TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THE SATURDAY OF JUNE 21, 1941, Admiral Kuznetsov was still trying to reconstruct what was happening behind the scenes in the Kremlin, in the Defense Commissariat, in the highest circles of the Soviet Government.
He recalled the day as an unusually quiet one. Ordinarily his telephone was busy with calls from commissars and high officials, especially from those whom he liked to call the “fidgety ones,” Vyacheslav A. Malyshev and Ivan I. Nosenko, the chiefs of the defense industries. The calls would come in a steady stream until about 6 P.M., when the top officials usually went home for dinner and a little rest before returning to their offices. They were in the habit of staying on duty until 2 or 3 A.M. in the event of a call from Stalin, who worked through most of the night. A commissar who was not at his desk when a call from the khozyain,1 or boss, came through was not likely to be a commissar the following morning.
But Saturday was quiet. Neither Malyshev nor Nosenko called. It was Kuznetsov’s impression that since it was Saturday, normally a half-holiday, and moreover a fine day, warm and summery, most of the chiefs had taken the afternoon off and gone to the country. In late afternoon he telephoned Defense Commissar Timoshenko. “The Commissar has left,” his office said. The Chief of Staff, General Zhukov, was not in his office either.
Was anything happening in Moscow? Did the whole glorious June day drift by without the Kremlin paying heed to what was afoot?
In one government office there was no quiet. This was the Foreign Commissariat, located in a rambling group of decaying buildings on Lubyanka Hill, across a small square from the red-stone headquarters of the NKVD. Since he had relinquished the premiership to Stalin on May 6 Foreign Commissar Molotov had concentrated on diplomatic duties. However, he retained a suite in the Kremlin, as Deputy Premier, and divided his time between the two establishments, usually working days in the Narkomindel (Foreign Office) and evenings in the Kremlin.
Some time on Friday night, or early Saturday morning, Molotov, acting on orders from Stalin himself (very probably after a long and heated argument within the Politburo), had drafted careful instructions which were telegraphed in cipher to the Soviet Ambassador in Berlin, Vladimir G. Dekanozov.2
Dekanozov was instructed to request an immediate meeting with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to present a note verbale, protesting the increasing German overflights of Soviet territory. These were said to have numbered 180 in the period between April 19 and June 19, some of them penetrating to a depth of sixty-five to a hundred miles.3
Dekanozov was then supposed to draw von Ribbentrop into a discussion of the general state of Soviet-German relations, expressing concern over their apparent deterioration, noting the rumors of possible war and voicing hope that conflict might be avoided. Dekanozov was to assure von Ribbentrop that Moscow was ready for conversations to ease the situation.
The coded instructions to Dekanozov were received in the Berlin Embassy early Saturday morning. In Berlin, as in Moscow, the weather was fine. Berliners were preparing to leave town by afternoon. Many were heading for the Potsdam parks or the Wannsee, where the bathing season was getting under way.
The atmosphere in the Soviet Embassy was serene. I. F. Filippov, the Tass correspondent in Berlin, dropped in after attending the usual dull Saturday morning press conference at the Nazi Foreign Office. He found Dekanozov listening to a report from the Soviet press attaché on the contents of the morning German press. Filippov told the Ambassador that the foreign newsmen had questioned him about rumors of a German attack on Russia. He said that some were considering staying in Berlin for the weekend because of the possibility of news.
“It didn’t seem to me that the Ambassador took my news very seriously,” Filippov recalled in his memoirs. Dekanozov did detain him after the others had left, however. He asked Filippov what he thought of the rumors. Filippov told the Ambassador that the many facts which the embassy already had in its possession required that the rumors be taken seriously. But the Ambassador assured him: “There’s no need for a panicky mood. That is just what our enemies want. You must distinguish between truth and propaganda.”
Filippov left the Ambassador after telling him he was planning a trip to the Rostok area on Sunday. The Ambassador thought that was a fine idea, and he said he hoped to go for a drive as well.
If Dekanozov was disturbed by Moscow’s instructions that he seek an urgent conference with Ribbentrop, he betrayed no sign of it in talking with Filippov.4
Valentin Berezhkov, first secretary of the embassy, was instructed to call the Wilhelmstrasse and arrange for the meeting with Ribbentrop. However, the duty officer at the Wilhelmstrasse advised him that Ribbentrop was out of town. Berezhkov then tried to reach Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary of the Foreign Office. He was also unavailable. Berezhkov called a little later. No one in a responsible position could be found. He kept calling at intervals. Finally, about noon, he got Dr. Ernst Wormann, head of the Political Division of the Foreign Office. Wormann was no help.
“It seems to me,” Wormann said, “that the Führer must be having some important meeting. Evidently, they are all there. If your matter is urgent, turn it over to me and I’ll try and get in touch with the chiefs.”
Berezhkov replied that Dekanozov had instructions to talk to Ribbentrop and no one else.
Meanwhile, Moscow began to place urgent calls to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin. Molotov was demanding action. All that Berezhkov could report was that every effort was being made to reach Ribbentrop—without result.
The afternoon wore on in an atmosphere of growing nervousness. Evening fell—and still no Ribbentrop. The rest of the embassy personnel went home. Berezhkov stayed on. Mechanically, every thirty minutes he telephoned the Wilhelmstrasse.
The windows of the Soviet Embassy gave onto the Unter den Linden. Berezhkov sat by his telephone and gazed out on the boulevard, where, as on all Saturdays, the Berliners paraded under their beloved lime trees—girls and women in bright summer prints; men, mostly middle-aged, in dark, rather old-fashioned suits (the youngsters were all in the army); the inevitable policeman in his ugly Schutzmann helmet leaning against the wall at the embassy gate.
On Berezhkov’s desk lay Saturday’s copy of the Volkischer Beobachter. In it was an article by Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press chief, expounding on the “threat” which still overhung Hitler’s plans to create a thousand-year Reich.
“It was hard,” Berezhkov recalls, “to keep from thinking of the rumors flying through Berlin and that the latest date given for the attack on the Soviet Union—the twenty-second of June—might this time turn out to be correct.”
He thought it more and more strange that in the course of the whole day it had not been possible to get in touch with either Ribbentrop or Weizsäcker, who ordinarily was quick to receive the Soviet Ambassador when the Minister was out of town.
Berezhkov continued his telephoning. Each time the duty officer repeated: “I still have not been able to reach the Reich Minister. But I have your request in mind and am taking steps.. . .”
Finally at 9:30 P.M. Dekanozov was received by Weizsäcker.5 The Soviet Ambassador presented his complaint about the Nazi overflights. Weizsäcker replied briefly that he would refer the note verbale to the appropriate authorities and added that he had been informed of wholesale overflights by Soviet, rather than German, planes, and that “it was therefore the German and not the Russian Government that had cause for complaint.”
Dekanozov attempted to broaden the conversation and bring up the general subject of Moscow’s anxiety over the course of Soviet-German relations. He was not successful.
Von Weizsäcker’s terse minute to von Ribbentrop conveys the measure of Dekanozov’s failure:
When Herr Dekanozov tried to prolong the conversation somewhat, I told him that since I had an entirely different opinion than he and had to await the opinion of my government, it would be better not to go more deeply into the matter just now. The reply would be forthcoming later.
The Ambassador agreed to the procedure and left me.
Saturday, June 21, was a fine day in London. It was both sunny and warm, a combination that is “not very frequent” in London, as Ivan M. Maisky, Russia’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, noted in his memoirs.
Maisky hurried through his work in the Soviet Embassy at No. 18 Kensington Palace Gardens and by 1 P.M. was on his way with his wife to the Bovington home of Juan Negrin, Premier of the Spanish Republic from 1937 to 1939. For the last year Maisky and his wife had spent almost every weekend at Negrin’s house, about forty miles outside London.
The Maiskys got to Bovington a little after two.
“What’s the news?” Negrin asked as they shook hands.
Maisky shrugged his shoulders.
“Nothing special, but the atmosphere is threatening and at any moment we can expect something,” he replied. He had in mind, of course, an attack by Germany on Russia.
Trying not to think of the many reports he had sent to Moscow warning of the likelihood of a German attack, Maisky changed his diplomat’s dark pin stripes for summer flannels and went for a stroll in the gardens. He sat on a bench in the green lawn and put his head back to soak in the warm sunshine. The air was filled with the intoxicating scents of summer, but try as he would he could not get out of his mind the dangers of the moment. Suddenly he was summoned to the telephone. The embassy secretary in London told him that Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador in Moscow who was then home on leave, wanted to see him immediately.
Maisky got into his car and was back in London within the hour, Cripps, in some excitement, was waiting for him in the embassy.
“You recall,” Cripps said, “that I have repeatedly warned the Soviet Government of the nearness of a German attack?6 Well, we now have reliable evidence that the attack will be made tomorrow, on the twenty-second of June, or in an extreme case on the twenty-ninth of June. I wanted to inform you of this.”
Maisky dispatched an urgent cable to the Foreign Commissariat. The time was about 4 P.M. (7 P.M. Moscow time). Then he went back to Bovington, to the quiet country, to the tennis courts, to the scents of summer, there to spend an almost sleepless night.
In view of the three-hour difference in time between London and Moscow, Maisky’s urgent cable could not have been decoded by the Foreign Commissariat earlier than 8 P.M., possibly not until after 9 P.M., Moscow time. At that hour Molotov still had no word from Berlin concerning Dekanozov’s effort to talk to von Ribbentrop.7
Possibly stimulated by Maisky’s cablegram or, more probably, despairing at Dekanozov’s lack of success in getting through to von Ribbentrop, Molotov called the German Ambassador, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schu-lenburg, to come to his Kremlin office at 9:30 P.M.
Molotov and von der Schulenburg had had frequent meetings during the heyday of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Now talks had become more rare and contacts between the Russians and the Germans were being carried on at lower levels. The summons to the Kremlin came as a surprise to Schulenburg.
Molotov opened the conversation by registering his complaint about aircraft violating the Soviet frontiers. But this, von der Schulenburg quickly realized, was only a pretext for a general discussion of relations, particularly of what Molotov described as indications that the German Government was dissatisfied with the conduct of the Soviet Government.
Molotov mentioned rumors that war was impending between the two countries and added that he could not understand what grounds there might be for German complaint. He asked Schulenburg to enlighten him as to the trouble.
“I replied that I could not answer his question, as I lacked the pertinent information,” Schulenburg reported in an urgent telegram to Berlin which he sent off at i: 17 A.M., Sunday morning. It was the last message the German Embassy in Moscow was to file for many years.
Molotov continued to press the matter, saying he wondered if there might not be something to the rumors of impending war. He had been informed, he said, that all German business people had left the country and that wives and children of embassy personnel had also departed.
Von der Schulenburg, an honest, principled man, was embarrassed. He knew from his own private sources (but not yet officially) that war was imminent. Deeply alarmed at what was going on in the Reich, he had sent a trusted agent to Berlin who had returned only the previous Sunday, bringing word that the likely date of attack was June 22.
The Ambassador had no ready answer for Molotov. He said rather lamely that the German women and children had gone home for vacation, that the climate in Moscow was very severe. Not all the women had left, he added, an allusion to the wife of Gustav Hilger, second secretary of the embassy, who accompanied Schulenberg to the interview.
At this point, Hilger recalled, Molotov gave up the effort, shrugged his shoulders and the interview was at an end. The Germans drove back to their embassy in the late evening twilight. An excursion boat was moving down the Moskva River, blazing with light, a jazz band blaring out an American song.
Admiral Kuznetsov became convinced in later years that some time after noon on Saturday Stalin finally realized that conflict with Germany, if not inescapable, was more and more likely. Kuznetsov’s theory is supported to some extent by the evidence of Army General I. V. Tyulenev, who in June, 1941, was in command of the Moscow Military District.
General Tyulenev was a Red Army veteran. He had commanded the Soviet troops which took over the Polish areas adjacent to the Ukraine in 1939. He had won his spurs in the Civil War. He had served in the Czar’s Army and had been with the Red Army’s 1st Cavalry.
As Moscow commandant he was in close touch with Stalin and the Kremlin. He was well briefed on the threatening situation on the Western frontiers. He knew there had been hundreds of Nazi overflights. He knew that Soviet forces had been forbidden to respond to such incidents, and he was uneasy about the situation. However, like many other officers, his concern was eased by a Tass communiqué published June 14 denying there was any basis for rumors of impending war. As he said, “It was impossible not to believe our official organs.”
Some time on Saturday8 General Tyulenev was told that the Kremlin was calling. When he picked up the receiver, he heard the harsh voice of Stalin, who asked: “Comrade Tyulenev, how are we fixed so far as antiaircraft defense of Moscow is concerned?”
Tyulenev gave him a brief outline of the status of air precautions as of that Saturday.
Stalin then said: “Considering the disturbing situation, you should bring the Moscow antiaircraft forces to 75 percent readiness for action.”
That was the end of the conversation. Tyulenev asked no questions, but he called his chief of air defense, Major General M. S. Gromadin, and told him not to send the AA batteries to summer camp, but to order them on full alert.
Another decision was made June 21—although possibly by coincidence. A unified fighter command for Moscow air defense was set up and orders for its operation were signed and given to Colonel I. D. Klimov. It was designated as the 6th Fighter Corps but did not actually become operative until after war had begun. It ultimately comprised 11 fighter squadrons with 602 planes. On June 22 its strength was zero.
Before leaving for the day General Tyulenev checked with Defense Commissar Timoshenko, who advised him there had been more evidence of German war preparations: there were suspicious activities at the German Embassy; many of the embassy personnel had left, either departing the country or driving out of Moscow. Tyulenev telephoned General Staff headquarters as well. He was told that Soviet border commanders reported a quiet day but that intelligence sources continued to indicate an imminent German attack. The information had been relayed to Stalin, who said there was no point in stirring up panic.
Stalin’s question about the Moscow air defenses did not arouse alarm in General Tyulenev’s mind. He had his chauffeur drive him to the quiet little side street, Rzhevsky Pereulok, where he lived with his wife and two children. He glanced at the newspaper,Vechernaya Moskva, as he drove through the main streets. No special news. He noticed that posters had been put up for Leonid Utyosov’s first summer jazz concert at the Hermitage Park. On Monday a movie was opening—The Treasure of the Gorge. The General heard some youngsters singing from an open window, one of the new popular songs: “Lyubimy gorod . . . beloved city.”
He wondered what to do on Sunday. Should he spend the day at his summer villa at Serebrany Bor, just outside Moscow, or should he take the youngsters to the opening of the water stadium at Khimki?
He decided to postpone a decision until morning and, picking up his wife and children in Rzhevsky Pereulok, drove on out to his dacha.
Tyulenev’s account leaves no doubt that if Stalin reached the conviction on Saturday afternoon that war with Germany was imminent, he did not communicate a feeling of urgency to his military associates. No evidence has come to light that he took other precautionary action on Saturday afternoon until after 5 P.M., when Marshal Timoshenko and General Zhukov were summoned to the Kremlin.
There a meeting of the Politburo was discussing the possibility that the Germans might attack either Saturday night or on Sunday. Marshal Semyon Budyonny is the only source for what happened, but his account conveys a sense of the unreality of the occasion.9Those present were called upon to offer their views of what should be done. Budyonny suggested that all armies east of the Dnieper be ordered to start moving in the direction of the frontier. Once they were in motion, he said, “it doesn’t matter what happens. Whether the Germans attack or not, they will be in position.”
It seems not to have occurred to Budyonny or any one else at the meeting that such a plan would put thousands of troops in motion on highways and railroads, an easy target for the German dive bombers.
Budyonny’s second proposal was to “take all the ropes off the planes” and put them on a No. 1 Alert. In normal Soviet practice the planes were secured to the ground by ropes and wires. Budyonny’s proposal meant that they would be freed and that the Soviet pilots would sit in readiness for take-off in their cockpits.
Budyonny’s third proposal was that a line of deep defense be set up on the Dnieper and Dvina from Kiev to Riga. He proposed that the population be mobilized with spades and shovels to transform the banks of the rivers into an impassable tank barrier. He thought that such a defense line would probably be needed because the Germans were in a stage of full military readiness whereas the Soviet forces were in the opposite condition.
There was some discussion, and then Stalin intervened: “Budyonny seems to know what to do, so let him be in chargé.”
Budyonny forthwith was named to command the Soviet Reserve Army with the construction of the Dnieper defense line as his immediate assignment. Georgi M. Malenkov was made his political commissar. The appointment came nine hours before the Nazis attacked. Budyonny had nothing with which to carry out his task—no staff, no troops, no equipment, nothing. He hurried off to army headquarters on Frunze Street and told Malenkov he would telephone him as soon as he had a staff put together.10
At that time, or so Admiral Kuznetsov believes, Stalin must have decided to put Soviet armed forces on a state of combat alert and to order them, in case of need, to oppose a German attack by force.
Such a decision by Stalin, Kuznetsov concluded, would explain the pile of telegraph blanks which he saw in front of Timoshenko and Zhukov when he was summoned to the Defense Commissariat at 11 P.M. Saturday evening. They had been working for hours at Stalin’s instructions, Kuznetsov believed, drafting orders to put the commands on the alert. These orders were not actually dispatched until about 12:30 A.M. on the twenty-second. So the possibility exists that whatever instructions Stalin may have given at the Politburo meeting were contingent on developments in the course of the evening, such as a possible talk with Ribbentrop.11
One more action was taken. Special representatives of the High Command were dispatched to border military districts and to the fleets to warn them of the dangers and instruct them to put their units on combat alert.
It was this mission which put General Meretskov on the Red Arrow to Leningrad Saturday night. But since the High Command’s emissaries were sent by railroad trains which would not arrive at the command points before some hour on Sunday (and in some cases not before Monday)12 it would hardly seem that the Kremlin was convinced that German attack was only hours away.
Indeed, the texts of the warnings which Timoshenko and Zhukov sent out (many of which arrived hours after the German attack) were only cautionary. They instructed the units to be alert, but they prohibited forward reconnaissance into enemy territory. And they warned sternly against provocations.
A serious question arose in Admiral Kuznetsov’s mind that Saturday night.
“I could not throw off some grievous thoughts,” he recalled. “When had the Defense Commissar [Timoshenko] learned of the possible attack of the Hitlerites? What time had he been ordered to put the forces on combat alert? Why had not the government [Stalin] instead of the Defense Commissar given me the order putting the fleet on combat alert? And why was it all semiofficial and so very, very late?”
Twenty-five years later the Admiral’s questions still awaited a full answer.
1 Khozyain is the old Russian word for “master” or “landlord.” This is what serfs called their owner. It was customary for bureaucrats to use this term in referring to Stalin.
2 Dekanozov, for many years an official of the Soviet Security Service and close associate of Lavrenti P. Beria, Soviet security chief, was named Soviet Ambassador in Berlin after accompanying Molotov to Berlin for the conference with Hitler and Ribbentrop in November, 1940. Dekanozov was executed with Beria on December 23, 1953.
3 The figure of 152 violations of the Soviet air frontier from January 1, 1941, to the beginning of the war is given in the official Soviet military history. (P. N. Pospelov, Istoriya Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1941–1945, Moscow, 1961, Vol. I, p. 479.) The Ukrainian and Byelorussian commands reported 324 overflights from January 1 to June 20, 1941. (V. V. Platonov, Eto Bylo Na Buge, Moscow, 1966, quoting Krasnaya Zvezda, April 14, 1965.)
4 According to Izmail Akhmedov, a Soviet security agent assigned to the Berlin Embassy in May, Dekanozov got a report from an agent on Saturday naming the next day, Sunday, as the time of attack but told his staff to forget it and go on a picnic Sunday. (David Dallin, Soviet Espionage, New Haven, 1955, p. 134.)
5 Berezhkov omits any mention of Dekanozov’s name or of the Dekanozov-Weizsäcker meeting. Because of his execution in 1953 Dekanozov apparently has become an unperson.
6 His most recent warning had been on Wednesday, June 18.
7 Dekanozov’s interview with von Weizsäcker did not occur until 9:30 P.M. Berlin time (11:30 P.M. Moscow time). Dekanozov reported the results of his talk by urgent cable, which could hardly have been transmitted and decoded before 1 or 1:30 A.M. Telephone connections between Moscow and Berlin normally were very fast—not more than ten or fifteen minutes, or a maximum of thirty minutes, being required to put through a call. Customarily, however, the embassy reported by telegraph. (Berezhkov, personal communication, March, 1968; I. F. Filippov, Zapiski o Tretiyem Reikhe, Moscow, 1966, p. 24.)
8 Kuznetsov gives the time as 2 P.M. Tyulenev’s memoirs merely indicate Saturday afternoon.
9 There is no reference to this meeting in the memoirs of such high military figures as Tyulenev, Kuznetsov, Voronov and Zhukov. Nor is it mentioned in official Soviet histories. Budyonny did not indicate precisely who was present. (Budyonny, personal communication, July, 1967.)
10 Many Soviet sources confirm that Budyonny was named Reserve Forces Commander and instructed to move reserve forces to the Dnieper River line. The Politburo decision of June 21 is reported by V. Khvostov and A. Grylev (Kommunist, No. 12, August, 1968).
11 This view is supported by the fact that at 4 A.M., June 22, an urgent message was sent by Molotov to Dekanozov, reporting the contents of the Molotov-Schulenburg talk and specifically asking Dekanozov to raise with Ribbentrop or his deputy the three questions to which Schulenburg did not respond: what reasons Germany had for being dissatisfied with her relations with the Soviet Union, what the basis was for the rumors of impending Soviet-German war, and why Germany had not responded to the Tass statement of June 14. (V. L. Izraelyan, L. N. Kutakov, Diplomatiya Agressorov, Moscow, 1967, p. 184.) Dekanozov was never to have an opportunity to raise the questions.
12 Marshal G. I. Kulik, another Deputy Defense Commissar, was sent to the Special Western Military District. He did not arrive at Bialystok, headquarters of the Tenth Army, until late Monday, June 23. By that hour he seemed to General I. V. Boldin to be dazed and at sea. Marshal Kulik reached Bialystok only a few hours before Major General M. G. Khazelevich of the Tenth Army was killed and his army virtually destroyed. (I. V. Boldin, Stranitsii Zhizn, Moscow, 1961.)