June 14, 2011

Historian David Reynolds explains how the ‘Man of Steel’ came close to a breakdown

By David Reynolds

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 13 June 2011 – Seventy years ago this month, on June 22, 1941, the final act of the Second World War began. Or so Hitler thought when he launched three million troops into Russia. And he assumed it would be over in a few months. Instead the epic drama lasted nearly four years and, when the curtain finally did come down, it was in Berlin not Moscow.

Stalin, not Hitler, was the big winner of the War in Europe. My new BBC Four documentary – 1941 and the Man of Steel – explores how he did it and why it mattered. Russia’s war still seems rather remote for us in Britain. We’re familiar with epic battles like Stalingrad but not the big picture of the Eastern Front. Yet that is where the European war was won, at appalling human cost.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

About 28million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, roughly one-seventh of the pre-war population. That body count reflects the savagery of the Nazi war machine but it’s also testimony to Stalin’s military ineptitude in the first year of the conflict.

Stalin means “Man of Steel” but in 1941 he was distinctly flaky. He dismissed a stack of intelligence warnings about the German build-up, convinced that this was British disinformation intended to drag him into their war. As a result, a quarter of the Soviet Air Force was destroyed on day one of the Nazi onslaught. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were encircled by the Germans.

A week into the fighting, Stalin finally realized the magnitude of the disaster. “Lenin founded our state,” he told his colleagues, “and we’ve screwed it up.” Although the evidence remains controversial, it seems that the Man of Steel came close to a nervous breakdown and feared he might be overthrown. Yet amazingly the Politburo asked him to take charge of a new War Cabinet. Even after Stalin had committed one of the biggest blunders in military history, his servile cronies couldn’t imagine Russia without him.

In retrospect, it’s easy to assume that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed from the start, given the size of the country and the severity of its winters. Napoleon had tried to crush Russia in 1812 and look what happened to him. But there was nothing inevitable about the Soviet victory because Stalin nearly blew it again in 1942. A successful counter-attack to save Moscow in December 1941 went to his head. Against the advice of his key general, Georgii Zhukov, he ordered offensives all along the front. These reckless assaults exhausted his troops and exposed them to Germany’s new campaign, this time aimed at the Caucasus and its oil fields.

Stalin, like Hitler, got carried away by hubris. The difference between the two dictators was that Stalin eventually learned from his mistakes. Defeat drove Hitler deeper into his fantasy world and made him ever more autocratic with his generals, whereas the appalling disasters of 1941 and 1942 finally taught Stalin to bend and compromise. The price of his education, though, was millions of Russian lives.
As Supreme Commander Stalin eventually backed off and let his best generals fight as they thought fit. Crucially, he didn’t push Zhukov into a premature counter-offensive at Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942. As a result, when the Russian onslaught was unleashed, it led to total victory.

Stalin also learned to work with allies, or at least use them. This insular, paranoid leader reached out to the arch anti-communist, Winston Churchill. The record of their first encounter in Moscow in August 1942 throws a fascinating light on Stalin learning the art of diplomacy. At one point, pressing in vain for an early invasion of France, he told Churchill that the British were cowards. When the furious prime minister nearly flounced off home Stalin changed tack and invited him into his Kremlin apartment for a boozy evening man-to-man. Churchill left Moscow next morning with a serious hangover, but also convinced that he had now forged a personal relationship with the inscrutable Soviet dictator. At times during the rest of the War Churchill was haunted by fears of “Russian barbarism” spreading across Europe. But he never lost his mistaken faith, born that surreal evening in the Kremlin, that he could do business with Stalin and that this offered the best hope of future peace.

So the Man of Steel proved his toughness – and his flexibility. That’s why in May 1945 he would walk in quiet triumph through the rubble of Berlin. And also why, despite Churchill’s hopes, his worst fears were realized and an “iron curtain” came down across half of Europe.


David Reynolds is Professor of International History at Cambridge University. ‘1941 and the Man of Steel’ is on BBC Four on Monday 13 June at 9.00pm

Copyright © The Daily Telegraph

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.