around midnight, Mikhail Kirponos, commander of the Kiev military district, called the defense commissariat on the high-frequency phone from his field HQ at Ternopol to report that another German had forded a river and crossed the border near Sokal (Ukraine) and said that Wehrmacht soldiers had taken up their firing positions, with tanks at their start lines. Zhukov called the Near Dacha to inform Stalin.⁸⁴ A little after midnight, a train carrying Soviet oil, manganese, and grain crossed the frontier into Greater Germany, its passage observed by waiting German divisions.⁸⁵ At around 1:00 a.m., Timoshenko called Pavlov on the high-frequency phone, evidently with word of Directive No. 1 to assume full combat readiness, and a caution not to succumb to provocation.⁸⁶

Some twelve hours earlier, precisely at 13:00 hours, Germany’s high command had transmitted the password for war, “Dortmund.” That afternoon, Hitler had received Admiral Raeder, Generals Keitel and Jodl, and Albert Speer, then, having already written a few days before to Romania’s Antonescu, who was responsible for Germany’s critical southern flank in the invasion, he composed explanatory letters for Italy’s Mussolini, Finland’s Ryti, and Hungary’s Horthy.⁸⁷ Hitler’s adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, noticed that he was “increasingly nervous and restless. The Führer talked a lot, walked up and down; he seemed impatient, waiting for something.” In his residence in the Old Reich Chancellery, Hitler did not sleep for the second straight night. He took a meal in the dining room. He listened to Les Préludes, the symphonic poem by Franz Liszt. He phoned to summon Goebbels, who had just finished rewatching Gone with the Wind. The two walked up and down Hitler’s drawing room for quite a while, finalizing the timing and content of the Führer’s war proclamation for the next day, about the “salvation of Europe” and the intolerable danger of waiting any longer. Goebbels left at 2:30 a.m., returning to the propaganda ministry, where staff had been told to await him. “Everyone was absolutely astonished,” he wrote, “even though most had guessed half of what was going on, and some all of it.”⁸⁸

Timoshenko’s ciphered radiograms of Directive No. 1 to military districts about advancing to full combat readiness while still avoiding provocations began to go out in the early hours of June 22. Most intended recipients in frontline positions failed to get word. One of Pavlov’s subordinates, Major General A. A. Korobkov, of the Fourth Army, who that evening had watched a performance of Johann Strauss II’s operetta The Gypsy Baron at Korbin, site of his field HQ, was left in the dark: his power and communications lines had been cut. Wehrmacht advance units, many in Red Army uniforms, had already crossed the border and sabotaged Soviet communications.⁸⁹ “The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room,” Hitler had told one of his private secretaries. “One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.”⁹⁰

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STALIN’S REGIME HAD REPRODUCED a deep-set pattern in Russian history—a country that considered itself a providential power with a special mission in the world, but that substantially lagged the other great powers to the west, a circumstance that time and again induced Russian rulers to turn to the state for a forced modernization to overcome or at least manage the power asymmetry. This urgent quest for a strong state had culminated, once more, in personal rule. Under Stalin’s regime, both the apocalyptic bloodshed and the state’s capacity to summon resources and popular involvement intensified, a consequence of the violent mass era that slightly predated but was blown open by the First World War, the heady promises of Marxism-Leninism, and Stalin’s personal qualities. His despotic power derived not just from his control over the formidable levers of Leninist dictatorship, which he built, but from the ideology, which he shaped. His regime proved able to define the terms of public thought and individual identity, and he proved able to personify passions and dreams, to realize and represent a socialist modernity and Soviet might. With single-sentence telegrams or brief phone calls, he could spur the clunky Soviet party-state machinery into action, invoking discipline and intimidation, to be sure, but also emotionally galvanizing young functionaries who felt close personal ties to him, and millions more who would never come close to meeting him in person. Stalin was a student of historical forces, and of people, and his rule enabled those who came from nothing to feel world historically significant.