INSIDE THE MIND OF STALIN
Did Hitler’s surprise attack really push the ‘Man of Steel’ to the brink of a nervous breakdown?
It seems clear that while Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had been preparing for and expecting the non-aggression pact he had signed with Hitler to collapse, he had not expected it to happen at 3am on 22 June 1941. There had been warnings from his commanders and intelligence from spies within Germany, but Stalin wouldn’t believe it. He was so convinced that it couldn’t be happening that when Operation Barbarossa began he thought it must be the actions of rogue German commanders and waited for an official declaration from the Nazi government, which came four hours after the attack had already started.
“I think Stalin had no doubt that in the long term this pact was not viable,” says Professor David Reynolds of the University of Cambridge. “He was playing for time but I think he persuaded himself that any breach to the pact would come as the result of a clear period of deteriorating relations. In other words, it wouldn’t come out of the blue.” It was because of this expectation that Stalin had not responded to increased troop activity on his borders, fearing any response from the Red Army could be used as pretext by the Germans.
“What Stalin was not prepared for was simply an attack without warning,” says Reynolds. “He did not want (in this rather grey situation) to give Hitler any excuse for attacking. He didn’t want to do anything in the way of mobilisation or even serious air reconnaissance over German-occupied territory. That would give Hitler an excuse to say, ‘Stalin’s about to attack. It’s a provocation and we will act’.”
It’s been suggested by historians through the years that Stalin had a nervous breakdown as a result of this shock attack, but how true is this? “This question of a nervous breakdown remains a matter of debate,” insists Reynolds. “I think that it was a claim made particularly strongly by Nikita Khrushchev in a speech from 1956, and that was part of a general denigration of Stalin that was happening during the Khrushchev era. It has been debated but there are other sources that suggest that when the magnitude of the offensive and the mess the country was in became clear, Stalin retreated to his dacha at the end of June.” Senior Politburo members had to travel to meet Stalin and plead with him to return to Moscow, but this may have been part of his plan to test the loyalty of those around him.
“Some people said that maybe he was playing games to see if there was any serious opposition to him or not,” Reynolds explains, perhaps mimicking a similar ploy used by Tsar Ivan IV (better known as Ivan the Terrible) when he abdicated in 1564. “This is a murky area but what is certainly clear is that Stalin was fundamentally taken aback by what had happened and his obvious culpability. It took him a while to regroup. Whether it was a nervous breakdown or whether it was something a little less startling than that is unclear. However, he doesn’t speak to the Soviet people until 3 July.”