Stalin Worries About Provoking German Attack, Ignores Intelligence of Actual German Plans to Attack
The world was stunned on August 23rd, 1939, when Nazi Germany and the communist USSR, avowed enemies, signed the German-Soviet Non Aggression Pact. It was a benevolent neutrality treaty that divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR. It freed Hitler to turn against Britain and France in the west, without fear of war with the Soviets in the east. A week later, he launched WWII by invading Poland.
The Fuhrer’s ultimate aim was an empire in the east, at Soviet expense. So he intended the Pact as a temporary measure to free him to deal with the Western Allies, before turning on the USSR. Stalin, however, thought that the Pact was more solid. He realized that war with Germany was inevitable, but reasoned that Hitler would settle the war against Britain before turning against the USSR.
By 1939, Stalin was the center of a personality cult that painted him as infallible. He began believing some of the hype about his supposed omniscience, and that omniscience told him that Hitler would not attack anytime soon. He was also surrounded by yes men, who dared not contradict him. Moreover, Stalin had gone far out on an ideological limb by signing the treaty with communism’s avowed enemy. War breaking out with Germany so soon after signing the treaty would mean that Stalin was wrong, and saying that Stalin was wrong was ill-advised.
When evidence mounted of an impending German attack, Stalin refused to believe it, dismissing it as fake news, incompetence by Soviet agents, a plot by British intelligence to instigate a war with Germany. Those who raised the alarm were punished, as Stalin insisted their evidence was part of a British plan to provoke a Soviet-German war, to use the Soviets “as a cat’s paw to pull the capitalists’ chestnuts out of the fire“. Red Army commanders were prohibited from taking precautionary measures, lest they provoke Hitler.
Thus, when the Germans struck on June 22nd, 1941, the Soviets were caught off guard. Even hours after the invasion had actually begun, Stalin disbelieved Soviet commanders reporting that they were being overrun, insisting that they were experiencing border clashes, not war. The Soviets survived only by the skin of their teeth, before the German advance finally ran out of steam that winter, within sight of the Kremlin. In the first six months of the war, the USSR suffered over 6 million military casualties, plus millions more civilian casualties – more than any country has ever suffered in a similar period.