The ultimate weakness of strongmen
A blindspot nearly cost Joseph Stalin the Soviet empire
On August 23, 1939, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hosted Germany’s foreign minister Joachim Ribbentrop at the Kremlin.
The U.S.S.R. and Germany were about to stun the world by announcing that the two totalitarian archenemies had agreed not to attack each other. They kept secret the document they signed carving up Poland, the Baltics and a section of Finland into German and Russian spheres of influence.
Stalin called for vodka. “I know that the German people dearly love their Führer and therefore I would like to drink his health,” he said, referring to Adolf Hitler.
An SS officer who was traveling with Ribbentrop, Richard Schulze, “noticed Stalin was drinking his vodka from a special flask and managed to fill his glass from it, only to discover it contained water,” wrote Simon Sebag Montefiore in his book, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.
“Stalin smiled faintly as Schulze drank it, not the last guest to sample this little secret.”
The Soviet leader, who was not averse to drinking alcohol on other occasions, didn’t want vodka to cloud his understanding of what the Germans were up to. This was Stalin at his most watchful and calculating.
The dictator’s extreme vigilance makes it especially astounding that he would go on to become Hitler’s ultimate dupe, at a great cost to the U.S.S.R.
Stalin would survive the war that killed Hitler. But his career is a case study in the defects of dictatorship, a prime example of the weakness of this form of government. It characterizes the regime of Stalin’s eventual successor in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, whose obsessive focus on capturing Ukraine has blinded him to the terrible costs.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who promised to be a “dictator for a day” and has adopted a Napoleonic slogan, is now calling Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.” The Wall Street Journal set the record straight: “The only dictator in the war is Mr. Putin, who poisons exiled Russians on foreign soil and banishes opponents to Arctic prison camps.”
It’s worth pondering the history of Stalin’s one-man rule as the Trump administration begins its effort to restore relations with Putin, despite the invasion of Ukraine he launched three years ago.
Master manipulator
Stalin was a master manipulator of people. He had survived the cutthroat politics of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution and resulting civil war. He had emerged on top of the Communist Party despite a denunciation from the first head of the revolutionary state, Vladimir Lenin.
After Lenin’s death, Stalin and his sycophantic lieutenants directed a campaign of murder and starvation against peasants and rural landowners that killed millions, only to follow it with a rampage of torture, deportations and executions that decimated the party’s own ranks and the Red Army.
Stalin kept his top aides in a state of constant suspicion and fear, playing them off against each other, expanding and contracting their duties and eliminating anyone who posed a threat — or raised a question he didn’t want to confront. He used the NKVD secret police and the vast network of remote gulags as his weapons of choice.
The son of a dirt-poor shoemaker from Georgia, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who took the name Stalin, was shrewd and smart, a voracious reader who actively courted — and cancelled — many writers, actors and artists.
He was a sociopath, largely devoid of empathy, and yet Montefiore writes that he inspired loyalty by charming people, even as he became the most-feared person imaginable to generations of Russians.
Stalin’s “over-centralized method of government” had “fatal drawbacks,” wrote one of his biographers, Isaac Deutscher. “It instilled a grotesque fear of initiative and responsibility in all grades of the administration; it reduced every official to a cog; it often brought the whole machine to a standstill, or, worse, by sheer force of inertia, it made the machine move in the wrong direction whenever the man at the top failed to press a button in time.”
A massive mistake
The Soviet leader felt from the inception of the pact with Hitler that Germany would eventually go to war against the Russians, but he wanted that war to come several years later, when his country would be better prepared.
In 1940, Germany’s successful six-week blitzkrieg attack on France and the Low Countries scared Stalin, since it meant that Hitler could soon turn his attention to invading the Soviet Union.
But Stalin accepted all of the German reassurances that the two nations would maintain their peaceful relationship and resisted calls to go on a wartime footing. On one occasion, Stalin turned down the idea of mobilizing Soviet forces and relayed to his inner circle and a number of generals Hitler’s claim that the “concentration of our forces in Poland” was only being done for retraining. The group proceeded to feast on “Ukrainian borscht soup, buckwheat porridge, then stewed meat, with stewed and fresh fruit for pudding, washed down with brandy and Georgian Khvanchkara wine.”
The Soviet leader also weighed in on key tactical decisions about rearming to counter the possibility of a German invasion. One of Stalin’s aides, “on hearing that the Germans were increasing the thickness of their armour … demanded stopping all production of conventional guns and switching to 107mm howitzers from World War I,” Montefiore wrote.
Stalin agreed with the aide. But when the armaments commissar, who knew his field, dissented forcefully, he was thrown behind bars. “Only in Stalin's realm could the country's greatest armaments expert be imprisoned just weeks before a war,” observed Montefiore. And after the war began, the Soviets gave up on producing the World War I weaponry.
In June, 1941, all signs pointed to a German attack, Montefiore noted:
The intelligence was now flooding in.
Earlier it had been presented in an ambiguous way but now it was surely clear that something ominous was darkening the Western border. Merkulov daily reported to Stalin who was now defying an avalanche of information from all manner of sources.
On 9 June, when Timoshenko and Zhukov mentioned the array of intelligence, Stalin tossed their papers at them and snarled,"And I have different documents."
Stalin dismissed multiple warnings of a German attack coming from sources as varied as western diplomats, Winston Churchill and Mao Tse-Tung. He wasn’t fazed by reports that the German Embassy was burning documents, that family members of German diplomats had left Moscow and that German deserters reported an attack was imminent.
On the eve of war, the top officials of the Soviet Union met, as Montefiore noted:
At eleven, the leaders moved upstairs to Stalin's apartment where they sat in the dining room.
"Stalin kept reassuring us that Hitler would not begin the war," claimed Mikoyan. "I think Hitler's trying to provoke us," said Stalin, according to Mikoyan. "He surely hasn't decided to make war?"
War
And then the attack came, on June 22, 1941. Montefiore described the vast scale of the war:
On the same day that Napoleon's Grand Army had invaded Russia 129 years earlier, Hitler's over three million soldiers — Germans, Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians and even Spaniards backed by 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 7,000 artillery pieces, 2,500 aircraft and about 625,000 horses, were crossing the border to engage the Soviet forces of almost equal strength, as many as 14,000 tanks (2,000 of them modern), 34,000 guns and over 8,000 planes. The greatest war of all time was about to begin in the duel between those two brutal and reckless egomaniacs. And both were probably still asleep.
Stalin’s aides were afraid to break the news of the German attack to him. And once they did, Stalin uncharacteristically took a back seat, deciding that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov should be the one to tell the Soviet people that they were at war.
Stalin appeared worn and depressed after war erupted; he lay low for a while, then stage-managed a meeting at which his closest allies took turns urging him to go back to work to lead the war effort.
His war leadership proved to be a mixed blessing, since he often allowed and even encouraged his political loyalists to interfere with the professional judgments of his senior generals, to disastrous effect. But as Hitler’s forces threatened first Moscow and later Stalingrad, Stalin gradually came to place his trust in military leaders such as George Zhukov, who forced the Germans to retreat.
Even in victory, the war was devastating to the Soviets.
The U.S.S.R lost as many as 10.7 million members of the military and 24 million civilians. The military toll was twice as high as Germany’s military death toll. And the Soviets’ civilian death toll was three times as high as Germany’s.
In 1987, a Soviet historian broke with the official narrative that Stalin was a war hero. As the New York Times reported then, “Aleksandr M. Samsonov, who is a specialist on the Soviet-German war, said in the weekly publication Argumenty i Fakty that it was Stalin's fault that the German forces approached Moscow and Leningrad after invading in June 1941.”
He blamed Stalin for failing “to mobilize his forces on the eve of the German attack, his miscalculation of German intentions in 1942, and his persecution of Soviet soldiers repatriated after having been prisoners of war in Germany.”
''We have been saying that the war began with a sudden attack by Germany on the U.S.S.R., but in fact the attack was not sudden,'' Samsonov said, the Times noted. ''The inevitability of war was obvious long before it began.''
Yet, in some quarters, the adoration of Stalin has outlasted the Soviet Union. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Russian President “Putin has approved the erection of statues of Joseph Stalin in cities like Novosibirsk and Moscow, and Russian scholars who write about the mass graves of Stalin's victims have been imprisoned.”
Built-in failing
Dictatorships, up to and including Putin’s, have a built-in failing. They rely on the judgments of a single individual. Yet the more exalted the leader is, the more hesitant his subordinates are to give him information that could contradict his preferred narrative.
In Stalin’s Russia, doing so meant risking not only one’s life, but also the lives of spouses, children, parents and co-workers. Other dictators enforce their will in less fatal ways.
It is no surprise that a dictator’s close associates will go out of their way to endorse his decisions and vouch for his wisdom.
The more the media is controlled centrally, the more it will cover up any information that goes against the regime’s interpretation of world events.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat remarked in her book on a recent example of the failings of dictatorship:
“The coronavirus outbreak started in Xi Jinping's China, a country of entrenched one-party rule. Wuhan doctor Li Wen-Liang warned his peers in December 2019 about the virus’s destructive potential. The Chinese police silenced him, classifying his truth-telling as ‘illegal behavior,’ since it conflicted with government assertions that the disease was ‘preventable and controllable.’”
More than 7 million people have died of Covid around the world.
Chilling piece of historical ‘background,’ which reminds us how vulnerable we are in this dangerous world with a dear leader who thinks — and is encouraged to think — that he’s god’s envoy.
Thanks for this, Rich. I knew so little of it. The lessons of this history are important, and chilling, as we look at where we are now.