Joseph Stalin: A Life From Beginning to End (World War 2 Biographies Book 4) by History Hourly

Author:History, Hourly [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2017-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Stalin’s Gambit

“In war I would deal with the Devil and his grandmother.”

—Joseph Stalin

By most accounts, Stalin was genuinely surprised on June 22nd , 1941 when his “non-aggression” pact partner Adolf Hitler launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. When Russia entered into its backroom deals with Germany, it was simply a means to an end. Stalin felt that war in Europe would be inevitable, but he was working a long game in which he hoped that Germany, England, and France would fight each other to a standstill in a protracted struggle, completely exhausting their resources. Meanwhile, he would work to build up tremendous resources for the Soviets, allowing them to emerge at the end of the conflict with a fresh and vastly more powerful army that could easily subdue the weakened belligerents.

When Hitler managed to conquer France in just a few weeks without expending hardly any resources at all, Stalin began to have second thoughts about his grand scheme. According to the man who would one day succeed him, Nikita Khrushchev recalled just how downcast and agitated Stalin had become when he first heard of Germany’s surprising victories in the field. According to Khrushchev, Stalin, in one of his particularly disgusted moods, had “cursed the French for letting themselves by beaten” and claimed that the British were “fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them.”

When Hitler finally tore through Soviet territory on June 22nd, 1941, despite the writing already being on the wall, Stalin for all intents and purposes appeared to be in a state of shock. At first, he absolutely refused to accept the reality of the invasion. He kept telling his associates that there must be some sort of mistake, that perhaps the attacks were the result of a rogue Nazi general and refused to believe that Hitler had just started a war against the Soviet Union.

Amazingly, in his search for answers, contrary to the hard reality of full blown German attack, he even had his Foreign Ministry Office reach out to Germany’s ally Japan in a vain attempt to mediate through what he insisted was just a misunderstanding with the Axis power. Despite Stalin’s unusual and highly uncharacteristic display of magnanimous restraint when it came to the Germans, no mediation would be forthcoming. While the German war machine rapidly advanced, Stalin became unresponsive to his colleagues, isolating himself and refusing to attend official meetings for days at a time.

Meanwhile, the Red Army was in a state of complete discord, as so many valuable Generals and intelligence officers had been executed in Stalin’s purge of just a few years before that the command structure of the military was nearly non-existent. Now that Soviet troops found themselves facing off against the highly efficient and organized German military, they were being cut down like grass. Communication behind Soviet lines was a mess, and whole divisions became lost simply trying to find the enemy.

The situation seemed so despairingly bleak that Stalin lost yet another of his top Generals—this time to suicide—when Major General Nikolai Vashigin shot himself in the head right in front of them.

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