On June 22, 1941, roughly three million German soldiers crossed the Soviet border. The invasion, known as Operation Barbarossa, had been months in the making and was visible in countless ways. Yet Joseph Stalin refused to believe it was coming until it had already begun.
The scale of the German buildup was enormous. About 3.2 million soldiers, 600,000 vehicles, some 3,200 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and nearly 3,000 aircraft were massed near the Soviet frontier. Soviet intelligence knew what was happening on the other side and sent a steady stream of warnings to Moscow. Some reports even named the correct date of the attack.
Stalin rejected them all. When one official presented evidence of the coming offensive, the dictator flew into a rage and ordered the source of the information sent, in his words, to his damned mother. Even after the invasion began, he clung to the belief that Hitler had not approved it. He preferred to think it was the unauthorized action of a few rebellious German generals. At a meeting with his top ministers, he reportedly said, "Hitler certainly does not know about this."
He was so convinced the operation could not have been authorized by the German leader that he proposed contacting the German ambassador to clear up what he desperately wanted to treat as a simple misunderstanding. Only when the scale of the German advance became impossible to ignore did he accept the truth. Hitler had betrayed him. In a state of shock and denial, Stalin left Moscow for his country dacha.
To understand why he failed to see something that now seems obvious, it is necessary to look at the history of German-Soviet relations and the events that led to Operation Barbarossa.
After World War I, relations between Germany and Soviet Russia developed surprisingly well. Both states shared a sense of grievance. The postwar treaties treated them as second-rate powers with no real influence over the new order. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had to accept humiliating terms, pay reparations, bear responsibility for the war, and drastically limit its army. Soviet Russia found itself in an even stranger position. It was not even given a seat at the negotiating table, and Britain and France imposed harsh trade restrictions on it because it was a communist state.
Their shared resentment of the postwar settlement became the foundation of a rapprochement. Four years after the war ended, Germany and Soviet Russia restored diplomatic relations and then agreed to military cooperation. A particularly important provision allowed German officers to train on Soviet territory. For Germany, this was a valuable way around the restrictions imposed by Versailles. The German army could test solutions and train personnel beyond the control of the victorious powers. Relations remained good for a time, and two more treaties strengthened cooperation in the following years.
The situation began to change after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Germany and the Soviet Union now embraced completely opposing ideologies, and their earlier understanding quickly lost meaning. Hitler hated communism. In Mein Kampf, he clearly announced that he wanted to destroy it entirely. Shortly after taking power, he outlawed the Moscow-backed Communist Party and imprisoned its members. Soviet enterprises were shut down, and Soviet citizens in Germany were subjected to repression and arrest.
Despite this hostility, Hitler did not yet intend to go to war with the Soviet Union, at least not for the time being. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany focused on rapidly strengthening its own position. The country armed itself intensively, and its rebuilt army became a tool for pressuring neighbors and testing the reactions of other powers. In 1936, German troops entered the Rhineland, which under Versailles was supposed to remain a demilitarized zone. Two years later, Germany annexed Austria, also in violation of the treaty. Germany seemed stronger than ever and cared less and less whether the world considered its actions legal.
At the same time, the Soviet Union appeared weak. Only a few years earlier it had suffered a catastrophic famine that may have killed as many as nine million people. Stalin was also purging the army, removing and often executing its most experienced and talented commanders. With the specter of war growing more real, the Soviet Union found itself in an extremely difficult position.
Stalin understood this weakness, which is why he tried with great determination to conclude a military alliance with Britain and France. The talks produced nothing. The British and French did not trust Stalin and feared the further spread of communism. The negotiations dragged on without any concrete agreement. Eventually Stalin concluded that an alliance with Britain and France would never happen. He then changed strategy entirely.
In a move that surprised almost everyone, he decided to reach an agreement with Nazi Germany. The result was the non-aggression pact known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Its name presented it only as a commitment not to take military action. In reality, it was much broader. The agreement not only ruled out direct war between the two powers but also divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence in secret provisions.
A week later, the arrangement was put to the test. Germany attacked Poland, and soon afterward the Soviet Union entered the part of its territory assigned to it. For the next period, Berlin and Moscow cooperated extremely closely. The Soviet Union supplied Germany with huge quantities of raw materials, significantly increasing German military production capacity and greatly helping its campaigns in Western Europe. In return, Germany provided the Soviet side with modern military equipment and advanced industrial goods.
The relationship benefited both sides for a time. Cooperation went so far that formal Soviet accession to the alliance of Nazi Germany and Italy was even considered. In November 1940, the Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov traveled to Berlin and met Adolf Hitler in person. The talks concerned the Soviet Union joining the Axis powers. Hitler rejected the idea. He was not prepared to accept some of Joseph Stalin's territorial demands, and the negotiations ended in failure.
That was when the earlier partnership began to fall apart. Just a few weeks later, in December 1940, Hitler issued Directive No. 21. The document authorized preparation for the largest military campaign in human history. It was given the codename Operation Barbarossa. Nazi Germany intended to attack the Soviet Union.
Hitler and his circle assumed it would be an easy victory. If Germany had conquered France, a far more developed and modern country, in just six weeks, defeating the Soviet Union should in their view be even simpler. Preparations began immediately but were kept secret. In the weeks before the attack, Germany massed enormous forces along the long German-Soviet border. The army numbered more than three million soldiers. Such a concentration could not truly be hidden.
Even so, Stalin remained convinced that Hitler would not dare attack. Even when Soviet agents informed him that invasion was near, he refused to believe it. Finally, on the morning of June 22, 1941, the offensive began. German tanks and infantry crossed the border, advancing quickly into Soviet territory. Within just one month, Germany took nearly a million Soviet soldiers prisoner and destroyed almost the entire Soviet air force.
Hitler had betrayed Stalin. Although he had clearly promised not to attack the Soviet Union, that is exactly what he did. The Soviet Union was forced to fight the largest battle in history if it wanted to avoid complete conquest by Nazi Germany.
Yet despite all the clear signs, Stalin did not see the coming invasion. Why? Before answering that question, it is worth showing that calling those signs obvious is not an exaggeration. There really were a great many of them.
Start with what Hitler said in the decades before the attack. His hatred of both communism and the Slavic peoples was completely open. In Mein Kampf, he repeatedly wrote of his contempt for the Soviet Union. He described Soviet leaders as common, blood-drenched criminals and the worst element of humanity. He accused them of creating the most cruel and tyrannical regime that had ever existed. Later in the book, he wrote that allying with a state whose ruler was the mortal enemy of Germany's future would be pure madness.
Stalin and the other Soviet leaders knew these statements well. They were not secret documents or private conversations. Everything had been published in a publicly available book. One could argue that about 15 years passed between those words and the start of the war, so Soviet leaders might have treated them as old declarations not to be taken literally. The problem was that Hitler did not abandon those views. On the contrary, he repeated them openly long after coming to power.
In 1934, he declared that defending Europe against Bolshevism would be Germany's task for the next 200 or 300 years. He did not try to hide his intentions. Even in 1939, he told a high commissioner of the League of Nations what he planned. He explained that all his actions were directed against Russia. He added that if Western leaders were too stupid and blind to understand this, he would have to come to an understanding with the Russians, defeat the West, and then turn their combined strength against the Soviet Union. He also said he needed Ukraine so that no one could starve Germany as had been done during the previous war. It would have been hard to state his intentions more clearly.
Even setting aside all these public declarations, there were further indications that invasion was near in June 1941. One of the most important signals was Hitler's rejection of the Soviet proposal to join the Axis powers. That alliance linked the dictatorial regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Initially, in 1936, it was a German-Italian agreement. In 1940, Japan joined. Many observers at the time thought the next logical step should be to include the Soviet Union. It too was a dictatorship. It maintained close economic ties with Germany, and its powerful army would significantly increase the military strength of the whole alliance.
In September 1940, talks began on Soviet membership. The Nazis proposed to Stalin a division of the world among the Axis powers. Japan would receive all of Asia and Australia. Italy would get northeastern Africa and the Middle East. The Soviet Union would get all of Central Asia and India. Stalin essentially agreed to such an arrangement but wanted one change. He demanded that Bulgaria be placed in the Soviet sphere of influence.
Some German negotiators leaned toward accepting the proposal. The German negotiator Kurt Schnurre sent a telegram to Berlin stating that, given the course of the talks, Molotov's words that day should be seen as a surprising display of goodwill by the Soviet government. The important Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop also favored accepting the agreement. Hitler, however, saw the Soviet response very differently. He told his top commanders that Stalin was demanding more and more and was a ruthless blackmailer. He then declared that Russia had to be brought to its knees as quickly as possible.
In reality, Hitler had probably already decided on invasion. Two months before the talks ended, he presented his military advisers with a plan to attack the Soviet Union. In November, he halted the negotiations, and three weeks later he signed Directive No. 21 ordering the army to prepare for invasion. Soviet leaders of course did not know that the plan to divide the world had been rejected. In January 1941, Molotov even asked why Germany had not responded to the Soviet proposal for changes. Hitler gave no clear answer. The very fact that he avoided a concrete response was an important indication that he had chosen the path of war.
Another signal appeared in March 1941, when Bulgaria joined the Axis powers. Control over Bulgaria was precisely why Stalin had not accepted Hitler's original world division plan without reservations. Now Hitler allowed Bulgaria into the alliance while refusing to admit the Soviet Union. It was a very clear message.
There was a third, especially glaring sign: the enormous military concentration that began almost a year before the invasion. As early as July 1940, the Soviet secret police informed Stalin that Germany was building new airfields near the border. A month later came reports that Germany intended to send about 120 divisions, roughly one and a half million soldiers, to the border region. In the following months, further highly visible preparations continued. Civilian facilities were converted into barracks. Fortifications and anti-aircraft positions were built. Railway lines were expanded and modernized.
As German units arrived, incidents in which soldiers from both sides exchanged fire also increased. In the first half of 1940, 22 such cases were recorded. In the second half, there were 187. As 1940 gave way to 1941, the signs of the coming attack became even more unambiguous. Railways worked at full capacity, carrying soldiers, artillery, and ammunition to the border. In April alone, Soviet authorities recorded 43 cases of German aircraft violating their airspace. Some flew as far as 220 kilometers into Soviet territory. With each passing month, such violations increased.
At the same time, Poland, occupied by Nazi Germany, was very clearly preparing for the coming invasion. Cities such as Warsaw and Lublin were swarming with German soldiers. Roads were repaired, and bridges were reinforced so they could bear the passage of tanks. Germany also gathered information about Soviet fortifications and troop deployments more intensively. Many of its agents were captured, however. In 1941 alone, more than 200 German spies were detained while trying to cross the border.
On the eve of the attack, the scale of preparations was already immense. The largest invasion army humanity had ever seen was assembled on the Soviet border. There were about 3.2 million soldiers, 600,000 vehicles, roughly 3,200 tanks, 7,000 guns, and almost 3,000 aircraft. All these forces stood almost directly at the Soviet border. Calling these preparations glaring would be an understatement.
So it can be said with great confidence that the coming war was obvious. Adolf Hitler had openly expressed hatred for the Soviet Union for decades. In previous years he had attacked and conquered about 10 countries. Some he invaded despite earlier promises not to. Now he had gathered a vast army on the border of the Soviet state. It is hard to accept that someone looking at such a picture could not foresee what would happen.
Why, then, did Joseph Stalin not expect the German attack? First, a more basic question must be answered. Can it really be said that Stalin did not foresee it? This is not a simple issue that can be answered with one word. There are convincing arguments both that the Soviet leader expected invasion and that he truly did not believe in it. Both points of view are worth considering.
Start with the arguments that Stalin did anticipate the possibility of war. Perhaps the strongest evidence is the preparations he carried out over many years. In the period before the German invasion, he very intensively expanded the Soviet armed forces. It is often forgotten, but at the time of the attack the Soviet Union had the largest army in the world, as well as the most tanks and aircraft. Much of this equipment was of course outdated. If one looks only at numbers, however, no other state had such a large arsenal.
This was not accidental. Throughout the decade, Stalin prepared the state for war. As early as 1934, before Germany began broad expansion and when the international situation still seemed relatively calm, the Red Army had 3,500 tanks. For comparison, that was 1,000 more than the total number of tanks Germany used during the invasion of France in 1940. In the 1930s, Stalin systematically increased military spending. In 1933, it consumed 16 percent of the state budget. Five years later, in 1938, that share rose to a staggering 43 percent, nearly half of all government spending. For a state that was not formally at war at the time, this was an astronomical sum.
Against whom was Stalin building such a powerful army? In practice, only two possibilities were in play: Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. The Soviet Union had repeatedly clashed with Japan in the 1930s on the border. It was an aggressive, expansionist power, so the risk of a Japanese attack was real. Still, everything indicates that the main opponent Stalin had in mind when building up the army was Germany. The largest part of Soviet forces was deployed on the western border. At the beginning of 1941, before the German strike, about 2.5 million soldiers were stationed there. If Stalin had truly been convinced that war with Germany would certainly not break out, he would have had no reason to direct such large forces to that region. Such a deployment made sense above all as preparation to defend against invasion.
If the Soviet leader really trusted Hitler and sincerely believed in the durability of the non-aggression pact, why did he allocate nearly half the state budget to the military? That money could have been spent on many other purposes.
The army buildup was not the only way Stalin prepared for a future war. He also took territorial actions. He annexed further areas because he wanted to create buffer zones around the Soviet state. In June 1940, he annexed the three Baltic states. Under the non-aggression pact with Germany, they had fallen into the Soviet sphere of influence. So from the point of view of the arrangements between the two powers, the Soviet Union had consent to take control over them.
Initially, Stalin held back from this step. He feared international condemnation from Western states. The situation changed after the fall of France, when the prospect of direct war with Germany became much more real. Then the Soviet leader decided on annexation. Leaving the Baltic states as independent countries was a serious risk for Moscow. If Germany took them over, it could come extremely close to Leningrad, the Soviet Union's second most important city. That is why in June 1940, shortly after the defeat of France, Stalin carried out the annexation of the Baltic states. In this way he gained an important protective belt against a potential German advance.
A very similar mechanism operated in Bessarabia, an area that today belongs to Moldova. At the time, the region was part of Romania. After the fall of France, Stalin decided that Bessarabia too should become a buffer zone. He sent the Romanian authorities an ultimatum. He demanded the transfer of the territory, threatening to use force otherwise. Romania accepted the terms, and Soviet troops entered the region to take control of it.
Both territorial moves came right after the defeat of France. It is hard to regard that as a coincidence. There are even statements showing that after the fall of France, the possibility of war with Germany occupied a great deal of Stalin's thoughts. One such piece of evidence appears in the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, who later became leader of the Soviet Union. According to his account, when Stalin heard in 1940 about the fall of France, he burst into curses and said that from that moment Hitler would certainly smash their heads in. Such a reaction suggests that Stalin considered the possibility of a German attack, and even regarded it as a very serious threat.
Now, however, it is necessary to look at the arguments for the opposite thesis, that Stalin did not expect invasion. Here too there are concrete accounts. There was the situation in which one of his associates gave him intelligence indicating that a German strike was near. Stalin reportedly flew into a rage, cursed the official, and told him to send that information to his damned mother. After the attack began, he reportedly said that Hitler probably knew nothing about it. It sounds as if the Soviet leader was convinced that war would not yet come.
Also very telling is a statement from just a few days before the German invasion. Generals begged Stalin at the time to put the troops on the highest alert. He reacted with anger. He replied that the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Germany, and that Germany was up to its neck in war in the West. He was convinced that Hitler would not risk opening a second front by attacking the Soviet Union. He also reportedly said that Hitler was not an idiot and knew that the Soviet Union was not Poland, not France, and not even England.
Another argument concerns raw materials. The Soviet Union sent them to Germany right up to the very start of the invasion. In practice, this meant supplying a future opponent with the materials needed to wage war against itself. When it is said that the shipments continued almost until the attack began, that is not an exaggeration. One train carrying Soviet raw materials crossed the border and entered Nazi German territory after the German operation had already begun. Its crew did not know that the two states were at war. It traveled according to schedule until German soldiers quickly stopped it.
The scale of these deliveries was enormous. In the 18 months before the invasion, the Soviet Union sent Germany one and a half million tons of grain, nearly a million tons of oil, and a wide range of other valuable goods. For the German economy and army, this was crucial. Britain had imposed a naval blockade that could have seriously paralyzed Germany if it had not been able to obtain so many raw materials from Soviet territory. The fact that Stalin still allowed these deliveries indicates that he did not consider a German attack inevitable.
There is another reason to think Stalin did not expect a rapid invasion. A few years earlier, he had himself seriously weakened the Soviet army in the events known as the Great Purge. Between May 1937 and September 1938, about 40,000 officers were brought before courts on charges based on fabricated crimes and then executed. All of this seriously weakened the army's combat capability. When the purge ended, as many as three-quarters of officers had less than a year of active service behind them. The consequences for the Soviet army must have been catastrophic.
About two years later, the Soviet Union began a war with Finland, known as the Winter War, and its armed forces performed extremely poorly. There were battles in which the Soviet army was defeated despite an enormous numerical advantage. On the Raate road, Soviet soldiers had roughly a 3-to-1 advantage, yet they lost and suffered enormous losses. At Taipale, clumsy attacks met with devastating artillery and machine-gun fire. During those fights, the Soviets lost about 10,000 people and achieved essentially nothing in return.
Such weak results were directly linked to Stalin's purge two years earlier. Inexperienced commanders very often sent their men into suicidal mass frontal attacks. Finnish defenders quickly learned to exploit the predictability of these actions and prepared ambushes. When the war ended, Soviet losses were roughly five times greater than Finnish ones. The Soviet Union lost about 350,000 people, while Finland lost about 70,000. The Soviet leadership was aware that it was largely responsible for this because of the huge number of incompetent commanders in the army. In its own assessment, about 40 percent of officers were described as idiots, people lacking character, and cowards. The source of this problem was Stalin's purge.
It is hard to understand why Stalin so greatly weakened his own armed forces if he was supposed to expect war with Nazi Germany at any moment.
The strongest argument that Stalin did not expect a rapid invasion, however, is his almost complete lack of action preparing the army for defense. If he had truly assumed Germany would attack, a series of concrete moves could have been expected. Full mobilization should have taken place, including the conscription of new soldiers. Fortifications could have been built, such as anti-tank ditches. Huge quantities of mines could have been laid in the vast border areas. The authorities could also have used a scorched-earth strategy, moving factories and other important economic resources east beyond the reach of German forces.
Stalin did none of these things. Moreover, he forbade his generals from carrying out preparations. This created an almost absurd situation. Soviet commanders quietly prepared for a war that seemed obviously inevitable, but they had to hide these actions from their own leader. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, one of the highest-ranking commanders, encouraged his subordinate local commanders to prepare everything they considered necessary. At the same time, he warned them not to do anything that might anger Stalin.
When Germany finally launched the invasion, the Soviet defense system was extremely unprepared. The Germans found that of roughly 1,000 forts, only about 200 were equipped and manned. Millions of Soviet soldiers were indeed on the border itself, but they were deployed extremely unfortunately. Instead of waiting in well-defended fortified positions deeper inside Soviet territory, the troops were stretched in a thin line right at the front. This left them very little time to react effectively and also made them an easy target for German encirclement maneuvers and mass capture.
Another problem was that Soviet divisions were not at full strength. A rifle division should have numbered about 15,000 soldiers, but at the time of the German attack most such units had only about 10,000 men. This happened because the government called up reservists very slowly. Only a month before the invasion were 800,000 people summoned, but most of these soldiers did not reach their units before Germany began its offensive.
The lack of preparation was one of the main reasons for the initial German successes. Within just eight hours of the invasion's start, Germany destroyed 1,200 Soviet aircraft. After a week, the number had risen to 4,600, nearly a quarter of the entire air force. The vast majority of the machines were destroyed on the ground. If Stalin had allowed earlier preparation for war, the aircraft could have been waiting ready for combat. Even if many were outdated, at least they could have taken off and attempted to defend themselves.
As can be seen, the question of whether Stalin expected the German invasion has no easy answer. One thing can be stated with great confidence, however. In June 1941, he did not treat it as an event even approximately as obvious as it might seem.
So why did he not foresee it? One reason was very simple. From the point of view of cold calculation, a Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union made little sense. It was mentioned earlier that Hitler received enormous quantities of raw materials from Stalin. An attack would mean the immediate end of those deliveries. Germany based much of its war against Britain on Soviet supplies, so it would lose a great deal as a result of invasion. Just a month before the attack began, Stalin even learned that the German economics minister had spoken of the need to further expand economic ties between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Stalin could therefore conclude that Hitler would not take such a reckless step and bite the hand that fed him.
Perhaps Stalin underestimated how strongly Hitler was guided by ideology. Stalin himself was a deeply ideological man and fanatically devoted to communism, but during negotiations he could behave like a pragmatist. He understood what power he had and did not use it excessively. It is possible he assumed Hitler would act similarly, keep his reason, and not voluntarily give up the enormous stream of materials supplied by the Soviet Union. This may have been one of the reasons Stalin did not see the coming invasion.
An important question remains, however: how did Stalin explain the enormous concentration of German troops at the border? What else could those forces be doing if not preparing to attack? In fact, Stalin believed Germany did not intend to invade the Soviet Union immediately. In his view, Hitler wanted to use the assembled army to blackmail Moscow. The plan was supposed to rely on the threat of invasion, through which Germany could force further concessions from the Soviets.
Stalin claimed that the actual start of military action would be preceded by an ultimatum to the Soviet government. He thought Hitler would demand additional raw materials and perhaps new territories. According to this interpretation, Germany would decide on a real attack only if Stalin rejected its demands. Such a view was in fact confirmed by many Soviet intelligence reports. Nearly half of those documents suggested that war was not yet decided and that Germany was still seeking a diplomatic solution. Soviet agents dismissed rumors of a rapid invasion, claiming that their purpose was, as it was put, to create an atmosphere of nervousness in Moscow and prepare the ground for an attempt to squeeze further concessions from the Soviet government.
This mistake was not the only serious problem with Soviet intelligence. In the period before the invasion, the intelligence services operated extremely ineffectively. Some of their representatives even assured Stalin that war would not happen. One of the most incompetent people turned out to be the head of Soviet intelligence, Ivan Proskurov. In December 1940, exactly when Hitler was issuing his first orders for the attack on the Soviet Union, Soviet agents in Berlin began obtaining information about it. The Soviet ambassador even received an anonymous letter containing detailed data on German invasion plans.
Agents tried to pass these messages to Moscow. One of them said plainly that invasion was coming, and his information, as he emphasized, was not based on rumors but on a special written directive from Hitler. The head of intelligence rejected the report. He replied to the agent that he was definitely exaggerating. In the following months, as the German attack became increasingly obvious, the head of Soviet intelligence continued to deny that it would happen. On May 25, less than a month before the invasion, he informed Stalin that 200 German divisions were concentrated at the Soviet border. Later, however, he tried to downplay the significance of this information. He argued to Stalin that war was unlikely because Hitler, as he claimed, could not afford a conflict with the Soviet Union. He feared that war would lead to a breach in the unity of the Nazi party.
The head of intelligence was not the only person giving Moscow such mistaken assessments. Many other agents also passed on messages completely detached from reality. One informant, an employee of a Berlin power plant regarded as a reliable source, stubbornly claimed that Hitler intended to conclude a 90-year trade agreement with the Soviet Union. In exchange for such a long-term arrangement, Germany was supposedly to agree that the Soviet Union would take control of Turkey and Finland. Another informant, a German officer who had become a Soviet spy, argued that even if a German attack occurred, it would be limited in nature and serve only as a warning.
Of course, these reports were not only false, they were also completely absurd. It is hard to believe that Germany, already waging war in the West, would assemble three million soldiers on the border with the Soviet Union solely to negotiate a trade agreement. So where did Soviet agents get such ridiculous ideas? Why were their assessments so incompetent?
One reason was the situation mentioned earlier, namely Stalin's Great Purge, which began in 1936. The brutal and chaotic wave of repression seriously weakened Soviet intelligence networks. Many experienced agents were executed or removed from service. Their places were taken by people without adequate experience, often also without proper training. A good example was the office of the head of the secret service in Berlin. This position was enormously important. The person who held it should have been among the best and most experienced officers. Instead, it was run by a certain Amayak Kobulov, an inexperienced and blatantly incompetent man. He could not create new safe networks of informants in Berlin. Instead, he continued to use old contacts about which the German services knew perfectly well.
The problem did not end there. One of the sources Kobulov considered particularly reliable was in reality a double agent. He passed information prepared by the Germans to the Kremlin. Reinhard Heydrich and other high-ranking Nazis even openly boasted that they could feed this agent any messages they wanted. Everything that reached this source sooner or later returned to Moscow as a supposedly independent report.
Soviet intelligence struggled with yet another serious problem. Agents were terrified of Stalin, especially of giving him news he did not want to hear. This fear was not unfounded. Stalin really did remove from their positions people who informed him of matters contrary to his expectations. When the newly appointed chief of staff warned him that the army was not ready to fight Germany, Stalin flew into a fury. He did not treat the assessment as a warning requiring action. He stated that the real problem was the chief of staff's own lack of preparation and incompetence, then immediately replaced him with someone else.
This way of reacting taught subordinates a very simple rule. Good news could be rewarded, bad news could cost one's position, or much more. As a result, reports reaching Stalin were carefully filtered. Their content was adjusted to his own expectations and hopes. The leader thus received a distorted picture of the situation, from which it followed that everything remained under control.
Sometimes it was not even a matter of choosing the right report. Information was altered after it had already been written, so as not to irritate Stalin. In May 1941, one Soviet agent passed to Moscow that Hitler had decided to attack the Soviet Union and intended to annex its European territories to the Reich. The content of the dispatch was later edited. In the new version, it was suggested that Hitler might still change his mind and that there was room for negotiations between him and Stalin. A warning that should have sounded like an alarm was transformed into a message offering hope for a diplomatic solution.
Over time, the Kremlin became a closed information loop dominated by groupthink. Repeated assumptions began to take increasingly fantastic forms. One theory held that all reports of a prepared German invasion were part of a British conspiracy. Britain was supposedly deliberately fueling tensions between Hitler and Stalin in order to bring about a conflict between the two states. Molotov spoke in a similar spirit during a conversation with the Japanese ambassador. He claimed that rumors of a rapid German attack were purely British and American propaganda without any basis.
Such a conviction shows the state of the Soviet information system just before the German invasion. It was no longer just a matter of individual errors. The entire structure was broken, intimidated, and incapable of properly assessing incoming data.
It cannot be said, however, that the cause of everything was solely Soviet incompetence. German intelligence did very effective work. Its officers managed to spread an enormous amount of disinformation, which made it even harder for Soviet services to distinguish facts from deliberately planted lies. Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda of Nazi Germany, was extremely proud of this achievement. In his diary he wrote that Germany had managed to create a powerful stream of false reports. Speculation appearing in newspapers was supposed to have so effectively muddled the picture of events that no one could determine what was true and what was false. This was exactly the atmosphere, Goebbels claimed, that Germany wanted to achieve. It was a well-thought-out web of deception. It combined outright lies, firm denials, and mutually contradictory information. Each individual report could look credible, but together they created a picture so chaotic that Soviet leaders found it increasingly difficult to establish what was really happening on the German side of the border.
All these elements help explain the seemingly inexplicable fact that Stalin did not treat the German invasion as an obvious and inevitable event, even though from today's perspective the preparations for it seem very clear. Perhaps it was not even that Stalin calmly and rationally believed Hitler would certainly not attack. More likely, he simply suppressed that possibility.
From a psychological point of view, this can be understood. For the Soviet Union, a German attack meant catastrophic news. We, knowing the later course of the war, can easily regard the Soviet victory over Germany as a foregone conclusion. We may get the impression that the defeat of the Reich was only a matter of time. At the moment Operation Barbarossa began, however, nothing was certain. When three million German soldiers crossed the border, no one could honestly guarantee that the Soviet Union would survive and ultimately win.
Germany had previously subordinated about 10 countries, including France, one of the most developed and powerful countries of the world at the time. Under these circumstances, a Soviet victory did not have to seem obvious at all. Even Winston Churchill assumed that the Soviet Union would be defeated relatively quickly.
It is also worth taking seriously the question of whether Nazi Germany could have won the war with the Soviet Union. One of the most important arguments for such a possibility is the role of American aid. If the United States had not supported the Soviet Union, there is a strong chance the Soviet state would have lost the conflict.
Such an assessment may seem exaggerated to some. Many commentators have claimed that Hitler had no real chance of victory. Yet a very similar view was expressed by a man who knew more about the war than most later commentators. That man was Joseph Stalin. Stalin said plainly that without American support the Soviet Union would have lost the war. These words were spoken during the Tehran Conference in November 1943. The leaders of the Allied states met at a dinner for Churchill's birthday, and Stalin explained at the time how great the importance of industrial production was. In his view, machines were the most important thing in that war. The United States could produce 8,000 to 10,000 aircraft per month. The Soviet Union could produce at most 3,000. Britain produced roughly 3,000 machines, a significant part of which were heavy bombers. Stalin emphasized, therefore, that the United States was a state of machines. Without using those machines delivered under Lend-Lease, the loan and lease agreement, the Soviet Union would have lost the war.
Such a statement may not convince all military experts who like to settle similar disputes. One could reply that Stalin was a politician, not a professional strategist. If his assessment does not seem sufficient, however, it is worth citing a man who really was an outstanding military commander, Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov. Zhukov also believed that without American aid the Soviet Union would not have been able to win the war. In 1963, during a conversation with a war correspondent, he addressed claims that the Allies had in fact helped the Red Army very little. He said then that the importance of materials sent by the Americans could not be denied. Without them, the Soviet army would not have been able to properly equip its reserve units or continue fighting.
One more opinion can be cited, this time from Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev announced that he would present an honest assessment of Stalin's views on whether the Red Army and the entire Soviet state could have faced Nazi Germany on their own and survived the war without the help of the United States and Britain. First, it is worth recalling certain remarks Stalin repeated several times during their free conversations. He said bluntly that if the United States had not given them help, they would not have won the war. If they had had to face Nazi Germany alone, they would not have withstood its pressure and would have suffered defeat. Listening to these words, Khrushchev said he completely agreed with him. Today, he added, he holds that view even more strongly.
Why mention this? Because in the period before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and also directly after it began, there was no reasonable reason to assume that America would ever come to the Soviets' aid. At that moment, the United States was not participating in the war, and it was not at all certain whether it would become involved at all. After all, it had watched as France, a country tied to it by historical bonds, was subordinated by Nazi Germany, and yet it did not come to its rescue. It did begin sending Britain military equipment and other needed materials, but it had been doing so for only three months. In reality, it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that pushed America into the war, and that happened six months after the German strike on the Soviet Union. Stalin and the other Soviet leaders could not possibly have known that such an attack would occur. If Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States might never have given the Soviet Union aid.
So when on June 22, 1941, three million German soldiers marched on the Soviet Union, there really was a very serious possibility, and perhaps even a probability, that the Soviet state would lose the war. Only a year earlier it had barely managed to win a conflict with Finland. Now it had to face an army that had defeated France in six weeks.
If we look at these facts from the right perspective and try to put ourselves in Stalin's place, his conduct becomes much easier to understand. If he believed that defeat was very likely, then his desire to avoid provoking Nazi Germany at all costs seems entirely logical. This was certainly one of the reasons he so stubbornly opposed military preparations. He feared that building up the army and fortifications would be treated by Hitler as a provocation.
There is in fact a statement that confirms this well. Stalin directed it at his defense minister, Semyon Timoshenko, after the latter suggested strengthening Soviet defenses on the border. Stalin humiliated him in front of the entire leadership. He said then: "Timoshenko is a decent man and has a big head, but apparently a small mind. He is preparing everyone for war, and for something like that he should be shot. If anyone without my permission moves troops and provokes the Germans, heads will roll. Remember my words."
As can be seen, Stalin's most important goal was to prevent provoking Germany. And if we take into account that a German victory was then quite possible, his position begins to seem understandable. In this light, other decisions also make sense. One can grasp why, even after the German aggression began, Stalin did not stop sending raw materials to Germany. The deliveries were part of a desperate attempt to stop the opponent from invading.
The same perspective sheds different light on his behavior after the German army crossed the border. When Stalin left Moscow and withdrew to his suburban dacha, perhaps he really was abandoning his duties, but not necessarily because he was shocked or surprised. It is possible he was driven by a simple sense of defeat and hopelessness. Perhaps he simply concluded that everything was already over.
A similar view should be taken of the absurd sentence he reportedly uttered at the time: "Hitler probably does not know about this." I do not think these words need to be treated as a sober assessment of what Stalin actually considered the most likely course of events. Rather, they revealed the desperate hope of a man clinging to the thought that the terrifying reality before his eyes was not real at all.