“There is still much that we do not know, beginning with Stalin’s real intentions on the eve of war.”

By Sean McMeekin

IN 1990, with the Cold War winding down and long-buried secrets of Soviet Russian history starting to emerge from the deep freeze, the Soviet defector Vladimir Rezun, writing as “Viktor Suvorov,” published a sensational study claiming that Stalin had planned for an offensive war in 1941, only to be pre-empted by Hitler’s own Operation Barbarossa.

Translated into English as Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, Rezun’s bombshell book ignited a furious debate among World War II scholars both inside and outside Russia – a debate Suvorov is generally considered to have lost badly, at least in western Europe and the United States, where critical “rebuttals” by historians such as David Glantz’s Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (1998) and Gabriel Gorodetsky’s Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (1999) are believed to have settled the matter definitively.

Unbeknownst to many western historians and history buffs who read only English, in Russia, Germany and the eastern European countries caught in the crossfire between Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies, serious debate about the “Suvorov thesis” and the Soviet military posture in 1941 has continued and deepened.

While few scholars accept Suvorov’s claims about Stalin’s offensive war plans in their entirety, research in the archives of the former Soviet Union has turned up thousands of intriguing documents that greatly enhance our understanding – while gravely undermining the once-orthodox view of Operation Barbarossa as a context-free bolt from the blue. Historians who still write about the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. in 1941 as an unprovoked surprise attack which caught Stalin’s “peace-loving” empire unprepared and unaware, sleepwalking into disaster, simply do not know what they are talking about.

Dozens of serious studies inspired by Suvorov’s work have appeared since 1990. Nearly every one of them was better-documented than Suvorov’s.

Among the most important of these works are a two-volume document collection edited by L.E. Reshin et al, published in Moscow in 1998 as 1941 God. Dokumenty, Mikhail Mel’tyukhov’s 2000 study Upushchennyi Shans Stalina or “Stalin’s Missed Opportunity,” and a long series of works by Mark Solonin produced between 2004 and 2011. Of these, only Solonin’s are available to English-language readers, via his website solonin.org, and only those sections which he has been able to translate. English language publishers have shown no interest in translating these works, nor even in important document collections such as 1941 God. Dokumenty, which can scarcely be found outside Russia. A WorldCat.org search shows only two copies in the entire United States, one at Stanford and one at the Library of Congress.

Owing to lack of English translations and lack of curiosity – stemming in part from the demolition job conducted by Gorodetsky and Glantz against Suvorov and anyone who dares take seriously the questions he raised – most American and British students of history have little idea how much we have learned since 1990 about the Soviet military posture in 1941. Revelations include Stalin’s orders to build the vast majority of new Soviet airfields, tank parks and petrol stations, roads and railroads in frontier districts abutting Hitler’s Reich in 1941, to his ever-more-intensive deployment of new warplanes and armor in those districts.

No less important was the gargantuan scale of Soviet military procurement and production prior to the German invasion, which ramped up to mind-boggling levels in the first six months of 1941, not only in T-34 and heavy KV tanks but in light-amphibious tanks, airborne brigades.

Then there was massive Soviet capital investment in light bombers such as the Su-2, Pe-2 and Il-2 “Sturmovik,” all designed to provide close-air support for advancing armies in essentially uncontested air – Stalin’s answers to the German Ju-87 “Stuka” dive bomber and the Japanese Nakajima B-5N used at Pearl Harbor.

Only those intrepid western military history buffs who have discovered Solonin’s website know about the war games for an invasion of Hitler’s Reich conducted by the Soviet general staff in January 1941, or the updated Soviet war plans of March and especially May 15, 1941, both of which emphasized a “powerful strike in the direction of Lublin” carried out from western Ukraine and designed to cut the German Reich off from her oil supplies in Romania and critical resources in the Balkans.

The May 15 war plan spoke for the first time of a “sudden blow,” which would “deprive the German command of all initiative, upredit’ protivnika [forestall the adversary] and attack the German army when it is still in the deployment stage and has no time to organize the distribution of forces at the front.”

So, is the debate about the Soviet military posture in June 1941, at least among those acquainted with the new Russian archival revelations, now resolved in Suvorov’s favor? Hardly. Despite the vast increase in our knowledge of Soviet military procurement, deployment, and planning born of three decades of new research, there is still much that we do not know, beginning with Stalin’s real intentions on the eve of war.

We do know that, after Stalin made an important (but then-secret) speech to military academy graduates in the Kremlin on May 5, 1941 outlining a change to offensive doctrine, Communist Party propagandists were ordered to step up “Bolshevik indoctrination of the personnel of the Red Army…in the spirit of burning patriotism, revolutionary decisiveness, and constant readiness to go over to a crushing offensive against the enemy.”

We know about the call-up of Red Army reserves in June 1941, about the concentration of Soviet armies on the western frontier, about orders to the western district command between June 12 and 15, 1941 to move “remote divisions” to the border, moving “only at night.”

We know about meetings Stalin convened with his military advisers on May 24, June 3, 6, 7, and 9, 1941, including the names of the principals attending; we do not know exactly what was said.

Whatever Stalin was planning, a close examination of the “Special Files” of the Soviet Politburo in the days prior to Barbarossa shows that his armies were not yet ready to “forestall the adversary” and conduct the “powerful strike in the direction of Lublin,” which was at the heart of the Soviet war plans of March and May 1941. Instead, there is a sense of creeping dread as it dawns on Stalin’s generals that the Germans had the jump on them, and a flurry of desperate directives are dispatched ordering maskirovka – the camouflaging of Soviet airbases and tank parks constructed dangerously close to the German frontier, including the construction of dummy warplanes and tanks, with target dates of July 5 and 15 – several weeks too late.

Although far from ready, Stalin and his generals were hardly asleep at the wheel as the German Wehrmacht crashed its brutal way into the U.S.S.R. on June 22, 1941. Later that day Stalin actually ordered the Red Army to counter-attack on the southwestern front according to the latest Soviet war plan – basically to carry out the “powerful strike in the direction of Lublin” his generals had intensively war-gamed earlier that year. But no war plan survives contact with the enemy, and the Soviet plan for a crushing counter-offensive towards Lublin was rendered superfluous by the furious speed of the German attack.

The early verdict on Stalin’s deployment of his best armor and warplanes near the Reich frontier – and his erasing of the buffer states between the U.S.S.R. and Germany between 1939 and 1941 – was damning.  It was this lopsidedly offensive Soviet military posture, not Stalin’s allegedly misplaced trust in Hitler or his refusal to heed warnings about Barbarossa, which explained the Russian debacle in the frontier battles. This much we now know. Even so, the debate about Stalin’s strategy in 1941 remains unsettled. Only Stalin could have known for certain what his plans were before Hitler upset them.

Sean McMeekin is the author of Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. He is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College. The award-winning author of several books, including The Russian Revolution, July 1914, and The Ottoman Endgame, he lives in Clermont, New York.