Stalin's Folly

by Pleshakov, Constantine

• ISBN13: 9780618367016
• ISBN10: 0618367012
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-05-15
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched a massive three-pronged attack on the Soviet Union, and in days his troops were within reach of Moscow. The attack was stunning, but Stalins response was even more astonishing. During the invasion, the mighty Soviet military stood in place while its soldiers were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands.Drawing on a wealth of newly available documents, from classified Politburo papers and diaries of key generals to diplomatic cables and secret police memos, the Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov paints a startling portrait of Stalin, one of historys most feared despots, as a vulnerable and paralyzed leader. Refusing to believe that the Germans would strike first, despite repeated warnings, he continued to supply them with war materials in the days before the attack, then tied his generals hands in the crucial first hours of the invasion. For more than a week, while Hitler rolled over Soviet territory, Stalin cowered in his dacha, leaving the country rudderless and - as Pleshakov reveals here - nearly losing power. The Red Armys effort to regain the territory lost in those first ten days cost more than 10 million Soviet lives.Stalins Folly is a dramatic hour-by-hour account that sheds light on an enigmatic and ruthless figure while providing a new and far deeper understanding of Russian history.

Author Biography

Russian-born Constantine Pleshakov is the author of The Tsar's Last Armada The Flight of the Romanovs, and Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. He is a visiting prefessor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Table of Contents

Prologue	1	(18)
1. War Game	19	(40)
2. On the Eve	59	(39)
3. The Attack	98	(32)
4. Disaster in the West	130	(24)
5. Hope in the South	154	(44)
6. The Loss of Byelorussia	198	(30)
7. Their Master's Voice	228	(38)
Epilogue	266	(11)
A Note on Sources and Methodology	277	(7)
Notes	284	(21)
Selected Bibliography	305	(8)
Index	313

Excerpts

1 WAR GAME JANUARY 2, 1941: THE KREMLIN The end of 1940 was grim. Two armies, one clad in gray, the other in khaki, were destroying the Old World. They had thrown themselves at Europe abruptly and ferociously, like ants attacking a cake left on a garden table. And like ants, they arrived in geometrically impeccable columns, never questioning their right to devour the trophy. The ants were of two different species. The grays took orders from the German Fhrer, Adolf Hitler; the khakis closed ranks around the Soviet leader, or vozhd, Joseph Stalin. Having been dismissed by cultured European politicians, cartoonists, and sketch writers as pests that could be stamped out by the civilized world in a flash, the ants had proved their worth by 1940. France crumbled under the wheels of German tanks in less than three weeks. The British force on the continent, expected to save the day, was decimated at Dunkirk. As headlines shouted about the impending demise of these two great powers, pillars of the West since the days of the Crusades, smaller European nations such as Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Norway wriggled under German occupation, their cries unheard by the panicking world. At the other end of the continent, the Red Army grabbed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and tore away chunks of Poland, Finland, and Romania. In both the west and the east, killings were performed speedily and expertly: troops swept through the ancient cities, blind to decorum, and the punitive squads followed immediately to scavenge, to cleanse, to kill. Hitlers men looked for Jews and Communists; Stalins went for the "exploiting classes." The proud and elaborate European order, which had taken centuries to create, was smashed in less than a year, because the two armies acted in accord. Hitler let Stalin do what he wanted to on the fringes of Europe, and Stalin turned a blind eye to the plight of the West and even reined in his fifth column abroad, the fanatically anti-Nazi Comintern. But this was not a partnership of equals - Hitler snatched the best pieces, and Stalin collected the crumbs. Kaunas was a poor match for Paris, the port of Riga didnt fare nearly as well as that of Rotterdam, and Romanian Cabernet hardly deserved the name when compared to the French varieties. At the end of 1940 a weird lull fell over Europe. The two armies had reached an impasse. Germanys hunger could not be sated by the annexation of the few lesser countries, like Yugoslavia and Greece, that were still stubbornly maintaining their sovereignty. The Germans had to launch a spectacular conquest to justify their roll across Europe; that was what all other empires had done at the peak of their might, and that was what Adolf Hitler had promised the German people. They had few options. One was to invade Britain, another the Middle East; yet another was to strike at the Soviet Union. At the end of 1940 nobody knew which path Hitler would choose. Vir

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Excerpted from Stalin's Folly: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War Two on the Eastern Front by Constantine Pleshakov
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