Crossing The Rubicon

Crossing the Rubicon: Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940-1941
Author(s): Evan Mawdsley

Source: The International History Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 818-865
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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EVAN MAWDSLEY
Crossing the Rubicon:

Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940-1941
sixty years after the event, the outbreak of the war between
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia remains controversial. In par-
ticular, historians continue to argue about the objectives of
Joseph Stalin's foreign policy in 1939-41, and more narrowly, the in-
tentions of the Red Army. Both sensational and scholarly works have
been published. Right-wing German historians have argued for some
time - as did Adolf Hitler himself on the very day of the invasion, 22
June 1 94 1- that Operation Barbarossa forestalled an imminent Red
Army attack and that the German onslaught was a 'preventative' inva-
sion.1 A more important catalyst for debate outside Germany was the
same thesis in the book Icebreaker (Ledokol), written by the Russian
emigre V. B. Rezun, under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov.2 Rezun-
Suvorov had two related themes: that Stalin planned to use Hitler and
Hitler's wars as an 'icebreaker' against the frozen sea of European
capitalism, and that as part of this grand design Stalin planned to
launch the Red Army against the Germans in July 1941.
Broadly speaking, two historical interpretations have emerged con-
cerning this subject. One continues to accept the long-held view that
Moscow's diplomacy and strategy in 1939-41 was defensive, pragmatic,
and essentially passive in the face of the German danger. The other ar-
gues that there were significant offensive and active elements - mili-
tary, diplomatic, or even ideological - in Russian policy at this time.
This second interpretation cannot reasonably be called 'Suvorovite' as
few of those who hold to it accept all Rezun-Suvorov's arguments and
evidence; Russian historians are also troubled by his status as a
'defector' from Soviet military intelligence. One Western author has
recently suggested that the terms 'defensist' and 'offensist' might be
used to describe the two interpretations, but it is probably safest to fall
back on the terms 'traditionalist' and 'revisionist'.3 It is noteworthy,
1 For the text of Hitler's address, 22 June 1941, 'Soldaten der Ostfront!', see: 'Unternehmen Bar-
barossa'. Der deutsche Uberfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941. Berichte, Analysen, Dokumente, ed. G. Ueber-
schar and W. Wette (Paderborn, 1984), pp. 319-23.
2 V. Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (London, 1990).
3 A. L. Weeks, Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-41 (Lanham, 2002), pp. 2-3. Weeks
argues in favour of the 'offensist' school. The term 'revisionist' is used by both David Glantz and
Gabriel Gorodetsky (D. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of the World War
The International History Review, xxv. 4: December 2003, pp. 757-1,008.

CN ISSN 0707-5332 © The International History Review. All International Rights Reserved.
Soviet Plans for Offensive War 819
however, that here these interpretations are the exact opposite of t

itionalist and revisionist in debates about the post-war period. In a
event, the revisionists on the pre-war period, going beyond Rezu
Suvorov, are a broad church in terms of opinions, interests, sourc
and professional competence. There are participants in the Germ
debate such as Joachim Hoffmann, Ernst Topitsch, and Walter Pos
There are other Western historians who stress the role of ideology
Stalinist foreign policy, such as R. C. Raack and Silvio Pons, whil
Cynthia Roberts has written about the offensive features of Red A
planning.2 And most interestingly, there are well-informed post-So
historians such as P. N. Bobylev, M. I. Mel'tiukhov, V. D. Danilov,
and V. A. Nevezhin.3
The traditionalists (or neo-traditionalists) are more numerous, and
their work would take in practically everything serious written before
1985. In modern Russia, they include the older generation of his-
torians, especially those defending the honour of the army: examples
are L. A. Bezymenskii, M. A. Gareev, Iu. A. Gor'kov, and O. V. Vish-
lev.4 In the West, two of the foremost authorities on the period,
Gabriel Gorodetsky and David Glantz, have gone to the trouble of
producing book-length rebuttals to Rezun-Suvorov. The Israeli histor-
ian Gorodetsky published Mif 'Ledokola' [The 'Icebreaker' Myth] in
1995. His magisterial Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of
Russia followed three years later and had a broader scope and an out-
standing archival basis, but it also has its roots in the 'Icebreaker' con-
troversy. Wholly rejecting Rezun-Suvorov, Gorodetsky depicted Soviet
(Lawrence, 2000), p. 2; G. Gorodetskii, '"Ledokol"? Stalin i put' k voine', in Voina ipolitika i939-4*y
ed. A. O. Chubarian (Moscow, 1999), p. 250.
1 E. Topitsch, Statins Kneg. Die sowjettsche Langzettstrategie gegen den Westen als rattonale Machtpohnk
(Munich, 1985); W. Post, Unternehmen Barbarossa. Deutsche und sowjetische Angriffsplane 1940/41
(Hamburg, 1995); J. Hoffmann, Stalin's War of Extermination, 1941-5: Planning, Realization, and Docu-
mentation (n.p., 2001) (rev. ed. of Statins Vemichtungskrieg 1941-5 [Munich, 1995]). The German his-
toriographical debate is discussed in Der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion 1941: Die Kontroversie urn
die Prdventivkriegsthese, ed. G. R. Ueberschar and L. A. Bezymesnkij (Darmstadt, 1998), pp. 48-74,
and Prdventativkrieg? Der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, ed. B. Pietrow-Ennker (Frankfurt,
2000).
2 R. C. Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-45: The Origins of the Cold War (Cambridge, 1995); S.
Pons, Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936-41 (London, 2002); C. A. Roberts, 'Planning for War: The
Red Army and the Catastrophe of 1941', Europe-Asia Studies, xlviii (i995)> 1293-326, and 'Oshibki
Stalina i Krasnoi Armii nakanune voiny', in Voina ipolitika, ed. Chubarian, pp. 226-43.
3 V. D. Danilov, 'Stalinskaia strategiia nachala voiny: Plany i realnost", Otecheswennaia tstonta (i995>
no. 3), pp. 33-44; V. A. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupatel'noi voiny (Moscow, 1997); M. I. Mel'tiukhov,
Upushchenyi shans Stalina: Sovetskii soiuz i bor'ba za Evropu: 1939-1941 (dokumenty, fakty, suzhdeniia)
(Moscow, 2000); P. N. Bobylev, 'Tochku v diskussii stavit' rano: K voprosu o planirovanii v
General'nom shtabe RKKA vozmozhnoi voiny s Germaniei v 1940-1941 godakh', Otecheswennaia
istoriia (2000, no. 1), pp. 41-63.
4 Iu. A. uor'kov, 'Ciotovil 11 Stalin uprezhdaiusncnn udar protiv oitiera v 1941 g.', M[ovata t\
n[oveishaia] i[storiia] (1993, no. 3), pp. 29-45; M. A. Gareev, Neodnoznachnye stranitsy voiny
(Moscow, 1995), pp. 78-100; O. V. Vishlev, Nakanune 22 iiunia 1941 goda (Moscow, 2001); L.
Bezymenskii, Gitler i Stalin pered skhvatkoi (Moscow, 2002). For discussions among Russian
historians, see 'S zasedeniia redkollegii', Otecheswennaia istoriia (i994> nos. 4-5), pp. 277-83, and M.
Iu. Miagkov, Tredvoennye operativnye plany SSSR (zasedenia Assotsiatsii istorikov vtoroi mirovoi
voiny Pec. 1997])', in Voina ipolitika, ed. Chubarian, pp. 489-93.
820 Evan Mawdsley
policy as 'essentially one of level-headed

Stalin who, from an acute sense of militar
pease Hitler and who suffered from the
man dictator would negotiate with him.
Western historian of the Soviet participat
produced Stumbling Colossus which also a
Suvorov. There could, for Glantz, be no
being used offensively; the 'Soviet politic
understood that the Soviet military coloss
The argument of the present article is cert
action was a preventative attack. Hitler
remarkably ignorant of Soviet preparations,
sive war against Russia, dating back to Ju
This is also not a defence of the polemic
am concerned with is how the Soviet high
general war in 1 940-1, the extent to whic
by Stalin and the Soviet political leaders
relate to the traditionalist-revisionist debate
put into context a document that is now fai
well understood. It was drafted by the R
May 1941, and proposed 'a sudden blow ag
the air and on land'. Under this proposed
152 divisions and 3,000-4,000 aircraft wa
against the Germans in southern Poland.
will outline Red Army war planning fro
second half will discuss Stalin's involveme
summer of 1941.
In May 1940, after the problematic perfo

the Soviet-Finnish 'Winter War', Marsha
Marshal K. E. Voroshilov as people's comm
In the extraordinary document which fo
people's commissariat, it was noted that
'there was no operational war plan [oper
neither general nor partial operational p
development.'2 In truth, planning had bee
in Poland and France, by Soviet annexati
lands, by the Soviet-Finnish War, and by
of the Red Army. However, a war plan h
1 G. Gorodetskii, Mif 'Ledokola': Nakanune voiny (Moscow

Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, 1998)
Erickson was deeply critical of Rezun-Suvorov and suppo
articles, 'Barbarossa June 1941: Who Attacked Whom?', Hist
2 Timoshenko report [Aktoprieme NKO], 7 Dec. 1940 [sic]
cow, 1998), ii. 623. Subsequently abbreviated to 1941 god. T
ments relating to the outbreak of the war was compiled with
1938 by Army Commander 1st Class B. M. Shaposhnikov, then ch

of the general staff, and approved in that November by the mai
military council. The plan was based on a very different geograph
and diplomatic situation from 1940-1, with the old borders and a
assumed German-Polish alliance. Nevertheless, the overall concept
1938 was one which would continue in all the later war plans: a R
Army offensive (or counter-offensive) either north or south of
Poles'ia (the Pripiat' marshes) and 'active defence' in the other sect
Basing itself on prepared positions, a covering force would hold
first wave of an attacking enemy and then, after a mass mobilizati
the Soviet forces would carry the war into the enemy's territory.1
In August 1940, immediately after the annexation of the Baltic
states, Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov submitted to Stalin and V.
Molotov, the Soviet prime minister, a draft war plan entitled 'Con
erations [Soobrazheniia] Regarding the Basis of the Strategic Depl
ment of the Armed Forces of the USSR in the West and in the East in
1940 and 1941'. The final writing up of the plan was the work of Major
General A. M. Vasilevskii, who that April had become deputy chief of
the operations directorate of the general staff. (A great career lay ahead
of Vasilevskii as wartime chief of the general staff and Stalin's post-war
minister of defence.) There was only one copy of the document. As
before, this plan gave the Red Army an offensive mission. This would
be in the northern half of the front (north of the Poles'ia), where it was
also assumed an initial German attack would be concentrated: ' The
basic task of our forces is to inflict defeat on the German forces concentrated
in East Prussia and the Warsaw area.92 The plan was not approved by
the political leadership, and in any event, on 15 August, Shaposhnikov
was replaced as chief of the general staff by General of the Army, K. A.
Meretskov. More important was a revised war plan first submitted in
September 1940 by Timoshenko and Meretskov, which had the same
title and structure as its predecessor and was again written up by
Vasilevskii. As with the 1938 and August 1940 plans, it included north-
ern and southern variants for operations in the West, but after a
discussion with Stalin on 5 October, Timoshenko and Meretskov pro-
posed that the southern variant was to be the 'main blow'. The pro-
posal was accepted in the name of the politburo on 14 October.3
1 Shaposhnikov to Voroshilov, 24 March 1938, 1941 god, ii. 557-71; M. V. Zakharov, General 'nyi Shtab
v predvoennye gody (Moscow, 1989), pp. 125-33.
2 Considerations regarding the basis of strategic deployment, c.19 Aug. 1940 [subsequently abbrevi-
ated to Strategic Deployment Plan, c.19 Aug. 1940], 1941 god, i. 181-93.
3 Considerations regarding the basis of strategic deployment, 18 Sept. 1940 [subsequently cited as
Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940], 1941 god, i. 236-53; Timoshenko and Meretskov, memo to
Stalin and Molotov, no earlier than 5 Oct. 1940, ibid., p. 289; D. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia:
Politicheskii portret I. V. Stalina (Moscow, 1989), kn. II, chast' 1, pp. 134-5. My assumption that the
Timoshenko/Zhukov memo was the document accepted on 14 October is based on the fact that
Volkogonov and the editors of 1941 god cite the same archive reference: TsAMO f. 16, op. 2951, d.
242, 11. 84-90.
822 Evan Mawdsley
The August and September 1940 war pl

buro decision, have been discussed by his
informed specialists on the Red Army
change of the main concentration of the
(north of the Poles'ia) to the Ukraine (so
stressed. However, these historians have
in terms of defence and in terms of the actual course of the war after
22 June. This redeployment would have disastrous consequences,
when the heavier German blow came in Belorussia and, in a few
weeks, destroyed General D. G. Pavlov's Western Army Group (in
Russian, Front) there. Glantz's map of the 'October 1940 strategic
plan' simply has arrows marking German advances hundreds of miles
east into Russia. Roberts does give weight to the offensive aspects of
the September plan but she also bases the decision to concentrate on
the south mainly on defensive considerations.1 This discussion,
however, misses the point about the choice made in October 1940 con-
cerning the September war plan. The Kremlin decision was not about
whether war, after its first weeks, would involve the Red Army in
defensive operations in either Belorussia or the Ukraine. It was about
whether such fighting would involve the Red Army in offensive oper-
ations against the Germans either north or south of Brest-Litovsk, that
is to say either attacking (a) into East Prussia and northern Poland or
(b) into southern Poland.
From the point of view of a Soviet defender, the northern axis, with
an attacker moving from East Prussia and northern Poland into Belo-
russia, was the greater threat to Moscow. Lines of communication
behind the invader's border were better, allowing him to concentrate
his forces faster; within the Soviet Union, there were better rail and
road routes for die invader to exploit. The northern sector was, in fact,
where the Germans actually chose to mount their main attack in June
1 94 1. If the Red Army was to be a passive buffer against such an
attack, then Belorussia was the place to concentrate it.
From the point of view of a Soviet attacker, however, deployment in
Belorussia was less satisfactory. A northern attack would be against
East Prussia and northern Poland, and the former region presented
special difficulties, as was noted in the September plan:
1. The strong resistance, with the [inevitable] introduction of significant

[German] reinforcements ...
2. The difficult natural conditions of East Prussia, which present extreme diffi-
culties in the conduct of offensive operations.
3. The exceptionally well-prepared nature of this theatre for defence, especially
the fortifications and [dense] road network.
1 Roberts, 'Planning', pp. 1316-17; Glantz, Colossus, pp. 92-5. For a different, and in my view more
satisfactory, perspective, see the map in Mel'tiukhov, Shans, between pp. 256 and 257, where the
arrows actually move west.
In conclusion there is a danger that the struggle on this front would lea
long-drawn out battles which would tie down our main forces and not giv
necessary rapid result, which in turn would make unavoidable and more r
the entry of the Balkan states into the war against us.
These basic points would be made again in the March 1941 versi
of the plan after the southern variant had definitively been adopte
Although it was not stated in the September 1940 document, Rus
armies had encountered great difficulties in the lakes and forest
East Prussia in 1914-15, at Tannenberg and afterwards. The frustra
experience of trying to break through the prepared defences of
Mannerheim Line in 1939-40 was another historical parallel that
cannot have been lost on the Soviet planners; Timoshenko and
Meretskov were both veterans of the Finnish campaign. If not taken,
East Prussia would be a constant threat hanging over any Red Army
advance into northern Poland.
In contrast, a Red Army attack out of the Ukraine would move into
southern Poland, a much softer objective than East Prussia in terms of
terrain and prepared defences. Such an attack offered the prospect of
outflanking and encircling from the south the German forces con-
centrated in central Poland. More than the northern variant, it also
had a plausible strategic objective: the Germans' link with their re-
source base in the Balkans. The approved southern variant of the
September war plan envisaged the main forces of the Red Army being
deployed 'to the south of Brest-Litovsk in order, by means of powerful
blows in the directions of Lublin and Krakow [in southern Poland]
and further to Breslau [in Silesia, now Wroclaw], to cut Germany off
from the Balkan countries in the very first stage of the war, to deprive
it of its most important economic bases, and decisively to influence the
Balkan countries in the question of their participation in the war'.2
Until just after 22 June 1941, this was to remain the basic operation
planned for the Red Army. Lublin was about fifty-five miles west of the
new Soviet border on the Bug River. Krakow was 125 miles west of
border, and Breslau 150 miles west of Krakow. As for the Balkan coun-
tries, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria were at this time slipping more
and more into the German orbit, but they had still not signed the
Tripartite Pact. Yugoslavia could be seen as a neutral state with
considerable military potential.
The September 1940 plan, like its predecessor and successors, was
based on a greatly exaggerated estimate of German strength. A poor
knowledge of the order of battle of the Wehrmacht was to be a basic
fault of Red Army intelligence and planning right up to June 1941. In
the September 1940 plan, current total German army strength was
I Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940, 1941 god, i. 245; Refined Plan of Strategic Deployment,
II March 1941 [subsequently abbreviated to Strategic Deployment Plan, 11 March 1941], V[oenno]-
i[storicheskii\ Zh[urnal\ (1992, no. 2), p. 22.
2 Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 ^ept. 1940, 1941 god, 1. 241.
824 Evan Mawdsley
estimated to be 'up to5 243 divisions; of t

placed 'up to' 94 on the Soviet border, an
ate, would have implied a great build-up
the estimate had been only thirteen divi
to' twenty-eight in Poland. The Soviet p
fought some time in the future (although
of the German war with Britain), when
greatly to increase their strength in the Eas
In reality, even in December 1940, the G
only 140 combat-ready divisions, of which t
(including two in Romania). (The German
divisions in the process of formation an
laubt.) Soviet estimates of Luftwaffe streng
September, this was put at 14,200-15,000
3,300 trainers), and both the August and
pated that Germany would concentrate 1
mid-August 1940, the Luftwaffe had only
aircraft in front-line units (including 226 tr
of the Soviet estimate.1
Both Roberts and Glantz cite an extended verbatim comment by
Stalin on 5 October 1940 about the September plan, in which the
dictator expressed fear of a German invasion of the Ukraine. Their
source is only an undocumented passage in D. A. Volkogonov's biog-
raphy of Stalin.2 This is not convincing proof that the choice of the
southern option was really based on fear of a German invasion of the
Ukraine. The September 1940 plan had assumed that the main
German attack would be against Lithuania and Belorussia, although
the planners suggested that there might be a secondary attack against
the western Ukraine. The enemy was expected to concentrate ten
panzer divisions and 123 infantry divisions from Siedlce north, and five
panzer divisions and fifty infantry divisions south of Siedlce. (Siedlce, a
town between Brest and Warsaw, divided the front into two approx-
imately equal halves.) Timoshenko and Meretskov's proposal in
October 1940 to concentrate the Red Army in the south would been
drafted after the supposed 5 October conversation with Stalin cited by
Volkogonov; in light of this, it is noteworthy that the proposal does not
refer to any specific threat to the Ukraine. In fact, the proposal follows
1 Report by 5th Administration to Timoshenko, 20 July 1940, 1941 god, i. 122; Strategic Deployment
Plan, c.19 Aug. 1940, ibid., p. 181; Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940, ibid., p. 237; B.
Miiller-Hillebrand, Das Heer, 1933-45: Entwicklung des organisatorischen Aufbaues (Darmstadt, 1956), ii.
no; A. Price, The Luftwaffe Data Book (London, 1997), p. 30. In light of all this, Roberts's suggestion
that the Red Army leaders 'underestimated the military potential of Germany' is incorrect, at least in
quantitative terms ('Oshibki', p. 228). She argues, somewhat paradoxically, that the Red Army had
detailed maps of Wehrmacht forces facing the Soviet border (ibid., p. 229). In reality, the Red Army
had a quite accurate 'division count' of the German army in the east; its key intelligence failure was
that it greatly exaggerated the number of German divisions that were not facing Russia.
2 Roberts, 'Planning', p. 1317, Roberts, 'Oshibki', pp. 237-8; Glantz, Colossus, p. 93; Volkogonov,
Triumfi tragediia, kn. II, chast' 1, p. 133.
exactly the wording of the original September plan and is couche

entirely offensive terms: 'In the West, the basic grouping is to be in
Southwestern Front in order, by means of powerful blows in t
directions of Lublin and Krakow and further to Breslau, to cut Ger-
many off from the Balkan countries in the very first stage of the war, to
deprive it of its most important economic bases, and decisively to
influence the Balkan countries in the question of their participation in
the war.'1 Both Glantz and Roberts speculate about Stalin's perception
of the need for the 'defence' of the Ukraine being partly based on his
experience as a military commissar there during the civil war. Equally
speculatively, a quite different 'historical' line of thought could be con-
sidered: in 1920, Stalin was commissar of an earlier Southwestern
Army Group that mounted an unsuccessful offensive into Poland,
which paralleled M. N. Tukhachevskii's Western Army Group drive
on Warsaw.2
The Soviet plan of 1940 involved the deployment of 191 Red Army
divisions and 159 aviation regiments in the West (there were about
forty aircraft in a regiment). Three Army Groups were to be created.
The Northwestern and Western Army Groups, based on the Baltic and
Western Military Districts (hereafter MDs), and comprising five field
armies, would hold off any German attack in the northern sector of the
front. Meanwhile, to the south, the main Soviet offensive blow was to
be delivered by seven field armies. Six of these armies were to come
from Southwestern Army Group (based on the Kiev MD, commanded
at this time by General of the Army G. K. Zhukov); one army was to
come from the neighbouring Western Army Group. Southwestern
Army Group included a 'Cavalry-Mechanized Army' (Konno-mekh-
anizirovannaia armiid) with four tank, two motorized, and two cavalry
divisions concentrated at L'vov in the western Ukraine. An additional
mechanized corps with two tank divisions and a motorized division was
to concentrate behind it at Tarnopol'.3
The strategic concept was tested at the general staff war games held
in early January 1941. When originally organized, there was only one
game, concentrating on the north-west (Lithuania and East Prussia).
Following the decision of the politburo on 14 October to shift the pro-
posed Red Army attack to the south, a second game was added to
replicate operations by Southwestern Army Group. These games were
based on the assumption that war had been initiated by a hostile power
(the 'Westerners') and not by the Soviet Union. That said, there was
no actual gaming of the first, defensive, stage of war (the stage which
would turn out to be so crucial after 22 June). The games took in
1 Timoshenko and Meretskov, memo to Stalin and Molotov, no earlier than 5 Oct. 1940, 1941 god, i.
289. Cf. the text in Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940, ibid., i. 238.
2 Roberts, 'Planning', p. 1317, Roberts, 'Oshibki', pp. 237-8; Lrlantz, Colossus, p. 93. Mill useful as a
summary of the 1920 episode is A. Seaton, Stalin as Warlord (London, 1977), pp. 65-77.
3 Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940, 1941 god, 1. 241-4.
826 Evan Mawdsley
developments that might occur after th

after the enemy, the 'Westerners', had p
Soviet territory and the army of the 'E
Army) had completed its mobilization. T
the second game was 'to study and maste
sive operations of an army group and an
an understanding and a unity of opinio
offensive operations with the massive use o
and the air force'. This game was held fr
'end of play', the 'Easterner' (Soviet) cou
destroy twenty enemy infantry divisions a
55-110 miles into Poland. The commande
Southwestern Army Group was Zhukov,
to his actual position up to January 1941
and putative commander of the army group). P. N. Bobylev has
convincingly made the case that these games were closely related to the
war plans of the general staff, and the same point was made in
recollections of Marshal Vasilevskii.1
Gorodetsky has argued in Grand Delusion that the outcome of the
January 1941 war games showed Stalin the difficulty of offensive oper-
ations or even of large-scale mobile defensive operations; the games fall
within a section of the book entitled 'The Bankruptcy of the Military'.
Gorodetsky notes that the war-game umpires were critical of how the
large forces were handled, and concludes that 'in view of this harsh
judgement Stalin could have few hopes of conducting a military adven-
ture. The most that could be achieved was that the basic deficiencies of
the defence . . . could be rectified before the Germans moved on to the
offensive.' While in hindsight this judgement is entirely correct, there is
little evidence that Stalin or the Red Army high command shared it in
the spring of 1941. Gorodetsky's account is based on Marshal M. V.
Zakharov's memoirs, which were concerned with only the first game.
In fact, while some aspects of the war games were indeed judged by the
Red Army leaders to be problematical, the overall outcome did not dis-
courage Stalin or the planners: immediately after the games, the officer
who had commanded the 'Easterner' drive into Poland in the second
game received a remarkable promotion - on 14 January 1941, Zhukov
replaced Meretskov as chief of the general staff.2
It is difficult to see Zhukov's appointment as anything other than
1 Nakanune voiny: Materialy soveshcheniia vysshego rukovodiashchego sostava RKKA 23-31 dekabria 1940
g. ed. V. A. Zolotarev et al. (Moscow, 1993), /?[««&«] a[rkhiv]/V[elikata] O[techestvennaia], xii (i[i]),
388-90; Zakharov, GeneraVnyi shtab, pp. 239-50; P. N. Bobylev, 'Repetitsiia katastrofy', VIZh (1993,
nos. 6, 7, 8); P. N. Bobylev, 'K kakoi voine gotovils'ia Generarnyi shtab RKKA v 1941 godu?\ VIZh
(1995, no. 5), pp. 8-10; A. M. Vasilevskii, 'Nakanune 22 iiunia 1941 g.', NNI (1992, no. 6), p. 9.
2 Delusion, pp. 124-30 (cf. Gorodetskii, Mif, pp. I37ff.); Zakharov, General'nyi shtab, p. 247; politburo
decree, 14 Jan. 1941, 1941 goa\ i. 537. Roberts also does not see the war games revealing any weakness
to an over-confident Red Army leadership; she does not, however, make a direct link between the war
plans and the war games (Roberts, 'Planning', p. 1313).
Stalin's endorsement of the offensive orientation of the Red Arm

Zhukov was a cavalryman and a prime exponent of offensive warf
He had been the designated wartime commander of a key mobile fo
in the Belorussian MD in 1939, the Cavalry-Mechanized Group
(Konno-mekhanizirovannaia gruppa), and an officer whose career was
'made' by his triumphant corps-level offensive at Khalkin Gol in the
late summer of 1939, a response to a Japanese probe into eastern Mon-
golia. As commander of the Kiev MD since June 1940, Zhukov had
become familiar with the forces that would carry out the thrust into
southern Poland. He had given the keynote address on offensive war-
fare at the December 1940 high command conference, where he cited
continuities from the early days of the Red Army: 'Even in 1921, M. V.
Frunze . . . wrote that it is necessary to develop our army in the spirit of
the greatest activity, preparing it for completing the tasks of the revolu-
tion by energetic offensive operations, carried out decisively and
daringly.'1
As Zhukov took up his post, the Red Army general staff was putting
the finishing touches to a different kind of plan: this was not about
operational deployment but about general mobilization. The plan, sent
to Stalin and Molotov in mid-February 1941 and evidently approved
by them, was called MP-41 (Mobilizatsionnyi plan na 1941 god). The
organization-mobilization directorate of the general staff had been
working on MP-41 since August-September 1940, and it replaced the
previous mobilization plan of November 1937. The new plan outlined
the wartime strength of the Red Army and the men, horses, and equip-
ment that would be required to achieve that: there were to be
8,700,000 soldiers in the equivalent of just over 300 fully-equipped
divisions. This total would include no fewer than sixty tank divisions
and thirty motorized divisions, which were to be organized into thirty
three-division mechanized corps; the Red Army air force was to have
333 aviation regiments (13,000-14,000 aircraft).2
MP-41 was symptomatic of grave weakness in the Soviet military
system, and showed a lack of coherent and realistic planning. Taking
the most critical view of the Red Army leaders, the plan was designed
to please their political masters, but also to secure for the military the
largest share of national resources. More charitably, the plan was a
function of a situation where none of the generals had the authority (or
experience) to argue that particular objectives were unrealistic. These
objectives were founded more on the overly optimistic long-term
targets of the defence industry than on what would be required - or
even what could practically be mobilized - in the immediate future.
The plan was drafted in terms of equipment whose procurement was
1 Zhukov address, 25 Dec. 1940, RAIVO, i. 151.

2 Zhukov and Timoshenko memo to Stalin and Molotov, c.12 Feb. 1941, 1941 god, 1. 607-40; Draft
Sovnarkom decree, 12 Feb. 1941, ibid., pp. 641-50; Zakharov, General'nyi shtab, pp. 226-30.
828 Evan Mawdsley
planned up to I January 1942. The num

tanks, for example, was to rise from 861 o
1 January 1942. But even in the whole co
and 1943), insufficient vehicles would be
divisions and thirty motorized division
concerned a key weapon, the medium ta
January 1942, even with optimum produ
fall of about 75 percent of vehicles: 12,
quired, but only 3,062 were projected t
divisions, the medium-tank requiremen
(almost all the new T-34 type). Each tan
ment strength of 63 heavy tanks, 210 m
tanks. (Some of the shortfall of medium
covered by the use of 7,218 light tanks.)1 T
unrealistic in terms of 1941 production.
MP-41 also demonstrated fundamental
war would be like and how likely it was
Soviet forces were to be armed with offens
and aircraft: only one scenario was env
the largest possible ground and air stre
operations - and there was no provision
in a prolonged war.2 The nature of the
come when the Soviet leadership willed i
This approach and these grandiose targ
the organization-mobilization directorat
whole, or even by the people's commissar
core issues of economic production and
they must have related to a general pol
level. The details of this process are not y
have involved the Red Army's main milit
mittee (Komitet oborony) of Sovnarkom,
Stalin himself. In truth, MP-41 displaye
Stalinist system of the 1930s, with its exho
mania', and its wishful thinking. Extrao
tomatically, Stalin in a semi-secret spee
academy graduates 'revealed' the MP-41 f
have 300 divisions in [v sostave] the arm
divisions, a third are mechanized [mekha
is not general knowledge, but you need
anized] divisions, two-thirds are tank [d
anized [mekhanizirovannnye^ the meanin
No one was prepared to challenge these
as Zhukov admitted in 1956, was very di
1 Zhukov and Timoshenko memo to Stalin and Molotov, c.1

2 Zakharov, General'nyi shtab, p. 228.
out, the majority of our mechanized corps and divisions were still
the state of being formed and trained, as a result of which they enter
battle weakly equipped and in a poorly organized state.' Accordin
another source, the paper strength of the Red Army on 22 June w
indeed 303 divisions, but one-quarter (about 75) were 'in the proc
of formation' (v stadii formirovaniid) }
In his memoirs, the future Marshal Zakharov, himself a veteran
the 1940 general staff, was highly critical of MP-41, which 'envisa
the deployment in a very short time of a large number of units a
formations'; 'before a storm, in the interests of maintaining high read
ness of the armed forces, it is better to be deeply cautious and to m
calculations not on the basis of what will be in the future, but wha
now, forming the armed forces step by step, taking into account
productive capacity of the defence industry.' (Zakharov, who was l
no friend of Zhukov, blamed him for this situation; in fact, Zhuko
had just assumed his post.) The most recent semi-official Russian
history is even more frank about what was happening: 'In the cours
the reorganization of the armed forces that began in 1940 funda
mental miscalculations were made, which had literally catastroph
consequences.'2
One other aspect of MP-41 was problematic. It foresaw two 'var
ants' for implementing mobilization. One was the public (ptkryty
poriadkom) general mobilization of all the Soviet armed forces or
individual MDs, announced by a decree of the Supreme Soviet. Th
other involved mobilization of individual MDs and of individual units
and formations in hidden form (skrytym poriadkom) by private
notification. This was to be accomplished in the guise of 'large-scale
training manoeuvres' (BoVshie uchebnye sbory). While it was not clear
how far such a hidden mobilization was a practical possibility, espe-
cially in terms of large-scale mobilization, it was an option that was
soon to be considered very seriously.3
The next version of the operational war plan was completed on 1 1
March 1 941, by which time Zhukov had effectively been in his post as
chief of the general staff for six weeks. Again, Vasilevskii wrote it up.
This was a 'refined [utochnennyi] plan for the strategic deployment of
1 Stalin, speech of 5 May 1941, '"Sovremennaia armiia - armiia nastupatel'naia". Vystupleniia I. V.

Stalina na prieme v Kremle pered vypusknikami voennykh akademii. Mai 1941 g.', ed. A. A.
Pechenkin, Istoricheskii arkhiv (1995, no. 2), p. 26; Zhukov, draft speech of May 1956, Georgii Zhukov:
Stenogramma oktiabr'skogo (1957 g.) plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty, ed. V. Naumov et al.
(Moscow, 2001), p. 138; Istoriia voennoi strategii Rossii, ed. V. A. Zolotarev (Moscow, 2000), p. 286.
On the planning system, see L. Samuelson, Plans for Stalin's War Machine: Tukhachevskii and
Military-Economic Planning, 1925-41 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 188-99, and N. S. Simonov, Voenno-
promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR v 1920 - 1950-4 gody: Tempy ekonomicheskogo rosta, strukturay organizatsiia
proizvodstva iupravlenie (Moscow, 1996), pp. 115-34.
2 Zakharov, General nyt shtab, pp. 227, 229; Vehkaia Otechestvennaia votna, 1941-5: Voenno-tstoncheskte
ocherki, ed. V. A. Zolotarev et al. (Moscow, 1998), i. 83.
3 Zhukov and Timoshenko memo to Stalin and Molotov, c.12 Feb. 1941,194/ god, i. 617, 630-1; Draft
Sovnarkom decree, 12 Feb. 1941, ibid., pp. 646-7.
830 Evan Mawdsley
the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union in the West and the East'. It
was a 'refined' version of the September 1940 plan, and of the variant
that had been approved in October 1940. l Changes were supposedly
called for 'by the major organizational measures which are being
carried out in the Red Army in 1941'. This must have been in part a
reference to the just-completed MP-41. The March 1941 plan was
based on a fully mobilized Red Army of 309 divisions, and the number
of divisions considered available in the west on mobilization rose from
191 (in the September 1940 plan) to 253. Within this western strength,
the number of tank divisions jumped from sixteen (plus fifteen
independent tank brigades) to the - impossible - total of fifty-four.
The March plan was also influenced by the results of the January war
games and confirmed the southern rather than the northern option
(southern Poland rather than East Prussia).
Vasilevskii discussed the plan in his memoirs, and he suggested that
the difference between it and its predecessors stemmed from intel-
ligence that was received from February 1941 about German troop
transfers. It is not clear, however, that the March plan was brought
about solely by the perception of this threat. Compared with the Sep-
tember 1940 plan, the estimate of German divisions currently located
on the Soviet border rose by less than 20 per cent, from 94 to in. The
estimated total German strength that the Red Army was expected to
have to face in wartime rose by a lower proportion, from 173 to 200.2
Unlike the Soviet September 1940 war plan, that of March 1941 did
identify the Ukraine as the most threatened area: ''Germany will most
likely deploy its main forces in the south-east, from Siedlce to Hungary
in order to seize the Ukraine by means of a blow to Berdichev and
Kiev.'3 This new - and incorrect - Soviet assessment did not, however,
lead to the unfortunate Red Army concentration in the Ukraine; that
decision had been made the previous autumn.
There is a striking historiographical discrepancy between the March
1 94 1 war plan and the others: it has not yet been published in its
entirety. What is unclear from the available text is the expected action
of the Red Army. Section V, 'Bases of Our Strategic Deployment in
the West', takes up ten full pages in the published text of the Septem-
ber 1940 plan. It included the following: (a) general aims of the Red
Army in the West; (b) the 'basic tasks' of each army group (and fleet);
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, n March 1941, VIZh (1992, no. 2), pp. 18-22. The March document is
still a mystery; even less was known about it in the mid-1990s when Roberts wrote her important
articles about pre-war planning, and she did not actually refer to it. She made a seemingly incorrect
distinction between (a) a 'spring of 1941' general staff document 'which provided further guidance on
the war plans' ('Planning', p. 13 17, 'Oshibki', pp. 238-9), and (b) a May 'proposal for a preemptive
strike' ('Planning', p. 1320, 'Oshibki', pp. 240-1). For 'a' she cites the published version of the May
plan in NNI (1993, no. 3), pp. 40-5, i.e., the same document as 'b\
2 A. M. Vasilevskii, Delo vsei zhizni (Moscow, 1989), i. 1 12-13; Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept.
1940, 1941 god, i. 250; Strategic Deployment Plan, 11 March 1941, VIZh (1992, no. 2), p. 19.
3 Strategic Deployment Plan, 11 March 1941, VIZh (1992, no. 2), p. 20.
(c) details of the number of divisions and aviation regiments assign

to each army group; and (d) details of how many divisions would
available at certain intervals after the start of mobilization. In contrast
in the first published text (1992) of the March 1941 plan, there w
nothing in Section V except a comment about the difficulties of
northern sector for a Red Army advance (and there was no indicat
that any text had been left out). The most recently published text
the document in the apparently authoritative collection 1941 god (1
leaves this section out altogether (although to their credit the edit
indicate missing text with an ellipsis).1 However, in 1993 and 1995
A. Gor'kov, a colonel-general and one of the leading specialists on t
history of the pre-war plans, cited the following passage, which
evidently been omitted from the two published 'full' texts. It is
dently from the beginning of Section V and is about the best opti
for the Red Army in the West:
The most suitable is a deployment of our main forces to the south of t

Pripiat' River [i.e., south of the Poles'ia] so that they can, by means of pow
ful blows towards Lublin, Radom, and Krakow, set themselves one strateg
objective: to defeat the main forces of the Germans and in the very first st
of the war to cut Germany off from the Balkan countries, to deprive it o
most important economic bases, and decisively to influence the Balkan st
in the question of their participation in the war against us ...
The first strategic objective is the destruction of the main concentration
[German] forces in the region Lublin-Radom-Sandomierz and the establ
ment of a front on the line Warsaw-Lodz-Kluczbork-Opole.
The subsequent strategic objective for the main forces of the Red Army, d
pending on how the situation develops, can be set [as follows] - the devel
ment of the operation through Poznah to Berlin or of action to the south-
towards Prague and Vienna or a blow to the north towards Toruh and Dan
with the objective of bypassing East Prussia.2
From this, it is evident that the proposal was essentially the south
variant of the September 1940 plan, the one that had been confirm
by the politburo on 14 October.
Another senior Russian officer-turned-historian, General of the
Army M. A. Gareev, produced an even more striking element of the
document. In a passage about the basic task of the Southwestern Army
Group (presumably also in Section V), there was an extraordinary
written comment by Lieutenant General N. F. Vatutin: 'The offensive
is to begin on 12.6 [Nastuplenie nachat' 12. 6\.93 Vatutin was the deputy
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, n March 1941, VIZh (1992, no. 2), pp. 18-22; Strategic Deployment
Plan, 11 March 1941, 1941 god, i. 741-6.
2 Iu. A. Gor'kov, 'Gotovil li Stalin uprezhdaiushchii udar protiv Gitler v 1941 g.', NNI (1993, no. 3),
p. 35 (the first and third paragraphs); Iu. A. Gor'kov, KremV. Stavka. Genshtab (Tver5, 1995), p. 61
(the second and third paragraphs).
3 Gareev, Stranitsy, pp. 93, 99. Gareev is one of the leading anti-revisionists, and his candour here is
praiseworthy: 'It is true that this date was not later confirmed, but it would seem that Vatutin did not
think it up on his own.' Perhaps this date was based on working forward from a general mobilization
832 Evan Mawdsley
chief of the general staff, and Zhukov's i

did not, unfortunately, print the 'basic
Group, but it must have been essentially
1940 plan:
firmly covering the border of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, after the
concentration of forces, in collaboration with 4th Army of Western Army
Group, to inflict a decisive defeat on the Lublin-Sandomierz grouping of the
enemy, and to reach the line of the Vistula River. After that to strike a blow in
the direction of Kielce-Piotrkow and towards Krakow, taking the Kielce-
Piotrkow area and to reach the line of the Pilica River [a tributary of the
Vistula] and the headwaters of the Oder River.1
This would also be consistent with the task of Southwestern Army

Group in the May 1941 plan (see below).
The March plan was about operations that would take place at some
time in the future. German strength (as assessed by the general staff)
had not built up to a level near that given in the plan. In addition, the
planners included Soviet forces that did not yet exist. The Red Army
did not have forty-five tank divisions, and the national total of 333
aviation regiments was what MP-41 had - extremely optimistically -
projected for 1 January 1942. 2 On the other hand, Vatutin's annotation
suggests at the very least that some thought was given to an attack with
the more limited forces on hand. Gor'kov (without referring to the
Vatutin annotation) suggests that the March war plan was not ap-
proved by Stalin, but there is no clear evidence for this. The document
was addressed: 'Central committee of the VKP(b), com. Stalin, com.
Molotov', so it presumably was sent to them. Timoshenko and Zhukov
met Stalin in his Kremlin office on the evenings of 17 March (for 5
hours and 35 minutes) and 18 March (2 hours and 5 minutes). The
fact that the March war plan was not signed is not telling, as Stalin's
practice was to give only verbal approval to such documents.3
The two months between the completion of the March war plan and
the presentation of its successor in the middle of May were very event-
ful. The Kremlin began to receive contradictory but substantial warn-
ings about Hitler's intention to attack the Soviet Union and reports
about the continued movement of German troops to the Soviet border.
It is hard to tell how far the measures taken were responses to this
intelligence, to the fulfilment of the September 1940 and March 1941
that began on a particular date; it is hard to see any other reason for choosing Thursday, 12 June
1 94 1. The September 1940 plan had envisaged an interval of 30-35 days between the beginning of
mobilization and the concentration of sufficient forces in Southwestern Army Group to begin the
offensive.
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940,1941 god, i. 243.
2 Draft Sovnarkom decree, 12 Feb. 1941, 1941 god, i. 642.
3 Tosetiteli kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina: Zhurnaly (tetradi) zapisi lits, priniatykh pervym
gensekom 1924-1953 gg.', ed. A. V. Korotkov et al., Istoricheskii arkhiv (1996, no. 2), pp. 11-12; Iu. A.
Gor'kov and Iu. N. Semin, 'O kharaktere voenno-operativnykh planov SSSR nakanune Velikoi
Otechestvennoi voiny. Novye arkhivnye dokumenty', NNI (1997, no. 5), p. 109.
offensive war plans, or to the implementation of the 'hidden' aspects o

MP-41. They may have been all three. From February 1941, three
army group (front) headquarters began to be formed on the basis of the
existing MDs; the Baltic, Western, and Kiev MDs, respectively, were
to become the Northwestern, Western, and Southwestern Army
Groups. By a politburo decision of 8 March 1941, over 900,000 reserv-
ists were to be called up at various times between 15 May and 20
October 1941 for training camps with under-strength divisions.
Between 25 March and 5 April 1941, 394,000 twenty-year-olds were
secretly called up. Some preparations were more directly oriented to-
wards offensive operations. In April 1941, five airborne corps were
established, 20,000 parachutes ordered, and the design of troop-carry-
ing gliders prioritized. More significantly, Zhukov, from the time of his
appointment, pressed Stalin quickly to implement the decision to
establish further large armoured formations in the shape of fifteen
mechanized corps. (Some nine mechanized corps had been ordered set
up after the Fall of France in July 1940; another twenty began for-
mation in February 1941.)1
The discussion of high command measures in the first half of May
relates to Stalin's involvement; these measures will be looked at more
fully in the second part of this article. Suffice to mention here that on
Tuesday, 13 May, four armies of the high command reserve were
ordered to begin movement from the interior to the Western and Kiev
MDs. On Wednesday, 14 May, the western border MDs were sent
orders to prepare plans for 'covering zones'. This brings us to the May
war plan proposal, which was probably completed on the following
day, Thursday, 15 May.2
The document has been called the 'Zhukov plan', but it will be
referred to here less precisely as the 'May 1941 war plan'.3 For one
thing, it appeared over the names of both Timoshenko and Zhukov.
The very similar September 1940 war plan was submitted five months
before Zhukov became chief of the general staff, and even earlier war
plans had an influence; Shaposhnikov and Meretskov, Zhukov's pre-
decessors, bore a share of responsibility. Vasilevskii and Vatutin were
also involved in the May plan, as one wrote out the plan and the other
amended it. The date of the manuscript is not clear, but it was almost
certainly 15 May.4
1 Mel'tiukhov, Sham, pp. 330, 362-3; Excerpt from politburo decision, 1941 goa\ i. 731-2; CC decree,
23 April 1941, ibid., ii. 105-6; Zhukov, unpublished memoir, ibid., ii. 506; Gareev, Stranitsy, p. 115.
2 Considerations Regarding the Flan tor Strategic deployment, May 1941, pnntea in uor kov,
'Gotivil Ii', pp. 40-5. Subsequently abbreviated to Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941.
3 Lev Bezymenskii, e.g., recently published an article entitled U "plane" z.nuKova ot 15 maia 1941
g.\ NNI (2000, no. 3), pp. 58-67. P. N. Bobylev, in the most incisive study of the document, uses the
better term 'the May plan of the general staff ('Tochku v diskussii stavit' rano: K voprosu o
planirovanii v General'nom Shtabe RKKA vozmozhnoi voiny s Germaniei v 1940-1941 godakh',
Otechestvennaia istoriia [2000, no. 1], p. 43).
4 As we will see, there is oral evidence from Zhukov that the draft was completed on 15 May. For
written evidence, there are several major texts of the May 1941 plan, and a facsimile. The best
834 Evan Mawdsley
The document actually falls into two parts, a war plan proper
(Sections I- VIII), and five concrete requests put by Timoshenko and
Zhukov to Stalin (Section IX). The first part outlined the deployment
of the Red Army and a 'plan of intended military actions'. To under-
stand the essence of the document, however, it is best to begin with the
second part, the 'requests'.
The first request was for confirmation of the proposed deployment
of the army and of the 'plan of intended military actions'. The second,
following on from the first, was approval of 'timely' hidden mobiliza-
tion and hidden concentration of forces, in the first instance of the
high command reserve armies and of the air force.
These two requests were also dealt with in the deployment plan itself
(Section IV), which listed essential measures requiring 'timely' com-
pletion: (a) hidden mobilization under the cover of training man-
oeuvres; (b) secret concentration of forces close to the frontier under
cover of training camps (in the first instance of the high command
reserve armies); (c) hidden concentration of the air force on forward
airfields; and (d) gradual deployment of the rear echelon.
The third request (in Section IX) was for completion of railway con-
struction; the fourth, assurance that industry would supply required
tanks, aircraft, munitions, and fuel; and the fifth (a late addition),
confirmation of the proposal for construction of new fortified regions.1
Neither the 'plan of intended military actions' nor the requests were
essentially new, contrary to the interpretation given to the war plan by
D. A. Volkogonov, when he first revealed its existence in his biography
of Stalin in 1989. Volkogonov only printed two paragraphs, without
making fully clear that they came from the middle of a much longer
document. From the short passage cited, this 'radical' proposal
sounded like an informal initiative by an overly decisive Zhukov;2 in
fact, the fifteen-page manuscript was very similar to the war plans of
September 1940 and March 1941. It had a similar general theme, 'con-
siderations on the plan for the strategic deployment of the Armed
Forces of the USSR ...'. This time, however, it was '... in the event of
war with Germany and her allies' rather than '... in the West and in
the East in 1940 and 1941' (as in the September 1940 and March 1941
plans).3 In its full version, the war plan had the same general structure:
a description of the strength and intentions of the enemy, a statement
of Soviet strategic objectives, a proposed allocation of Soviet forces to
annotated version is that published in 1993 by Gor'kov ('Gotovil li', pp. 40-5), but this should be
compared with another version published by him in 1995 (Gor'kov, Kreml', pp. 303-9). Another full
text was published in 1998 in 1941 god, ii. 215-20. A facsimile of the first and last pages appeared in
Bezymenskii, Gitler i Stalin, pp. 478-9. The second Gor'kov edition includes the date 15 May, and it
also gives the fullest version of the heading material.
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, NNI, pp. 43-5.
2 Volkogonov, Triumfi tragediia, kn. II, chast ' 1, p. 136.
3 The manuscript did not actually have a title, but this phrase, 'considerations ...', comes in the first
introductory paragraph.
the various sectors, and details of the deployment of Soviet forces

the West and to the reserves of the Supreme Command. Like the ot
plans, it was a manuscript drafted by Vasilevskii but, unlike them
included a number of last-minute corrections, evidently by Vatuti
There were four appendices: (1) a 1:1,000,000 map showing propos
Red Army deployment; (2) three maps showing plans for covering
frontier; (3) a table of comparative strengths; and (4) three maps
showing the basing of the Red Army air force in the West. It was, the
not a mere sketch but a proposal created with all the resources of
general staff and, in essence, as much a war plan as the documen
drafted in September 1940 and March 1941.
More to the point, the 'plan of intended military actions' in May
the same as what Stalin had first seen in September 1940, approve
October 1940, and considered again in March 1941. The 'first strat
objective of the forces of the Red Army' in the May plan was as
follows:
the destruction of the main forces of the German Army which are deployed
south of Dublin and the arrival by the 30th day of the operation at the line
Ostrol^ka, Narew River, Lowicz, Lodz, Kluczbork, Opole, Olomouc. The
subsequent strategic objective is: an offensive from the region of Katowice in a
northern or north-western direction to destroy the main forces of the centre
and northern wing of the German Front and to conquer the territory of former
Poland and East Prussia.2
This advance, as in the September and March plans, took in most of

southern Poland. The great left hook of the Red Army would still
consist of the Southwestern Army Group, which had two objectives.
First, the right flank armies of the Army Group were 'by a concentric
blow ... to surround and destroy the main grouping of the enemy east
of the Vistula in the Lublin area'. Ironically, this 'grouping' was the
German 6th Army, which actually was surrounded and destroyed
according to a plan worked out by Vasilevskii, but eighteen months
later and a thousand miles to the east. At the same time, Southwestern
Army Group was 'to smash [razbif] the forces of the enemy in the
Sandomierz-Kielce direction and to conquer [ovladet'] the Krakow,
Katowice, and Kielce districts'.3
1 Gor'kov stated that the corrections were made in the handwriting of Vatutin ('Gotovil li', p. 40).
The differences between the three versions of the document are partly 'explained' by the legibility of
the comments. Thus, the 1993 Gor'kov version included in Section II the following important
addition: 'The most immediate task is to destroy the German army east of the Vistula River and in
the Krakow direction, to advance to the line of the rivers Narew and Vistula, and to take the
Katowice area' (ibid., p. 41). This passage is then described as illegible (!) in the 1995 version
(Gor'kov, Kreml'y p. 305), but had evidently become legible again by 1998, when it was published in
1941 god (p. 216). Perhaps not too much should be read into this (pace Bobylev, 'Tochku', pp. 50-1,
54), as all versions make clear the general advance into Poland.
2 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1 941, p. 41.
3 Ibid., p. 43.
836 Evan Mawdsley
The future Northwestern and Western

task of a 'stubborn defence' of the Riga, V
ections, at least until the offensive of S
began.1 Then, the left wing of Western A
circle the German Lublin group. A correc
was to include the conquest of Warsaw.
It is impossible to agree with Gorodetsk
'clearly defined and limited' or with the G
wetsch that it was a 'limited preventative
sive involved the main strength of the Re
was that the Red Army would have local s
against 100 German ones. Gorodetsky sug
somehow be explained as an embodiment
[Red Army] doctrine of the "deep opera
tended only to disrupt the German build
vincing interpretation of the quintessenti
concept. Nor can it be argued categoricall
not 'the creation of a base of operations f
tral part of Europe'. The May plan referr
East Prussia; the September 1940 and Ma
was a development, referred to an advan
March plan apparently alluded to variant
Berlin, Prague, or Vienna.2
There was one apparent difference, and a
between the May 1941 war plan and its p
Soviet offensive plans seem to have been
a>MWter-offensive, to be mounted after th
and after a Soviet mobilization period (t
1940 version). That had been the formal p
war games. The May plan envisaged a surprise attack by the Red
Army, a 'sudden blow [vnezapnyi udar] against the enemy, both from
the air and on land', following a 'hidden mobilization'.3 Zhukov

2 Gorodetsky, Delusion, p. 238; V. A. Nevezhin, Sindrom nastupateVnoi voiny (Moscow, 1997), p. 260
(Bonwetsch); Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 41. Gorodetsky records that his view of deep
operations' was influenced by Shimon Naveh {Delusion, p. xv; S. Naveh, In Pursuit of Military
Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory [Tel Aviv, 1997]). Naveh, in my reading, does not
suggest that the basic orientation of the concept, and of its Red Army progenitors like Tukhachevskii
and Triandafillov, was anything other than offensive {Pursuit, pp. 164-249). For a more straight-
forward discussion of 'deep operations', see R. W. Harrison, The Russian Way of War: Operational
Art, 1904-40 (Lawrence, 2001), pp. 194-217. Harrison correctly notes that Tukhachevskii's 'intentions
were overwhelmingly offensive' (p. 185). A. A. Kokoshin, Armiia i politika: Sovetskaia voenno-
politicheskaia i voenno-strategicheskaia rnysV, 1918-1991 gody (Moscow, 1995), pp. 175-239, is a broad
introduction to the offensive orientation of Russian doctrine. See also the excellent analysis in
Roberts, 'Planning', pp. 1297-307; many of the documents she cites on the period 1921-38 have not
yet been published.
3 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 43; V. A. Anfilov, ' ... Razgovor zakonchilsia ugrozoi
Stalina': Desiat' besed s marshalom G. K. Zhukovym v mae-iiune 1965 goda', VIZh (1995, no. 2), p.
4i.
himself later described it as a 'pre-emptive blow' (preduprediteV

udar), if we accept the text of an interview with him in the 1960s. M
Mel'tiukhov has suggested that the earlier 'counter-offensive' war
were also really about offensives in which the Red Army would take
initiative, and Cynthia Roberts noted that 'Soviet military lead
had often expressed an interest in preemption prior to an antici
enemy first strike.'1 It would be necessary to see the full text o
March 1941 plan to be certain that the May plan was actually a
departure.
In any event, given this concept of the 'sudden blow', the real nub of
the historical debate about the May 1941 war plan is timing. Leaving
aside, for the moment, Stalin's response to the proposal, what did the
Red Army planners intend? How far ahead were they looking? The
Soviet May war plan was certainly ambiguous and confusing, and was
no doubt intentionally so. Unlike the plan of September 1940 (and
possibly unlike that of March 1941), the May 1941 war plan did not
even give mobilization timings: as military leaders operating within the
Stalinist system, Timoshenko and Zhukov would have been extremely
rash to commit the Soviet state, even hypothetically, to beginning war
at a particular date. Formally, the May plan only requested that Stalin
'at the appropriate time [svoevremenno] permit the ... carrying out of
hidden mobilization and hidden concentration in the first instance of
all armies of the high command reserve and of aviation forces'.2 The
famous Barbarossa directive of 18 December 1940, in contrast, set an
attack date of 15 May 1941 (later pushed forward seven weeks), but
that document was issued directly over Hitler's name. The Soviet May
war plan was, in fact, in some respects more like the preliminary plan
(Operationsentwurf) completed by General Marcks for the German
army general staff on 5 August 1940; it outlined an invasion to be
initiated by Germany but it did not specify a time of attack.3
No one has suggested that Timoshenko and Zhukov's plan involved
immediate action, such as an attack into Poland in the middle of May
1 94 1. The May war plan, like its predecessors, was above all a staged
procedure: first, mobilization and concentration (covered by screening
forces on the frontier), and then attack (either pre-emptive attack or
counter-attack). Given the ambiguity of the May document, it is per-
haps best to look at it in terms of three other possibilities. In the first
alternative, the high command was proposing the immediate beginning
of large-scale hidden mobilization and the continued movement west
of the high command reserve armies (initiated on 13 May). Based on
the timings of earlier mobilization plans, and assuming the 'sud-
den blow' would come immediately after the completion of hidden
1 Meltiukhov, Sham, p. 385; Roberts, 'Planning', pp. 1302-3, 1319-20, 1323 n. 31, 1326 n. 113.
3 Ueberschar and Bezymesnkij, Angriff, pp. 223-38, 250-3.
838 Evan Mawdsley
mobilization and concentration, this alter

posed surprise attack in mid- or late Jul
cited by some revisionist historians). A second alternative would
involve a later beginning of large-scale mobilization and concentration
or a longer gap between the completion of mobilization and concen-
tration and the launching of the 'sudden blow' (or even both a delayed
beginning and a longer gap between concentration and attack). This
would have allowed for an attack later in 1941. In a third scenario, the
May plan was one of general orientation, with the intention of a con-
siderably later mobilization, concentration, and attack, perhaps in
1942. This would have allowed for the further expansion, equipping,
and training of the Red Army and the air force.
Determining which possibility is most plausible requires looking at a
range of factors. One of them is the Soviet estimate of the state of Ger-
man readiness. The May plan was literally a proposal to put the Red
Army in a position to be able to pre-empt the Germans at a particular
time in the future, when the Germans were in the last stages of preparing
an attack on the Soviet Union, and not before. The assessment was that
the state of German readiness had become more ominous than in
September or March:
Bearing in mind that Germany at the present time is holding its army in a
mobilized state with its rear echelon deployed [5 razvernutymi tylami], it has
the possibility to pre-empt \predupredity ] us in deployment and to deliver a sud-
den blow.
To avert [predowratit'] this, I consider it absolutely necessary not to give the
initiative to the German command, to forestall [upredit3] the enemy in deploy-
ment and to attack the German army at that moment when it is [still] being
deployed and has not yet been able to organize a front and the co-ordination of
the different branches of service.1
This could only be implemented after the (hidden) mobilization of

the Red Army. The May proposal was pre-emptive, and the Soviet
high command's intelligence assessment was crucial. If it was obvious
that the Wehrmacht was about to attack, then Timoshenko and Zhukov
were actually thinking in the short term. Between February and May,
the Germans had indeed started to concentrate their infantry forces for
Barbarossa. In an interview near his death, Vasilevskii argued that the
Red Army high command was aware of the danger: 'There was more
than enough evidence that Germany planned a military attack on our
country. In our era aggressive preparations are very difficult [or]
practically impossible to hide.'2
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, 18 Sept. 1940, 1941 god, i. 239; Strategic Deployment Plan, 11 March
1941, VIZh (1992, no. 2), p. 20; Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 41. One very useful map,
showing the situation on 1 June 1941 as (mis-)perceived by the Soviet high command, has been
published as a facsimile: L. Dvoinykh and N. Tarkhova, 'O chem dokladyvala voennaia razvedka',
Nauka i zhizn' (1995, no. 3), p. 10.
2 G. A. Kumanev, Riadom so Stalinym: Otkrovennye svideteVstva (Moscow, 1999), pp. 232-3.
Soviet intelligence is one of the most discussed aspects of Barbaro

and space does not permit an extensive analysis here. Nevertheless
could be argued that Vasilevskii was basing this assessment on hi
sight and that at the time the high command was not convinced th
German attack was imminent. There is no clear evidence that the
1 94 1 plan was motivated by a high command perception of any ra
new German build-up in Poland and East Prussia. (A bigger factor
we shall see, may have been Stalin's speech of 5 May.) The Red Ar
estimate of current German strength had not grown by a very gr
amount in the period before mid-May: in the May plan, it was put
284 divisions, with 180 likely to be deployed against the Soviet Un
and 120 currently (15 April) located on the Soviet border; the 11
March figures had been 260, 200, and in.1 The German army, then,
may have been mobilized, but as far as the Soviet planners could see, it
was not yet concentrated in the East. The May plan implied the move-
ment east of another sixty German divisions, which would take some
considerable time even after Germany decided upon this action. From
this perspective, a Soviet 'sudden strike' in July, based on a perceived
German threat, becomes less convincing.
The high command's sense of timing was also affected by the period
required to mobilize Soviet forces. Unfortunately, even the extent of
mobilization proposed by Timoshenko and Zhukov in May is not
clear. One request (Section IX) referred ambiguously to 'hidden
mobilization [otmobilizovaniia] and hidden concentration in the first
instance of all reserve armies of the high command and of aviation'.
Hidden mobilization in the form of 'Large-scale Training Exercises'
had been a feature of Red Army war planning for some time, and was
confirmed in MP-41; but it was not clear whether the May plan
envisaged hidden general mobilization, and concentration ('in the first
instance') of only certain armies, or if it meant that both mobilization
and concentration should ('in the first instance') only apply to certain
armies. That the high command wanted the former (general mobiliza-
tion) rather than the latter is suggested by an earlier passage (Section
IV), which refers to a 'hidden mobilization of forces' without qualifi-
cation. In any event, the May war plan took into account not just the
mobilization of the high command reserve, but the general mobiliza-
tion of the Red Army to its full strength, officially comprising 303
divisions, with 258 of them deployed in the West.2
Related to this is the difference between, on the one hand, the pro-
posed Soviet ground forces attack strength and, on the other, the
forces actually on hand in May-June 1941. Table 1 gives detailed
figures cited by the general staff in mid-May 1941, when it ordered the
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1 941, pp. 40-1; Strategic Deployment Plan, 11 March 1941, VIZh
(1992, no. 2), pp. 18-19.
2 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, pp. 41-3, 45.
840 Evan Mawdsley
Table i: May 1941 War Plan:

Required and Available Ground Forces (
Required for Available Available Available

May 1941 14 May 1941 mid-June 1941 13 June 1941
War Plan (Covering Plans) (Zhukov) (Vatutin)
Northwestern AG
TD 4444
MD 2 2 22
RD 23 16 19 17
CD - - 2 -
Total Divisions 29 22 27 23
Western AG
TD 8 8 12 12
MD 44 6 6
RD 31 12 24 24
CD 2222
Southwestern AG
TD 28 18 20 20
MD 15 9 10 10
RD 74 35 45 43
CD
Sources:
Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, NNI (1993, no. 3), pp. 41-4; Iu. A. Gor'kov an
Iu. N. Semin, 'Konets global'noi lzhi', VIZh (1996, no. 2), pp. 6ff. (NWAG); no. 3, p
8ff. (WAG); no. 4, pp. 3-8; no. 5, pp. 8ff. (SWAG); Zhukov, Vospominantia, i. 367
Vatutin, Report on Deployment, 13 June 1941, 1941 god, ii. 358-61. TD = tank divisio
MD = motorized division, RD = rifle (infantry) division, CD = cavalry division. NWA
is based on Baltic MD, WAG on Western MD, and SWAG on Kiev and Odessa MDs,
excluding small forces in the Crimea. 'Covering plans' is based on detailed strengths
cited in directives sent to MD commanders in mid-May. The figure of 43 rifle divisions
in SWAG in the 'Vatutin' column excludes 20 rifle divisions that he put under SWAG
command, but which were physically still in the Khar'kov, Orel, and Volga MDs (in the
document Vatutin's total for SWAG was 63 rifle divisions and a total of 97 divisions).
various MDs to prepare 'covering' plans. (The table also includes

figures for actual strength in mid-June given by Zhukov and by his
deputy, Vatutin; these will be discussed later.) It shows that when the
May plan was proposed, the actual strength on hand in the key
Southwestern Army Group was only about half what was specified, 67
divisions out of 122.
The May plan certainly included the option of beginning mobilization
as soon as possible, and for this it was necessary to cover the frontier,
which in turn involved the drafting of up-to-date covering plans. The
planners proposed that covering and air defence plans be completed by
1 June.1 The implications of the immediate beginning of mobilization
are not clear; this was to have been, as already mentioned, a phased
procedure. P. N. Bobylev, perhaps the most thoughtful revisionist, has
argued the high command were essentially proposing a mid-July attack
date because the mobilized Red Army could not be kept doing nothing
for an indefinite period.2 It is not certain that this is correct. There
were certainly reasons for not mobilizing before it was necessary, and
reasons for proceeding directly to attack once mobilization was com-
plete; these reasons were, however, essentially diplomatic or economic.
The diplomatic impact of mobilization was that it might so alarm the
prospective enemy that war would become inevitable; the economic
impact included the removal of workers, horses, and trucks from
industry and agriculture, which would complicate, among other things,
the completion of rearmament. There was, however, no inherent rea-
son, from the point of view of the mobilization planners, why a much
larger Red Army could not be readied without proceeding inevitably to
the next stage of the actual attack. Timoshenko and Zhukov could
plausibly have considered a delay between mobilization and the begin-
ning of war.
The May 1941 plan was also ambiguous about the Red Army air
force. The air element for the May war plan was based on a national
air strength of 2 1 8 aviation regiments which supposedly currently
existed (see Table 2). The plan envisaged 165 aviation regiments in the
West and the high command reserve, the strength available in mid-
June. This was, by the way, a huge force of about 6,600 aircraft. The
war plan, however, also referred to a projected addition, by 1 January
1942 y of a further 10 1 aviation regiments. This implied a total national
strength of 333 aviation regiments by 1 January 1942, the same as
anticipated in the March 1941 war plan and in MP-41.3
The timing of any Soviet pre-emptive strike would have been greatly
affected by transport and supply considerations. In his memoirs,
Zhukov reported pessimistic assessments of the situation on the
1 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 44.

2 Bobylev, 'Tochku', p. 57.
3 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 42; strategic Deployment nan, 11 Marcn 1941, viz.h
(1992, no. 2), pp. 21-2; Draft Sovnarkom decree, 12 Feb. 1941, 1941 god, i. 642.
842 Evan Mawdsley
Table 2: May 1941 War Plan:

Required and Available Air Units (Aviati
Required for Available

May 1 94 1 War Plan 13 June 1941
(Plan) (Vatutin)
Northern AG 18
Northwestern AG 13
Western AG 21
Southwestern AG 85
Total in Western AGs 144 137
RGK 21 29
Eastern USSR 33 33
Other 20 26
Total Combat- Ready 218 225
Forming 115 NA
Sources:
Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, NNI (1993, no. 3), p. 42 (May plan); Vatutin,
Report on deployment, 13 June 1941, 1941 god, ii. 58-361. There is apparently a math-
ematical error in the published document, as the total in the Western AGs was supposed
to be 130 aviation regiments, but the figures for the four AGs total 137. There were
about forty aircraft in a regiment. RGK is the high command reserve. 'Eastern USSR5 is
Transbaikal MD and Far Eastern AG; 'other' includes Arkhangelsk, Transcaucasus and
Central Asian MDs, and Moscow air defence.
railways by Vatutin and Timoshenko. The May plan stated that it was
necessary 'gradually [postepenno] under the cover of training exercises
and rear training to deploy the rear echelon and the hospital base'
(emphasis added). In late May 1941, Lieutenant General N. I. Tru-
betskoi, the chief of the Red Army's administration of military com-
munications, submitted a general report noting the sharp gap in
railway-carrying capacity in the zone between the old and new border;
he urged accelerated construction work on track and installations.
According to him, in the 'western theatre' railway-carrying capacity to
the old border was 871 pairs of trains a day, compared to 444 to
new border (and, ominously, 988 on the other side of the new bord
He contrasted the existing expenditure of 799 million rubles for railwa
construction and development planned by the transport commissar
(NKPS) for 1 94 1 with 7,276 million rubles planned by the defen
commissariat, and 2,181 million rubles approved by the governmen
(Despite his prescience, Trubetskoi would be shot in 1941.)1 Indee
the May war plan asked that the government demand of the transp
commissariat 'the completion in full and at the appropriate time
[svoevremenno] of work on the railways according to the [i9]4i plan
and especially in the L'vov direction'. Furthermore, the 152 Soviet div-
isions advancing into southern Poland and the 3,000-4,000 attacking
aircraft would have required huge amounts of fuel and ammunition.
The May plan specified, among other requirements, a month's supply
of medium- and heavy-calibre ammunition, of aviation bombs, and of
diesel fuel; it also specified a month and a half's supply of automotive
petrol, as sufficient stocks had not been built up in the western Soviet
Union for early movement. The May proposal noted that 'supplies of
fuel intended for the western military districts have to a significant ex-
tent been stored in the inner military districts (due to a lack of storage
space in the territory [of the border districts]).' The supply difficulties
that the Red Army faced in the days immediately after 22 June are well
known, and that was without any movement forward. For example, at
his post-invasion trial, the doomed General Pavlov complained that his
Western MD had been granted a full allocation of fuel, but that the
fuel was still in Maikop in the North Caucasus.2 None of this was
consistent with a Soviet offensive in July 1941.
The need for more detailed planning is another factor that might
have affected timing. The military historian M. A. Gareev, who was a
General of the Army with extensive staff experience, noted that the
top-level war plans could only be the very beginning of the process,
and that at least three or four months of intensive staff activity would
be required to draft corresponding formation and unit plans. On the
other hand, the earlier versions of war plans should already have led to
some lower-level planning. Timoshenko and Meretskov's October
1940 acceptance of the September 1940 war plan, for example, speci-
fied that 'all plans for the deployment and action of forces ... are to be
completed by 1 May 1941.'3
1 Zhukov, Vospominaniia, i. 312, 367; Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 44; Trubetskoi
report, 26 May 1941, Tyl Krasnoi Armii v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941-194$ gg. Dokumenty i
materialy, ed. V. A. Zolotarev et al. (Moscow, 1996), RA/VO, xxv (xiv), 54-60; B. W. Menning,
'Sovetskie zheleznye dorogi i planirovanie voennykh deistvii. 1941 god', in Voina i polittka, ed. Chu-
barian, pp. 359-65. On the Kiev MD in particular, see Purkaev memo, c. Dec. 1940, 1941 god, i. 491-
2.
2 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, pp. 44-5; Interrogation of General Pavlov, 7 July 1941, 1941
god, ii. 462.
3 Gareev, Stranitsy, p. 96; Timoshenko and Meretskov, memo to Stalin and Molotov, no earlier than
844 Evan Mawdsley
The final version of the May plan, tak

tions, also included long-term defensive pr
significant change to the original documen
wrote in Section VI ('Covering the Conc
involved covering only the frontier and
were logical elements of preparing an o
the following paragraph: 'Simultaneously
accelerate \forsirovaty] the constructio
regions, to begin construction of fortif
Ostashkov-Pochep [140 miles west of M
construction of new fortified regions in
gary and also to continue the constructi
line of the old state border.' There wer
defence: the current border, the line of
called 'Stalin Line', which had been part
equip the defences of the new frontier),
covering Moscow. This was also put in a
to Stalin at the end of the document in Section IX: 'to confirm the
proposal for the construction of new fortified regions'. All of this
assumed action set well in the future (1942 for the Hungarian border
fortifications).1 More important, it implied a diversion of scarce re-
sources from the manning and equipping of the offensive formations to
the manning and equipping of the layered defence of central Russia.
This suggests at some stage - and perhaps at the highest level - an
element of compromise or confusion, and perhaps both.
To sum up, in the May plan Zhukov and Timoshenko were certainly
requesting that steps be taken. Their 'plan of intended military actions'
was - strangely enough - the least controversial aspect of the docu-
ment: they were just restating the September 1940 and March 1941
war plans for offensive operations in southern Poland. They were also,
it would seem, proposing the beginning of mobilization, for which
implementation of the covering plans was an essential first step (and
which in turn required the final drafting of those plans by 1 June 1941).
But it is not clear that, for the high command, mobilization and
deployment were directly to be followed by the 'sudden blow'. The
mobilized Red Army and air force would still have been far below the
MP-41 establishment. There are references in the high command plan
to long-term production, logistics, and defensive factors, and these are
not consistent with an attack on Germany in July 1941.
* * * * *
Such were the evolution and main featur

Soviet general staff in the Timoshenko e
5 Oct. 1940, 1941 god, i. 290.

1 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, pp. 44-5.
deviation to the May 1941 plan. Stalin's involvement in this proc

remains controversial. If Stalin approved the May plan, then the So
Union was readying an offensive war against Germany. This is in
with the general argument of Rezun-Suvorov and the more extre
revisionists. If he rejected the plan, it might suggest an irrespons
initiative by the Red Army high command. Traditionalists, in fa
question the importance of the May plan. Some Russian historian
assert that the May document was just a 'variant' for discussion wi
the general staff, one of several proposed scenarios; O. V. Vishlev
gued that 'the document in question never left the confines of t
general staff building.'1 In the West, Glantz suggested that perh
Stalin never even saw the May 1941 war plan. In Stumbling Colos
the May 1941 proposal is left out of the discussion of 'war and strategi
deployment planning on the eve of war' and is confined to a late
chapter on 'Red Army Intelligence on the Eve of the War'; Glant
most recent book on 1941 relegates the May proposal to an endno
Even Roberts, writing in 1995, was non-committal about whether
plan was seen by Stalin.2
Stalin was not as well informed at this time about operational
military matters as he would be later (he probably knew more about
questions of military production). Zhukov maintained that the dictator
showed little interest before the war in the activities of the general staff,
and that there was never a comprehensive discussion on the state of
national defence, including a discussion 'about our military options
and about the options of our potential enemy'. According to Zhukov,
Stalin only infrequently heard reports from him and Timoshenko.
While I would not disagree with this assessment of Stalin's limitations,
Stalin clearly occupied himself with military questions even at this
time. He received Timoshenko in his Kremlin office on average once a
week between October 1940 and 22 June 1941, and he would have
been in frequent contact with Voroshilov, who was a member of the
politburo and chairman of Sovnarkom's defence committee. Stalin
does seem genuinely to have been an advocate of the strategy of the
offensive: 'defence', he privately told Timoshenko in December 1940,
'is really useful only when it is a means for the organization of an
offensive, and not as an end in itself.'3 Stalin was aware of the military
planning that was going on, and he had approved the southern variant
of the September 1940 war plan. He had also followed the course of
the January 1941 war games, and had been sent the August 1940 and
March 1941 operational plans, as well as the February 1941 mobiliza-
1 Vishlev, Nakanune, pp. 34-5.

2 Glantz, Colossus, p. 245 and Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 (Stroud, 2001), p. 215 n. 11;
Roberts, 'Planning', p. 1320. Roberts appears to have become less non-committal by the time a
Russian-language version of her article was published in 1999, but she still only stated that 'some
[unspecified] sources suggest' that the proposal was put to Stalin ('Oshibki', p. 240).
3 Zhukov, Vospominaniia, i. 329; Korotkov, 'Posetiteli', pp. 28-52; 1941 god, i. 498 n. 2.
846 Evan Mawdsley
tion plan (MP-41). Moreover, he had appo

evidently made the decisions to replace Sh
and Meretskov with Zhukov.
To deal with the most basic question: what is the evidence that
Stalin knew about the May 1941 war plan? First of all, the document
was addressed to him. While it is true that the manuscript has a num-
ber of corrections, and it is surprising that a less-than-perfect docu-
ment should have been sent by the general staff to Stalin, the two
pages that have been published in facsimile indicate that the manu-
script was far from a rough draft. It is laid out very neatly in Vasilev-
skii's handwriting.1 A previous plan had corrections; Vatutin had
added at least one note to the March 1941 plan, that is, the comment
about 12 June (see above). At least three explanations suggest them-
selves for the less-than-perfect state of the existing copy of the May
plan: the requirements of haste and secrecy may have led to the use of
an unfinished version; the changes may have been made in Stalin's
presence', and, conceivably, a final draft of this most sensitive document
was prepared, kept by Stalin, and subsequently destroyed.
Second, there is strong memoir or oral evidence that Stalin con-
sidered the May war plan. Admittedly, this does not come directly
from the small group of senior party and military leaders who could
have known about the planning. Although Zhukov and Vasilevskii only
died in the 1970s, and both were eventually allowed to publish long
and important memoirs, neither specifically mentioned the May 1941
war plan. Timoshenko, who died in 1970, left no written memoirs, and
Vatutin, Zhukov's deputy in 1941, was mortally wounded by Ukrainian
nationalist guerrillas in 1944. Nothing beyond fragments of the basic
May war plan was produced from Stalin's papers by his biographer
Volkogonov, and there is no reference to the May 1941 war plan in the
interviews with Molotov published by Feliks Chuev. (There is, how-
ever, one interesting comment in a passage about the immediate pre-
war period: 'Marxism-Leninism ... stands for offensive action when it
is possible, and when it is not we wait.'2) However, there are three
persuasive second-hand sources. Colonels V. A. Anfilov and N. A.
Svetlishin recorded separate interviews with Zhukov in the 1960s in
which Zhukov said that the proposal for a pre-emptive attack was given
to Stalin in May 1941 (and, as we shall see, also stated that it was
rejected by Stalin). And General of the Army N. G. liashchenko gave
to the journalist and historian Lev Bezymenskii an account of a con-
versation with Timoshenko which made the same point.
Evaluating this evidence requires a short detour to events decades
after 1941. Zhukov fell out with Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, was dis-
1 Bezymenskii, Gitler, pp. 478-9.

2 Zhukov, Vospominaiia; Vasilevskii, Deb; F. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz dnevnika Feliksa
Chueva (Moscow, 1991), p. 40.
missed from his post as minister of defence, and was retired from
army. In October 1964, however, Khrushchev himself was ousted
Zhukov, who was still only sixty-eight, began gradually to be rehab
tated. By coincidence, the Soviet Union was also approaching the
twentieth anniversary of the final campaigns of the Second World War
and of the victory over Germany. Zhukov was eager to tell his own side
of the wartime story, and now for the first time it was politically pos-
sible for historians to interview him. At the end of 1964, N. A.
Svetlishin, then a forty-seven-year-old colonel working in Voenno-
istoricheskii zhurnal [Military-Historical Journal], went to see Zhukov at
his dacha at Sosnovka, outside Moscow. He proposed that Zhukov tell
his side of the Battle of Berlin, and an article was duly published.
Svetlishin gained Zhukov's confidence and, despite considerable op-
position from the marshal's rivals in the military establishment, wrote
the assessment in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal that marked Zhukov's
seventieth birthday in 1966.1 Some twenty-six years later, Svetlishin,
now a septuagenarian himself, produced a biography of Zhukov based
on numerous conversations. In his book, he reported a discussion with
Zhukov about the May war plan. According to this, the Red Army
leadership had by the middle of May 1941 come to the conclusion that
war was inevitable. In Zhukov's words, 'considering the situation, and
having taken the advice of Marshal S. K. Timoshenko, I wrote a
memorandum [dokladnaia zapiska] in which I set out my proposal for
the acceleration of the strategic deployment of the Red Army and for
the carrying out of the first operations ... I sent this memorandum to
Stalin via his personal secretary Poskrebyshev.'2 Svetlishin's book, it
should be noted, appeared after Volkogonov had revealed the existence
of the May 1941 war plan in his biography of Stalin in 1989.
Svetlishin was not the only military historian interviewing the newly
rehabilitated Zhukov at Sosnovka in 1964-5. In May 1965, Colonel
V. A. Anfilov arranged (through Vasilevskii's son) the first of a series of
interviews. Among the subjects discussed was the May 1941 war plan,
which Anfilov had become aware of in 1958 while working in the mili-
tary science administration ( Voenno-nauchnoe upravlenie) of the general
staff on a secret history of the war. At that time, citation of the docu-
ment had been forbidden by the highest levels of the Red Army.3 Seven
years later, Anfilov was able directly to ask Zhukov about the war plan.
The marshal replied: 'The concrete task [of drafting a directive] was
assigned to A. M. Vasilevskii. On 15 May, he delivered the draft of the
directive to the people's commissar [Timoshenko] and me. However,
1 G. K. Zhukov, 'Na Berlinskom napravlenii', VIZh (1965, no. 6), pp. 12-22; N. A. Svetlishin, 'Ot
soldata do marshals', VIZh (1966, no. 11), pp. 31-40.
2 N. A. Svetlishin, Krutye stupeni sud'by: Zhizn' i ratnye podvigi marshala G. K Zhukova (Khabarovsk,
1992), p. 57.
3 V. A. Anfilov, '"Novaia versiia" i realnost': Spor o torn, byl li udar Gitlera po SSSR uprezhdaiush-
chim, davno reshen', Nezavisimaia gazeta, 7 April 1999.
848 Evan Mawdsley
we did not sign this document, and we de

make a report to Stalin about it.'1
The text of Anfilov's interview was pub
after Svetlishin's book, and it differs from
is a key link to Zhukov, and much depen
1965, he was a senior lecturer in military
academy. The following year, Anfilov esta
pendence with outspoken public criticism
leaders. In February 1966, there was a di
Marxism-Leninism, at which Anfilov condemned Voroshilov and
Marshal Budennyi for their part in the Red Army purges of 1937-8 ('It
makes me sick, at parades, when I see Voroshilov at the tribune').
More to the point, Anfilov made outspoken criticisms of Stalin, and in
the cautious new historical climate of the Leonid Brezhnev era this cost
him a promising mainstream military career. Nevertheless, Anfilov was
able to continue as an historian and scholar, and he would produce
some of the most important studies of 1941.2
The third account concerned Timoshenko. The people's commissar
of defence in 1941 was less forthcoming than many other wartime
leaders. His career had been blighted by the disastrous Battle of
Khar'kov in early 1942. He did not write memoirs or even grant inter-
views, although he was officially on active service until i960 (he died in
March 1970). 'I have not been able to talk to Timoshenko,' Anfilov
told the meeting in 1966; 'he speaks to nobody.'3 Nevertheless, Timo-
shenko did speak informally and frankly in the 1960s to one comrade,
N. G. Liashchenko, and in this conversation confirmed that the May
1941 war plan had been put to Stalin. As with the Anfilov account, this
version has a meeting between Timoshenko and Stalin, but Liash-
chenko also mentioned the presence of politburo members.4 It is the
most colourful version, as we shall see. Although third-hand, the inter-
mediaries are substantial figures. Liashchenko, born in 19 10, served as
a division commander in the Second World War; in the 1960s, he was
a General of the Army, commander of an MD, and a candidate
member of the party central committee.5 Liashchenko's account comes
to us through Bezymenskii, one of the leading Russian writers on the
Second World War, an editor of the current affairs journal Novoe
vremia, and a professor in the academy of military science.
To sum up, there are at least three second-hand accounts, based
initially on the oral evidence of Zhukov and Timoshenko, which indi-
cate that the May 1941 war plan was put to Stalin. Anfilov, Bezy-
1 Anfilov, 'Razgovor', p. 40.

2 Anfilov, 'Novaia versiia'; V. Petrov, 'June 22, 1941': Soviet Historians and the German Invasion
(Columbia, SC, 1968), p. 252. Anfilov died in 2002; for an obituary, see A. S. Orlov et al., 'Viktor
Aleksandrovich Anfilov', NNI (2002, no. 5), pp. 253-5.
3 Petrov, June 22, p. 253.
4 Bezymenkii, 'O plane', pp. 61-2 n. 27, citing notes of the author's conversation with Liashchenko.
5 Liashchenko, Nikolai Gngorevich , Sovetskaia voennaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1978), v. 63.
menskii, and Svetlishin are specialists with scholarly credentials

good contacts. There is no plausible reason why Zhukov and Timo
shenko (or Liashchenko) should have made up the story about the
presentation to Stalin of the May 1941 war plan. It is, then, uncon
cing to argue that Stalin never saw the May war plan, or that it ne
left the walls of the general staff building. The most likely time for t
war plan to have been discussed with Stalin is the evening of 19
1 94 1. According to Stalin's appointment diary Timoshenko, Zhuk
and Vatutin were alone with Stalin and Molotov for over an hour,
which is the first recorded meeting of Timoshenko and Zhukov with
Stalin after the document was completed (assuming it was completed
on 15 May).1 If Stalin had been given the plan immediately after it was
drafted, it is hard to think how he would not have discussed it at this
first meeting with Zhukov and Timoshenko; the presence of Vatutin,
the other key planner, was also significant.
If Stalin was aware of the plan, did he initiate it? The May plan was
evidently drafted immediately after Stalin's speeches in the Kremlin on
5 May to the graduates of various Red Army academies, an event
which the military and political leadership of the Soviet Union
attended. Anfilov's account of his interview with Zhukov has Zhukov
confirming the importance of Stalin's speeches: 'The idea to pre-empt
the German attack came to Timoshenko and me in connection with
Stalin's speech of 5 May 1941 ... in which he spoke of the possibility of
an offensive mode of action [o vozmozhnost* deistvovat* nastupateVnym
obrazom] . This speech, in the circumstances of the enemy concen-
tration of forces on our borders, convinced us of the need to work out
a directive involving a pre-emptive attack.' A reference to Stalin's 5
May speech is also made in Timoshenko's account (see below).2
Stalin did indeed refer to the doctrine of the offensive in his speeches
of 5 May (the full details of which were not made public at that time,
and not even until the 1990s). His main speech of 5 May concerned
the strength of the Red Army and the need not to overrate the German
armed forces. He also, however, blamed the defeat of the French in
1940 on their passive Maginot Line strategy. He was more out-
spoken in shorter speeches (toasts) at the reception that followed the
graduation ceremony. When a general proposed a toast to the 'Stalinist
foreign policy of peace', Stalin corrected him:
The policy of peace secured peace for our country. The policy of peace is a
good thing. We have up to now, up to this time, carried out a line [based on]
defence - up until the time when we have re-equipped our army, up until the
time we have supplied the army with the modern means of battle. And now,
when our army has been reconstructed, has been amply supplied [nasytili] with
equipment for modern battle, when we have become stronger, now it is neces-
1 Korotkov, Tosetiteli', pp. 47-8.

2 Anfilov, Razgovor, p. 41; Bezymenskii, 'Plan', pp. 61-2 n. 27.
8 so Evan Mawdsley
sary to go from defence to offense [ot oborony

country, we must act offensively. From defenc
offensive actions. We must transform our train
tion, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red
modern army is an offensive army.1
It would be naive to accept a sequence o

made his 5 May speech, completely changing Timoshenko and
Zhukov's outlook, after which they withdrew to their headquarters to
draft a response which they suddenly presented to Stalin two weeks
later. First of all, pre-war Soviet war plans, including those of Septem-
ber 1940 and March 1941, had involved 'an offensive mode of action'
(as indeed had Red Army strategy since the Civil War). Zhukov's
presentation to the December 1940 high command conference had
been about the 'offensive mode of action'.
Moreover, much of importance happened between the 5 May speech
and the completion of the May war plan on the 15th. As Timoshenko
and Zhukov were working on the May war plan and ordering certain
military preparations (see below), on the other side of the Kremlin
Communist Party officials were redrafting propaganda documents,
both for the army and for the population in general. The draft direct-
ives amplified and elaborated Stalin's words of 5 May. V. A. Nevezhin
has attempted to argue, on the basis of extensive research in the central
party archives, that an 'offensive war slogan' (lozung nastupateVnoi
voiny) dominated propaganda preparations after 5 May. He has cer-
tainly demonstrated that this was an elaborate process which directly
involved A. A. Zhdanov and A. S. Shcherbakov, who were central
committee (CC) secretaries. The secretariat of the CC was the core
administrative organ of the Communist Party: there were only five CC
secretaries, and all were full or candidate members of the politburo;
Stalin was a secretary (more accurately, general secretary). In other
words, this process was taking place at the highest level and involved
officials in day-to-day contact with Stalin.2
Conferences were held on 8-9 May in the CC secretariat, with the
editors of the major newspapers and journals and with those respon-
sible for the TASS news agency. Even more significant, there was a
meeting of the main military council on 14 May where Timoshenko,
Zhukov, and other senior Red Army commanders and commissars met
with Zhdanov, who was a co-ordinator of the propaganda campaign.
This main military council meeting took place as Timoshenko and
Zhukov were putting the finishing touches to the May war plan. The
meeting on 14 May seems to have been in the spirit of the new 'line'
put forward in Stalin's speeches of 5 May. After his report to this
meeting, Army Commissar 1st Class A. I. Zaporozhets, head of the
1 Stalin, speech of 5 May 1941, Istoricheskii arkhiv (1995, no. 2), pp. 26-31.
2 Nevezhin, Sindrom, pp. 186-251.
main administration of political propaganda of the Red Army

(GUPPKA), was ordered immediately to begin work on a draft direct-
ive on army propaganda.1
Two draft propaganda directives were eventually prepared (and it is
important to remember that these were drafts). The one for civilian
party organizations was prepared by the propaganda and agitation
administration (UP A) of the central committee and entitled 'On the
Current Tasks of Propaganda'. The directive for the military, 'On the
Tasks of the Political Propaganda in the Red Army in the Immediate
Period', was prepared by GUPPKA. Both covered almost exactly the
same ground as Stalin's 5 May speeches, and, although drafted by
different agencies, they shared a key core: '[The] new conditions under
which the country is living demand of party organizations a funda-
mental change in party-political work in the Bolshevik indoctrination
of the personnel of the Red Army, and of the whole Soviet people, in
the spirit of burning patriotism, revolutionary decisiveness, and con-
stant readiness to go over to a crushing offensive against the enemy.'
(The passage in the army document is nearly identical, and presumably
was based on the civilian document.)2 The draft civilian directive
explained the 'new conditions': Soviet 'military weakness was a thing
of the past,' and the Soviet Union could now fulfil Lenin's teaching
that 'the land of socialism . . . must take on itself the initiative of offen-
sive military actions against the capitalist encirclement with the object-
ive of widening the front of socialism.' In addition, 'the international
situation has become extremely critical, [and] military danger for our
country is approaching as never before. Under these conditions the
Leninist slogan "defend our land on the land of others [na chuzhoi
zemle zashchishchat' svoiu zemliu]" may at any moment be transformed
into practical action.'3
There were also important measures being taken by the Red Army
in these critical days between 5 and 15 May, and these must have had
Stalin's approval. Stalin remained, it should be stressed, in close
contact with the high command: Timoshenko and Zhukov had nearly
two hours alone with Stalin and Molotov on the evening of 10 May,
and the two officers also met Stalin for ninety minutes on the 12th, and
again for two hours on 14-15 May (after the main military council).
Perhaps significantly, the midnight meeting on 14-15 MaY was also
attended by one other official, Lazar' Kaganovich, politburo member
and people's commissar for transport (NKPS). This should be seen in
light of the third request in the May war plan (completed on the
following day): 'to demand of the NKPS the full and timely completion
1 Nevezhin, Sindrom, pp. 186-251.

2 Draft CC directive, c.28 May 1941, 'Dve direktivy 1941 g. o propagandistskoi podgotovke b5bK k
voine', ed. V. A. Nevezhin, Arkheograficheskii ezhegodnik za 199s gody p. 200; Draft GUPPKA
directive, c.9 June 1941, ibid., p. 203.
3 Dratt CC directive, c.28 May 1941, ibid., p. 200.
852 Evan Mawdsley
of railway construction according to th

the general staff ordered the movemen
2 ist, and 22nd Armies) from the interi
their strength totalled twenty-eight rifle
high command reserve, which would fea
carry out a hidden concentration of fo
frontier, in the first instance to concentra
mand reserve'). A document of 13 June
being part of the high command reserve
were intended for the Southwestern Arm
Western Army Group; 21st Army was al
Kiev MD.3
Also, very soon after 5 May, Timoshenko and Zhukov were allowed
to take the initiative of ordering that 'covering plans' be prepared by
the frontier MDs, which were to be ready within a week or two
(depending on the MD). The most likely date for sending these orders
out was, significantly, 14 May. Preparation of the covering plans can
be seen as a reaction to the German troop build-up, but bolstering the
border defences was an essential first stage in the implementation of an
offensive war plan. The mobilization and deployment of the main Red
Army striking force had to be covered, and it was also necessary to
prepare those sectors of the front - the future Northwestern and West-
ern Army Groups - that would be on the defensive as the attack of
Southwestern Army Group began. The May war plan would request
precisely this preliminary step: 'to organize a firm defence and a
covering of the state border, using for this all forces of the border
[military] districts and nearly all aviation which has been assigned for
deployment in the West'; indeed, these plans were to be drawn up by 1
June.4
Two weeks after the 5 May 1941 speech, and very shortly after
the main military council meeting of 14 May, Stalin seems to have
changed the pace of the preparations. Our knowledge of what hap-
pened is, once again, based on third-hand accounts: Anfilov found no
documents in the archives about Stalin's reaction, but states that
Zhukov told him the following:
On 1 5 May, [Vasilevskii] delivered the draft of the directive to the people's

commissar [Timoshenko] and me. However, we did not sign this document,
and we decided as a preliminary step to make a report to Stalin about it. He
immediately exploded when he heard about the pre-emptive blow
l Korotkov, 'Posetiteli', p. 47; Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 45.

2 Zhukov, Vospominaniia, i. 345.
3 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 43; Vatutin, Report on Deployment, 13 June 1941, 1941
god, ii. 359-6o.
4 Some of the covering plans and responses were published in several numbers of Voenno-istoricheskii
zhurnal in 1996; see Iu. A. Gor'kov and Iu. N. Semin, 'Konets globaPnoi lzhi', VIZh (1996, nos. 2, 3,
4> 5j 6); Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 44.
\predupredheVnyi udar] against the German forces. 'Have you gone mad
you want to provoke the Germans?,5 he barked out irritably. We referred to
situation that had developed on the borders of the USSR, and to the idea
contained in his speech of 5 May ... 'I said that in order to encourage the
people there, so that they would think about victory and not about the
invincibility of the German army, which is what the world's press is blaring on
about,' growled Stalin. And thus was buried our idea for a pre-emptive blow.1
The version that Liashchenko passed on to Bezymenskii, based on

his talks with Timoshenko, was even more dramatic. According to this,
Zhukov lost his composure and had to be removed to another room
when Stalin shouted at him and accused him of being a warmonger.
Stalin then turned on Timoshenko with the same charges. Timoshenko
cited Stalin's speech, to which Stalin allegedly replied, addressing
those at the meeting, 'Look everyone [...] Timoshenko is healthy and
has a large head, but his brain is evidently tiny . . . What I said [on 5
May] was for the people, their vigilance had to be raised, and you must
understand that Germany will never on its own move to attack Russia
[...] If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces
without our permission, then bear in mind that heads will roll.' Stalin
then left, slamming the door.2 In Svetlishin's rather different version,
published before Anfilov's account, Zhukov sent [vruchil] the war plan
to Stalin via A. N. Poskrebyshev, Stalin's powernil personal assistant,
and was summoned the following day by Poskrebyshev:
Stalin was very angry with my [Zhukov5 s] report, and he [Poskrebyshev] was
instructed to inform me that I was to write no further memoranda directly [to
Stalin]; the chairman of the council of ministers [i.e., Stalin] was better in-
formed about our long-term relations with Germany than the chief of the
general staff, [and] the Soviet Union still had enough time to prepare for the
decisive battle with fascism. Carrying out my proposal would only benefit the
enemies of Soviet power.3
Is it possible, on the other hand, that Stalin not only saw (and in-
stigated) the May 1941 war plan but that he accepted the plan and
ordered that it should be put into operation immediately? The
revisionists claim that, as of 22 June, the Soviet Union was actually
planning to attack Germany, perhaps in July 1941. Mel'tiukhov, who
has worked extensively in the military archives, argues that the Soviet
attack was originally set for 12 June 1941, then postponed because of
the diplomatic uncertainty following the flight of Rudolf Hess to
Scotland. This was Stalin's 'missed chance' (upushchenyi shans) in the
title of his book published in 2000. Based on the rate of concentration
of the first echelon armies, Mel'tiukhov concludes that the date was
1 Anfilov, Razgovor, p. 41.

2 Bezymenskii, 'Plan', pp. 61-2 n. 27.
3 Svethshin, Krutye stupem, pp. 57-8.
854 Evan Mawdsley
then re-set for 15 July or shortly after i

decision was made to go to war, and that
likely. Rezun-Suvorov states that the day
mobilization (Den* 'M') would have been S
Timoshenko and Zhukov were not, afte
'warmongers'. Both Mel'tiukhov and Bob
the desiderata of the 15 May war plan wer
filled, a process which began before the M
and which continued in late May.2 On 24
important meeting of senior military lead
detailed records have not yet been produ
shenko, Zhukov, Vatutin, the head of the
and commissars of the Leningrad MD an
the commanders of the air forces of the Western and Kiev MDs. There
was apparently no comparable meeting, combining the central and
field military leaders, at any other date in the first half of 194 1. It is
striking that this meeting has never been dealt with by 'official' Russian
military historians, and it remains one of the major mysteries of the
pre-Barbarossa period. Some revisionist historians have, not unreason-
ably, read much into the absence of any discussion: had the partici-
pants simply considered the German threat and measures to strength-
en Soviet defences, this meeting would surely have been used later as
evidence of the foresight and professional competence of the Red
Army's leaders.3
It does, on balance, seem unlikely that Stalin gave the go-ahead for
the immediate implementation of the May plan. The memoir evidence
cited above must carry considerable weight, and military measures that
would have been essential for the lead-up to a 'sudden blow' were not
carried out. Above all, there was no full-scale hidden mobilization;
concentration of forces was going on, but not at a pace that would
allow an early attack. Table 1 gives both the forces specified in the May
plan, those initially available, and those that, according to Vatutin and
Zhukov, had become available by the middle of June. Vatutin's figures
would appear to indicate what forces would be available if war began
immediately. Under the May plan, the Southwestern Army Group was
to have 122 divisions, but even in mid-June, in the eight armies of
Southwestern Army Group and in one army on the left flank of West-
ern Army Group, the total strength available was still at most 84
divisions. Vatutin added to this 20 rifle divisions which were physically
in the Volga, Khar'kov, and Orel MDs. His figures suggest where the
final elements of the striking force would have come from: there were
1 Mel'tiukhov, Sham, pp. 290, 411-12, 509; Bobylev, 'Tochku', pp. 51-8; Suvorov, Icebreaker, pp.
344ff.; V. Suvorov, Ledokol. Den' 'M' (Moscow, 1997), pp. 560, 566-7.
2 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 45, Mel'tiukhov, Sham, pp. 408-10; Bobylev. "Tochku',
p. 51.
3 Korotkov, 'Posetiteli', p. 48; Bobylev, 'Tochku', pp. 52ff.; Mel'tiukhov, Sham, pp. 377.
23 divisions in the two high command reserve (RGK) armies (16th

19th), which were deploying behind Southwestern Army Group,
further 11 divisions were in 24th Army, one of the 'Central Arm
the RGK, and which was forming south-west of Moscow. Toget
with the forces on the frontier, these made for a total of 138 divisio
According to Vatutin a further 17 divisions would be available 'fo
west' (for either Western Army Group or Southwestern Army Gr
'under favourable conditions'.1 According to the May plan, the
centrated force of the whole Red Army in the West was to number 1
divisions. On 22 June, Soviet forces in the first and second stra
echelons numbered only 108 divisions: 56 rifle and cavalry divisio
the western frontier and 52 divisions (including 24 tank and 12 m
ized divisions) at a distance of 60-250 miles from the frontier. Ma
the these divisions were under-strength in personnel and equipm
Another sense of the shortfall is that, under MP-41, the Western
should have had 6.5 million personnel; on 22 June, they numbe
about three million.2
A number of other measures would have been expected. No wartime
headquarters was created, and there was no Soviet air reconnaissance
over those German airfields and lines of communication which would
have been the first targets of a Soviet 'sudden blow ... from the air'.
Implementation would also have involved making the plan known
beyond a very small inner circle, and the drafting and distribution of
detailed orders; such activity would have left traces in archives or
memoirs, or would have been discovered by the German invaders.
Fifteen years later, Zhukov stated that on 22 June 'the general staff did
not have operational and mobilization plans which had been com-
pleted and approved by the Government.'3 As for the propaganda
campaign, the 'offensive war' directives were only composed in draft
form four or five weeks after Stalin's 5 May speeches, and they had still
not been approved three or four weeks later, on 22 June.
This is not the place to go in depth into the subject of Stalin's per-
ceptions and intentions. Molotov correctly urged caution on this
subject, while criticizing Vasilevskii's memoirs: '"Stalin believed this,
Stalin thought that." As if anyone knew what Stalin thought about the
war.'4 My working hypothesis, and it cannot be more than a hypoth-
esis, is that Stalin did not want war with Germany in the summer of
1 94 1, did not see it as the most likely event (or at least did not see it as
unavoidable), but did not necessarily fear it either. He did not expect it,
but this was not because he naively trusted Nazi Germany, not because
he awaited an ultimatum, and not because he mistook German mili-
tary preparations for diplomatic pressure. Above all, Stalin assumed
1 Zhukov, Vospominaniia, i. 367; Vatutin, Report on Deployment, 13 June 1941, 1941 god, ii. 358-61.
2 Zolotarev, Velikaia otecheswennaia, i. 122; Gareev, Stranitsy, p. 127.
3 Zhukov, draft speech of May 1956, Zhukov, p. 138.
4 Chuev, 140 besed, p. 42.
856 Evan Mawdsley
Germany would not act until after the British Empire had been
defeated or forced to make peace. This was consistent with Stalin's
understanding of the history of the First World War, with the intel-
ligence reports he was receiving about German intentions, and with
what those reports were telling him about the deployment of the
Wehrmacht. He did not want war in the summer of 194 1 because the
Soviet armed forces were in the middle of huge re-equipment, fortifi-
cation, and training programmes and would be much more ready for
war in 1942 than in 1941. Time was on the side of the Soviet Union.
Stalin did not, I would argue, fear war in the summer of 1941
because the Soviet Union possessed very powerful, if imperfect, armed
forces. From Stalin's point of view, if war broke out in 1941 it would
be more difficult than a war in 1942, but not a disaster. Although
Glantz and Gorodetsky have stressed Stalin's sense of the weakness of
his armed forces, they are both arguing from hindsight, from know-
ledge of what actually happened after 22 June. The basic argument of
Glantz's Stumbling Colossus is that the Red Army was in a disorganized
state, therefore Stalin could not possibly have been thinking of a pre-
emptive attack. Gorodetsky talks of the 'bankruptcy of the [Soviet]
military', and claims that this was why Stalin was frantic to make an
accommodation with Hitler. Both historians are right about the actual
flaws of the Red Army, but unconvincing in their argument that Stalin
- or the generals - saw those flaws before 22 June 1941.
Roberts takes a different line and portrays a Stalin desperate to be-
lieve in the power of the Red Army, even in its ability to carry out
successful offensive operations. There is an inconsistency in Roberts's
argument; she also argues that Stalin's confidence in the Red Army
was shaken by the Winter War, and she tends to make Stalin more
cautious than his generals. Courageously, she attempts to draw a
nuanced picture of the Soviet military-political system, but she depicts
Soviet military doctrine as some kind of elemental force beyond
Stalin's control, and with which he was swept along. I would argue
that there was little difference between the perceptions of Stalin and
the generals until perhaps the last months before June 1941.1 Stalin
himself gave a bullish assessment of the Winter War in a speech to an
April 1940 conference: 'We did not just beat the Finns - that was not
such a big thing. The main thing about our victory was that we
defeated the technology, tactics, and strategy of the leading states of
Europe, whose representatives were the Finns' instructors.' Interest-
ingly, according to Stalin one of the reasons the Finns lost was that
they had a defensive doctrine: 'An army that is trained not for the of-
fensive but for passive defence ... I cannot call such an army an army.'
A year later, in his famous 5 May 1941 speech, Stalin told the gradu-
ating cadets that 'real experience in the restructuring of our army we
1 Roberts, 'Planning', pp. 1295, 1320; 'Oshibki', pp. 229-31.
drew from the Russo-Finnish War and from the current war in the
West.'1
Stalin was prepared to plan 'realistically' for contingencies, and even
to sanction covert preparation for war. Soviet-German relations might
worsen or operations in the West might so entangle the Wehrmacht that
a Soviet-initiated offensive would be possible. (There is, however, very
little in the Soviet war plans about the implications of a German
invasion of Britain, which would have tied down or weakened the bulk
of the Luftwaffe as well as at least a part of the German army.) Stalin
did not disagree with the overall doctrine and deployment of the Red
Army and was genuinely an advocate of offensive warfare: if relations
with Nazi Germany were to break down irretrievably, he apparently
had no qualms about the May document's 'plan of intended military
actions', the offensive into southern Poland.
After the war broke out, Stalin would explain much of the early
'German-Fascist' success by prior mobilization: 'the German forces ...
were already fully mobilized and the 170 divisions ... moved up to the
frontiers of the USSR were in a state of complete readiness, awaiting
only a signal to act, while Soviet forces still had to be mobilized and
moved up to the borders.'2 Six weeks earlier, however, 'hidden mobil-
ization and hidden concentration' may have been the sticking point for
Stalin when he considered the May war plan. The essence of that plan,
despite many ambiguities, was arguably an attempt by the Red Army
high command to secure Stalin's agreement to immediate mobiliza-
tion, but this he was not prepared to give. Vasilevskii stated that 'it was
known to responsible workers of the general staff that . . . Timoshenko
on several occasions in May and June 1941 made requests to I. V.
Stalin about the necessity of carrying out the immediate general mobil-
ization of the country, or of the mobilization of even those forces which
were designated in the operational plan for deployment along our
western borders, but permission for this was not received.'3 A hidden
mobilization of the scale required to make the 'sudden blow' into
Poland a practical possibility meant calling up millions of men, hun-
dreds of thousands of horses, and tens of thousands of vehicles; general
mobilization meant increasing the strength of the Red Army to a total
of 8,700,000 men. Forward movement of divisions up to their staging
points would obviously have been very hard to conceal. Stalin must
have believed that if the Germans learned about large-scale mobiliza-
tion and concentration, they would go to war. This was a point empha-
sized by his military mentor Shaposhnikov in his major theoretical
1 Stalin, speech of 17 April 1940, Zimniaia voina 1939-40, ed. E. N. Kul'kov and O. A. Rzheshevski
(Moscow, 1998), ii. 282; Stalin, speech of 5 May 1941, Istoricheskii arkhiv (1995, no. 2), p. 26. The
Winter War did involve appalling Russian losses, but the Red Army won a decisive victory in the
Karelian Isthmus, and it won it under difficult weather conditions.
2 Radio address, 3 July 1941, 1941 god, ii. 449.
3 Vasilevskii, 'Nakanune', p. 10.
858 Evan Mawdsley
work of the 1920s, and based on the Ru

break of the First World War: 'Mobiliza
wrote, 'and we cannot understand it in a
even more true in dealing with the apparen
of the Third Reich. Timoshenko and Zh
military solution, which began with mob
mobilization would effectively close all o
to wait. The Germans might be causing
concentrated the bulk of their forces in
the moment, to use diplomatic and econ
Nazi threat.
The same reasoning may well have applied to propaganda planning,
as implementation of the propaganda directives would have been the
political equivalent of a Red Army general mobilization. The draft
civilian directive made clear what would have been involved: 'all means
of propaganda and agitation - newspapers and magazines, brochures
and books, lectures and reports, meetings of the toilers and discus-
sions', were to be subordinated to the 'all-important task' of incul-
cating 'the militant offensive spirit of the Red Army and of the whole
Soviet people'.2 Such a propaganda campaign could only have led to a
drastic worsening of relations with Germany, and indeed would have
provoked a German attack.
Stalin's reasoning, at least to me, is understandable. Less clear is the
reasoning and behaviour of generals like Timoshenko, Zhukov, Vatu-
tin, and Vasilevskii, a phenomenon first brought out in the West by
Roberts.3 The generals - and not Stalin - proposed ambitious offensive
preparations, notably in the September 1940 and March and May 1941
war plans, the last of which included a pre-emptive surprise attack. Of
course, at one level these officers were right: against Hitler there could
only be a military solution. Unfortunately, the Red Army high com-
mand did not have a realistic military solution: they advocated general
mobilization when that measure, even while 'hidden', would run a
strong risk of leading to war with Germany. The generals should also
have been more aware than Stalin of the Red Army's weaknesses.
Many shortcomings did become obvious after the Soviet-Finnish War,
and they had been elaborated in the Voroshilov/Timoshenko hand-
over documents (Aktpriema). It might be argued that Timoshenko and
Zhukov only put forward the May 1941 war plan when they suddenly
learned (on 5 May) of Stalin's change of 'line' to an offensive strategy.
Going against this, however, is the fact that Soviet military doctrine
1 B. M. Shaposhnikov, Vospominaniia. Voenno-nauchnye trudy (Moscow, 1974), p. 558 (from Mosg

QTtnii).
2 Draft CC directive, c.28 May 1941, Nevezhin, 'Dve direktivy', p. 202.
3 This is one of the main themes of Roberts, 'Planning'. Roberts is more concerned, however, about
the technical shortsightedness of the military planners, than about the diplomatic implications of
mobilization and concentration.
had long been offensively minded, and the May 1941 war plan w
only a variant of the Red Army's earlier plans. Bezymenskii suggested
different explanation, that for Zhukov the purpose of the May war pl
was to make Stalin see the seriousness of the situation, to get som
kind of response to the German threat.1 Such an interpretation see
too charitable.
The generals do seem to have believed that the Red Army could
feasibly go to war against Germany, with an offensive strategy using
existing resources but after a considerable period of preparation. From
their point of view, this would not be ideal, but it would keep the
Germans from gaining the initiative. The generals were aware of the
great size of the Red Army in terms of personnel and equipment, and
possibly saw the Soviet-Finnish war as indicative of the power, rather
than the weakness, of the Red Army. An example of this wishful
thinking was Voroshilov's speech to a CC plenum in March 1940:
'Our army achieved this victory in a short time because the short-
comings in military preparations and in the work of the war depart-
ment [Voennogo Vedomstva] that were hidden at the start of the war
were in the main liquidated at the instructions of and under the leader-
ship of com. Stalin ... in the course of the war itself.' It was the
'victors' of the Winter War - notably Timoshenko and Meretskov -
who led the Red Army in 1940. The generals may also have believed
that adequate reforms had been implemented in the year which fol-
lowed the war: this was Zhukov's view, in the opinion of one of his
biographers.2 As for the May version of the war plan, with the 'sudden
blow', the generals were also probably more pessimistic than Stalin
about the likelihood of a German attack. If Russia was going to have to
fight anyway, then it was best to seize the initiative.
Stalin's near-fatal cadres policy, going back to the purges of 1937-8
(and perhaps to the less-known ones of 1930-1), had thrown up a
supreme military leadership which, at the time, was inexperienced or
incompetent. The surviving military vydvizhentsy, the men who were
'moved up' to the top of the Red Army ground forces, were, almost
without exception, former enlisted men in their mid-forties. The situ-
ation was even worse in the Red Army air force, where young combat
veterans from Spain or China were given command posts for which
they were poorly prepared: for example, Lieutenant General P. V.
Rychagov, the overall commander of the Red Army air force in the first
months of 194 1, was only thirty years old. All these commanders had
been educated and socialized in a military system which exaggerated
1 Bezymenskii, 'Plan', pp. 64-5.

2 Voroshilov, speech of 28 March 1940, Tainy i uroki zimnei voiny. 1939-1940, ed. N. L. Volkovskii et
al. (St Petersburg, 2000), p. 445; B. Sokolov, Neizvestnyi Zhukov: Portret bez retushi (Minsk, 2000),
pp. 222-3; lessons of the Winter War are also discussed in V. A. Anfilov, 'Korennaia perestroika
obucheniia i vospitaniia v Krasnoi Armii posle sovetsko-finliandskoi voiny', VIZh (2001, no. 1), pp.
26-36, and C. van Dyke, The Soviet Invasion of Finland, 1939-40 (London, 1997), pp. 189-220.
86o Evan Mawdsley
the role of the offensive. Meanwhile, ext

in Stalin's hands, and frequent changes o
calculations of mobilization capacity and
confused, disjointed, and unrealistic.
The individuals who made the military
comings. Timoshenko (more than Zhukov
led the people's commissariat of defence
September 1940, March 1941, and May 1
His serious limitations as a leader and pla
in the late summer of 1941 in the central p
at Khar'kov. Zhukov and Vasilevskii, who
the half dozen outstanding military leade
World War, on either side, were, in 1941
youthful officers who, in any other ma
nowhere near high command. 'It must be
unpublished memoir written after the w
commissar [Timoshenko] nor I had the n
preparation of the armed forces for the k
1 94 1. The experience of conducting war
later - in the course of the war.'1
Zhukov, the third chief of staff in six months, had not served on the
general staff before and was temperamentally unsuited to the job. Ac-
cording to his memoirs, he tried to turn down the January 1941 ap-
pointment: 'I have never worked in staffs,' he told Stalin. 'I have
always been a line officer. I cannot be chief of the general staff.' This
was not false modesty; in a testimonial written ten years earlier (1930),
Zhukov's superior had written positively about his will and decisiveness
but made a significant reservation: 'May be usefully employed as a
deputy division commander or commander of a mechanized unit . . .
Cannot be assigned to staff and teaching work, he fundamentally hates
it.'2 Zhukov was an energetic young commander who had shown
ruthless ability in an extraordinary battle fought over long supply lines
on the remote border of Mongolia. On the other hand, the defeat of
the green Japanese 23rd Division at Khalkin Gol in the summer of
1939 hardly gave Zhukov adequate experience for preparing a huge
European army for battle against the Wehrmacht. In a conversation in
1968 with the writer Konstantin Simonov, Zhukov admitted as much:
'Before my [January 1941] appointment I did not have experience of
staff work and at the beginning of the war, by my own reckoning, I was
not a sufficiently experienced and prepared chief of the general staff,
leaving aside the fact that I was inherently drawn not to staff but to
command work.' Several years earlier, Zhukov had admitted specific
shortcomings in co-ordinating front and rear, something which would
1 Zhukov, unpublished memoir, 1941 god, ii. 501.

2 Zhukov, Vospominaniia, i. 296; Sokolov, Zhukov, p. 202.
have been crucial for the massive operations which the 1941 war p
envisaged:
On the eve of the war, operational co-ordination of the supply and rear services
of the people's commissariat [of defence] was concentrated in the general staff.
The mobilization and deployment of the rear of the army groups and armies
was dealt with by the general staff's plans for mobilization and deployment.
Even by the time the war started, not only had I been unable to take control of
this most complicated and weighty business, but I was not even able to
become familiar with it in the way that I should have.
The administrative structure, regardless of Zhukov's abilities or limita-

tions, was cumbersome and over-centralized; the chief of the general
staff was in charge of three subordinate administrations - signals, fuel
supply, and air defence - as well as the senior military academies. In
any event, in one of his interviews with Anfilov, Zhukov admitted -
twenty-five years after the fact - that he had been wrong: 'Now I
consider that it was good that [Stalin] did not agree with us at that
time [about a pre-emptive attack] . Otherwise, given the state of our
forces, there would have been a catastrophe much more massive than
our forces suffered near Khar'kov in May 1942. 51
Vasilevskii was less convinced that the plans he drafted in 1 940-1
would not have been feasible. 'The problem', he told Simonov in 1967,
'was not a lack of operational plans, but the impossibility of executing
them in the prevailing situation. And it prevailed because Stalin was
trying ... by any possible means, to avoid war.' In an unpublished
interview given in 1965, Vasilevskii argued that a necessary step to
repel the blow of an enemy army of 5,500,000 men was 'the concen-
tration and deployment on the western state border of all the mobilized
forces in accordance with the operational plan [emphasis added]'. The
'operational plan' - even if we leave aside the May war plan - was
essentially that of September 1940 and March 1941, with preparations
for an attack into southern Poland. According to Vasilevskii, repelling
the enemy blow could be achieved 'only by the main forces of our
armed forces under the necessary precondition of their timely
[svoevremennogo] raising to full combat readiness and complete deploy-
ment along our borders before the beginning of the treacherous attack
on us by fascist Germany. It was entirely possible for our country to
achieve this.'2 In 1940-1, however, Vasilevskii had only limited service
experience, having commanded an infantry regiment until 1931 and
then moving on to staff posts. Zhukov's private comments, written on
6 December 1965 about the text of the second Vasilevskii interview,
are interesting, especially in light of his own responsibility for the May
1941 war plan:
1 K. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia: Razmyshleniia o I. V. Stalin (Moscow, 1990), p.

308; Zhukov, unpub. memoir, 1941 god, ii. 507 and Vospominaniia, i. 305; Anfilov, 'Razgovor', p. 41.
2 Simonov, Glazami> p. 397; Vasilevskii, 'Nakanune', pp. 9, 11.
862 Evan Mawdsley
A. M. Vasilevskii's explanation does not entire

the Sovpet] Union would have been quickly d
our forces on the frontier on the eve of the wa
able to achieve their existing plan to destroy
frontier. It is just as well that this did not ha
had been destroyed in the area of the st[ate] bo
have had the possibility to fight the war succ
grad would have been taken in 1941.1
Any damage resulting from a linear defence of the frontier

('deploy [ing] all our forces on the frontier') would have been much
smaller than that resulting from an attempt to move forward, to imple-
ment the general Soviet war plan for an offensive into southern Poland,
including Timoshenko and Zhukov's final 'sudden blow against the
enemy, both from the air and on land'. Zhukov, arguably, was ad-
mitting as much here, although presumably he was reluctant, even in
private correspondence, to speak openly about the offensive war plan.
The May 1941 war plan was inadequate because it did not anticipate
the German attack which actually occurred on 22 June. Thinking
counter-factually, the May war plan would have been a failure even if
the Germans had not attacked in June 1941 and the Red Army had had
the chance to launch the first blow in - for the sake of argument - the
late summer of 194 1. Given the performance actually demonstrated by
the Red Army and by the Wehrmacht in the months after 22 June, this
was no missed opportunity. V. Karpov's 1990 description of a victori-
ous Soviet attack is fanciful; M. I. Mel'tiukhov, a more serious scholar,
had no excuse for his far-fetched description of a successful Soviet pre-
emptive attack on 12 June.2 There was a disastrous mismatch between
the ambitious operational objectives of the Red Army and air force and
their low level of organizational cohesion, their poor training, and their
mix of obsolete and untested equipment. Zhukov's assessments -
made after 1941 - are no doubt correct.
Going beyond the counter-factual, even preparation for the offensive
envisaged in the September 1940, March 1941, and May 1941 war
plans had a most damaging effect on the Red Army's position on 22
June. It led to a mindset which contributed to the Red Army's failure
to foresee the actual German attack. It was reflected in a concentration
in operational thought and training on attack rather than defence.
Zhukov noted this in both published and unpublished memoirs.3 Two
aspects were certainly important. First, the Red Army's offensive pos-
ture meant deploying forces and supplies as far to the west as possible:
mechanized units, airfields, and supply bases had to be situated in for-
1 Vasilevskii, 'Nakanune', p. 6 (comment by Zhukov).

2 V. Karpov, 'Zhukov', Kommunist vooruzhennykh sil (1990, no. 5), p. 68; Mel'tiukhov, Sham, pp.
502-6. Roberts is also pessimistic about the pre-emptive plan, but she states that at best it 'might have
produced somewhat less of a disaster than the Soviet Union suffered in 1941' ('Planning', p. 1321).
3 Zhukov, Vospominaniia, i. 323; unpublished memoir, 1941 god, ii. 505.
ward locations, able to be used in an attack, but also highly vulner

to an enemy first strike. A defensive deployment, in contrast, wo
have prioritized successive lines of defence and a supply base secur
the heart of the country. Second - and this is a point missed by m
historians - the offensive orientation was one of the main factors
leading to the disastrous deployment of a largest part of the Red Army
in the Ukraine, poised to attack southern Poland, rather than in
Belorussia.
The pre-war plans also had an influence on the actual reaction of the
Soviet high command to the German invasion in the early morning of
22 June 1941. Timoshenko's Directive No. 1 set in train the call-up of
men, horses, and vehicles in accordance with MP-41. Then, the 'sud-
den blow against the enemy, both from the air and on land' was actu-
ally ordered. Directive No. 2, sent out to the MD commanders at
07.15, brought into play the Soviet air strikes: 'Bomber and ground-
attack aircraft are by means of powerful blows to destroy the aircraft
on the enemy's airfields and to destroy by bombing [razbombit3] the
concentrations of his ground forces. Air strikes are to be carried out to
a depth of 60-95 miles.' Tragically, much of the Red Army air force
had by this hour been destroyed or immobilized on forward airfields.
The Russians had little idea where the enemy attacks were coming
from, and the directive had to order reconnaissance aircraft to find the
Luftwaffe's bases, as well as the concentration points of the German
army. Directive No. 3, issued fourteen hours later, ordered the Soviet
ground forces to carry out a truncated version of the pre-war oper-
ational plan:
The armies of the Southwestern Army Group are ... by concentric blows in the
general direction of Lublin, using the forces of 5th and 6th Armies [including]
no fewer than five mechanized corps and all aviation forces of the army group,
to surround and destroy the enemy concentration which is attacking on the
front from Vladimir- Volynskii to Krystynopol' [and] by 26 June to take the
Lublin area. [Vladimir- Volynskii and Krystynopor (later Chervonograd) are
north of LVov and between 5th Army and 6th Army.] [These forces] are firmly
to secure themselves from the Krakow direction.
Lublin was 55 miles inside German-occupied Poland. The importance

still attached to the offensive potential of Southwestern Army Group in
these last few hours of unreality was shown by the decision to send the
chief of the general staff there, rather than to the Western Army
Group. By the morning of 23 June, Zhukov had arrived at South-
western Army Group headquarters at Tarnopol'.1
1 Timoshenko directive, 22 June I94ij General ynyi shtab v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny.
Dokumenty i materialy. 1941 god, ed. V. A. Zolotarev, et al. (Moscow, 1998), RA/VO, xxii (xii[i]), 23;
Timoshenko directives, 22 June 1941, 1941 god, ii. 431, 439-40; Zhukov, Vospominaniia, ii. 12-15.
864 Evan Mawdsley
In an interview taped in July 1977, fou

Vasilevskii blamed Stalin's 'line' of avoidi
[Stalin] did not grasp the limit [predel] beyo

only unnecessary but dangerous. Such a lim
determined, the armed forces brought to fu
mum possible speed, accelerated [forsirovann
the country converted into a single armed cam
conflict, whatever hidden work [skrytnaia
been carried out and completed earlier. There
that Germany planned a military attack on o
preparations are very difficult [or] practical
that in the West there would be a hub-bub [shu
intentions of the USSR should have been disr
come, due to circumstances beyond our contr
was necessary determinedly [tverdo] to take a
Motherland, of socialism, demanded this.1
The emphasized sentence is remarkable. There is, of course, no

reason why in 1941 the Soviet Union should have been worried about
'hub-bub' in the West. 'Hub-bub' makes sense only from a post-war
historiographical perspective, revealing the existence of an offensive
war plan in the context of the Cold War of the 1970s. Also extra-
ordinary is the metaphor. Vasilevskii, I would argue, was talking about
both a metaphorical Rubicon and a geographical one. In 49 bc, Julius
Caesar launched a sudden, secret, pre-emptive offensive campaign
across the Rubicon River into the territory of his enemy Pompey. In
1 94 1, the Red Army had to cross the Bug River into southern Poland.
This brings us back to the controversy between traditionalists and
revisionists. Did the Red Army in 1 940-1 have war plans based on
offensive operations? It certainly did, and the deployment of the Red
Army was based on such operations. From hindsight, in light of the
disaster of June 1941, these plans cast doubts on the strategic sense of
the Soviet political leadership and the professional competence at that
time of Timoshenko, the people's commissar of defence, and of
Shaposhnikov, Meretskov, and Zhukov, successive chiefs of the general
staff. Nevertheless, they also require a significant qualification of the
traditionalist view of a frightened, inert, and defensive Soviet leader-
ship. Did Timoshenko and Zhukov in May 1941 propose using this
offensive war plan in a pre-emptive way, without waiting for the enemy
to strike? They did, and this detailed proposal for a 'sudden blow from
the air and on land', following a hidden mobilization, reflects even
more badly on their professional competence. The proposal did, how-
ever, develop out of earlier war plans, it was linked with a number of
military and political steps taken that May, and it is possible that it was
1 Kumanev, Riadom^ pp. 232-4.
considered seriously by Stalin. Could such an attack plausibly hav

been mounted as early as June-July 1941, as revisionists like Boby
Mel'tiukhov, Rezun-Suvorov, and others suggest? Almost certainl
not. Even the immediate implementation of preparations for a p
emptive attack would have taken months, although the prelimin
steps could have begun in the high summer of 194 1. The war plan
volved mobilizing and assembling very large forces. Did Stalin, Mo
tov, and the other political leaders actually intend to put this offen
war plan into effect, stage by stage, in 194 1? They certainly knew abo
the May plan, but the answer to the question, based on informat
currently available, would seem to be no. Stalin was not prepared
escalate tension with Germany by ordering military and political
bilization. He was prepared to stand on the Rubicon but not to cr
it, and that ambiguous stance was to have disastrous consequences.
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Crossing the Rubicon: Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940-1941

Author(s): Evan Mawdsley

Crossing the Rubicon:

The International History Review, xxv. 4: December 2003, pp. 757-1,008.

however, that here these interpretations are the exact opposite of t

policy as 'essentially one of level-headed

In May 1940, after the problematic perfo

1 G. Gorodetskii, Mif 'Ledokola': Nakanune voiny (Moscow

1938 by Army Commander 1st Class B. M. Shaposhnikov, then ch

The August and September 1940 war pl

1. The strong resistance, with the [inevitable] introduction of significant

estimated to be 'up to5 243 divisions; of t

exactly the wording of the original September plan and is couche

developments that might occur after th

Stalin's endorsement of the offensive orientation of the Red Arm

1 Zhukov address, 25 Dec. 1940, RAIVO, i. 151.

planned up to I January 1942. The num

1 Zhukov and Timoshenko memo to Stalin and Molotov, c.1

1 Stalin, speech of 5 May 1941, '"Sovremennaia armiia - armiia nastupatel'naia". Vystupleniia I. V.

(c) details of the number of divisions and aviation regiments assign

The most suitable is a deployment of our main forces to the south of t

chief of the general staff, and Zhukov's i

This would also be consistent with the task of Southwestern Army

offensive war plans, or to the implementation of the 'hidden' aspects o

the various sectors, and details of the deployment of Soviet forces

This advance, as in the September and March plans, took in most of

The future Northwestern and Western

1 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1 941, p. 45.

himself later described it as a 'pre-emptive blow' (preduprediteV

mobilization and concentration, this alter

This could only be implemented after the (hidden) mobilization of

Soviet intelligence is one of the most discussed aspects of Barbaro

Table i: May 1941 War Plan:

Required for Available Available Available

Total Divisions 122 67 70 77

various MDs to prepare 'covering' plans. (The table also includes

1 Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 44.

Table 2: May 1941 War Plan:

Required for Available

Total in Western AGs 144 137

Total Combat- Ready 218 225

The final version of the May plan, tak

Such were the evolution and main featur

5 Oct. 1940, 1941 god, i. 290.

deviation to the May 1941 plan. Stalin's involvement in this proc

1 Vishlev, Nakanune, pp. 34-5.

tion plan (MP-41). Moreover, he had appo

1 Bezymenskii, Gitler, pp. 478-9.

we did not sign this document, and we de

1 Anfilov, 'Razgovor', p. 40.

menskii, and Svetlishin are specialists with scholarly credentials

1 Korotkov, Tosetiteli', pp. 47-8.

sary to go from defence to offense [ot oborony

It would be naive to accept a sequence o

main administration of political propaganda of the Red Army

1 Nevezhin, Sindrom, pp. 186-251.

of railway construction according to th

On 1 5 May, [Vasilevskii] delivered the draft of the directive to the people's

l Korotkov, 'Posetiteli', p. 47; Strategic Deployment Plan, May 1941, p. 45.