Soviet embassies and intelligence stations adhered rigidly to orders from Molotov and Beria to report nothing which suggested the inevitability of war. On 24 May, when the Finnish ambassador in Istanbul gave his Soviet counterpart details of German formations deployed on the Soviet border, Stalin’s man asked contemptuously whether the Finn had counted the soldiers himself. A week later, Timoshenko and Zhukov were summoned to the Kremlin, and arrived expecting orders to put Soviet defences on full alert. Instead they were handed Stalin’s acceptance of a transparently fraudulent request from Berlin that squads of Germans should be allowed to roam inside Russia’s border in search of 1914–18 war dead. The generals were obliged to fume in impotence while Hitler’s scouts surveyed their chosen battlefields, protected by spades and Khozyain’s orders.
The British government’s clumsy handling of the 10 May parachute descent on Scotland by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess converted what should have been a propaganda disaster for Hitler into a major embarrassment for his enemy. It persuaded Stalin that both the Germans and the British were toying with him, while preparing to make a separate peace with each other. Lord Beaverbrook, a supreme mischief-maker whose interventions were all the more damaging because he was a known intimate of Churchill, told Maisky in London, ‘Of course Hess is an emissary of Hitler.’ The press lord claimed, rightly enough, that Hess sought to promote a common front against Bolshevik barbarism. Maisky deduced that Britain’s future conduct depended not – as he had hitherto supposed – on Churchillian resolution, but instead on the acceptability of the German terms he assumed Hess to have brought with him from Hitler.
In the late spring of 1941 Stalin daily expected to receive details of an Anglo–German compromise peace, followed by a demand from Berlin that Russia should join the Axis and accelerate its economic support for Germany. As late as October 1942 Stalin wrote to Maisky: ‘All of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill is aiming at the defeat of the USSR, in order then to come to terms with the Germany of Hitler or Bruning at the expense of our country.’ With breathtaking hypocrisy, he chose to forget that in the mood of panic that overtook the Kremlin after ‘Barbarossa’ began, the NKVD’s Pavel Sudoplatov had been ordered to pass to the Bulgarian ambassador, for forwarding to Berlin, a secret Kremlin message inviting a compromise Russo–German peace. Only because Hitler was uninterested did that approach go nowhere. At an October 1944 dinner in the Kremlin Stalin could still offer a mocking but at least semi-serious toast to ‘the British intelligence service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England’.
In June 1941 the NKVD dragged from a cell in the Lubyanka Captain Aleksandr Nelidov, an erstwhile Abwehr man in Warsaw, to invite his opinion of Hess’s flight to Britain. The old soldier responded immediately: ‘This means war, without any doubt. Hess is recruiting England as an ally against the USSR …’ Nelidov, born in 1893, was a former tsarist gunner officer who had roamed Turkey, France and Germany following the White Army’s defeat in Russia’s civil war. He struck up friendships in the German general staff, and attended several of their 1930s war games. Early in 1939 he was foolish enough to accept from Canaris an assignment to Warsaw, where he was promptly seized by the Poles. When the Russians overran eastern Poland and found him languishing in Lvov prison, as a known Nazi intelligence agent he was dispatched to Moscow.
By the time Zoya Rybkina, the tall, strikingly attractive senior operations officer of the German section of the NKVD, was handed his file in mid-1940, Nelidov was a broken man. Rybkina wrote contemptuously in her 1998 memoirs: ‘His behaviour was servile … I felt amused by him but also ashamed of him, as an officer of the old school.’ The wretched captain was repeatedly summoned from his cell to be quizzed about the Wehrmacht through the day and far into the night: ‘His lunch was brought from our canteen, and when he saw a knife and fork for the first time, he pushed them away and said in terrorised tones: “But I am not supposed to have these.”’
Rybkina set Nelidov to work composing a narrative of the German war games he had attended, complete with maps and order-of-battle details. He told the NKVD officer that the German plan for invading Russia assumed that Minsk would fall on the fifth day. Rybkina wrote: ‘I burst out laughing. “How come, on the fifth day?!” He was embarrassed and swore by every god that this was what [Gen. Wilhelm] Keitel [chief of OKW] reckoned on.’ She passed on the joke to Fitin, who snarled, ‘This bastard is such a liar. Just think about it, Minsk on the fifth day!’ Golikov, the Red Army’s chief of intelligence, laughed even louder: ‘So they have decided to drive wedges forward. And imagine – they plan to take Minsk on the fifth day! Well done, Keitel, you are a strong man, such a strong man! …’ But Nelidov also told his jailers that Gen. Hans von Seekt, the hoary old former army chief of staff, predicted disaster for a German invasion of the Soviet Union, because the logistics were unsustainable.
Doubts persist, unlikely ever to be resolved, as to what precisely the Red Army knew before ‘Barbarossa’. Marshal Zhukov insisted to the end of his days that he was kept in ignorance of much of the foreign intelligence that went to the Kremlin. If the Germans invaded, he himself expected them to drive south-westwards to secure Ukraine and its immense natural resources, though he thought possible an alternative attack on an axis Riga–Dvinsk. Soviet military attachés, especially those in the Balkans, provided detailed and broadly accurate information about German deployments. Russian frontier-watchers contributed substantially more than the NKVD’s or GRU’s foreign agents to the Stavka’s (armed forces high command) grasp of the Wehrmacht’s order of battle. By April Zhukov realised the importance of the central front in German planning – large forces were concentrated in East Prussia and Poland. But conflicting evidence reflected continuing arguments between Hitler and his generals.
It is often stated that the Red Army was wholly surprised when the Germans attacked. This is less than true. In the weeks before war, despite Stalin’s scepticism he allowed large forces to be redeployed in the West and brought to a relatively high state of readiness. The disasters subsequently suffered by the Russians were overwhelmingly attributable to the rotten condition of the armed forces and their leadership, rather than to lack of immediate preparedness. Stalin deserves most of the blame for what befell the Soviet Union in 1941, but surprise was the least of the reasons for catastrophe. The Red Army was outfought by the Wehrmacht at every level, save that some of its units displayed an animal sacrificial courage that astonished their foes. Before the invasion, on 12 May Zhukov had moved into forward positions four Soviet armies, 800,000 men. On 2 June Beria told Stalin that the Germans were at a high state of readiness along the entire border. On the 12th a further report on German deployments went to Stalin, noting a high level of hostile intelligence activity: the Wehrmacht had some two hundred ‘line-crossers’ scouting in the Soviet border region. In response, Stalin grudgingly agreed that war readiness should be reduced to two hours for rifle divisions, three for motorised and artillery divisions. This scarcely constituted absolute passivity in the face of the threat.
Both the Russians and the British were naïve enough to expect an ultimatum to precede hostilities. On 11 June, Sir Stafford Cripps returned home ‘for consultations’. The purpose of his recall was exactly as stated – to enable the British government to discuss with him the bewildering and momentous developments that were unfolding. London was dismayed by a German propaganda campaign, designed to persuade the world that a new Russo–German