9. Stalin’s Wishful Thinking Nearly Doomed 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 Non-Aggression Pact with communism’s avowed enemy. War with Germany so soon after signing the treaty would mean that Stalin was wrong, and saying that Stalin was wrong was ill-advised in the USSR. When evidence mounted of an impending German attack, Stalin refused to believe it, dismissing it as fake news, incompetence by Soviet agents, and a scam 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 plot to provoke war, and use the Soviets “as a cat’s paw to pull the capitalists’ chestnuts out of the fire“. To avoid provoking Hitler, Stalin prohibited military commanders from taking precautionary measures. So when the Germans attacked on June 22nd, 1941, the Soviets were caught off guard. Even hours after the invasion had 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.
