The common image of Stalin is that of an absolute dictator whose position in command of the USSR he was almost omnipotent, firm and immovable. The truth is that there was a moment when he faltered or, at least, he himself believed. It was when the Wehrmacht unleashed Operation Barbarossa , launching an invasion of Russian territory that caught the Politburo off guard.
Stalin, faced with the lukewarmness of Great Britain and France, had signed a Non-Aggression Treaty with Germany. which left Hitler's hands free to enter Poland , something that the Russians imitated two weeks later to divide up the country. In fact, the pact between the two entailed the mutual recognition of their respective territorial aspirations on the continent. In the case of the USSR, staying with the Baltic countries and Bessarabia (part of Romania) and take back Finland , which had become independent during the Bolshevik Revolution.
But if Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania gave in quickly, the Finnish troops showed unexpected resistance, causing such a level of casualties to the Russians (125,000, separate material) that Stalin was soon forced to dismiss generals and rethink his initial idea of an operation of ten or twelve days, an absurdity surely based on the rapid blitzkrieg over the Poles without taking into account that the Soviet Union did not yet possess anything remotely resembling Panzer divisions. In the end, a massive shipment of troops forced the Finnish government to sue for peace; yes, even accepting to negotiate only the cession of a protection zone around Leningrad (Hanko, Karelia and north of Lake Ladoga).
That war made it clear that the Soviet army was very deficient and outdated . The modernization process, delayed by itself due to the Civil War that followed the revolution, was extremely slow due to a bureaucracy in which Stalin, in the manner of Felipe II, insisted on supervising everything (they say that he was consulted up to the length that the bayonets should have) and some of his most reliable collaborators continued to cling to concepts from another era , such as prioritizing cavalry over armored cars. In this state of affairs, the signing of the pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov was a way of buying time because, in reality, neither Stalin nor anyone else was naive enough not to guess that sooner or later they would be attacked by Hitler.
But everyone hoped that the Führer would not do it until well into 1942 and by then the country would already have an army capable of containing it. It was not so. To general astonishment, on June 22, 1941 the invasion began through Odessa, kyiv and Minsk. The degree of surprise was such that Stalin refused to believe in the information that came to him from the front, as he had ignored the alert provided by his spies, and he continued to believe that everything was due to an error unknown to Hitler or a provocation. Only as the hours passed and the news was confirmed did reality prevail in the Kremlin.
A dramatic reality, since nothing effective had been foreseen for such a situation. All the pleas that Marshal Zhukov , Chief of Staff, had done in this regard over the previous weeks had crashed into a double wall:that of politics , in which the communist bigwigs did not dare to contradict their leader because of the account he brought them (although it had loosened up quite a bit, the Great Purge was still active, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens and commanders of the army, many of them communists and members of the leadership of the party, accused of being traitors, spies and saboteurs) and the military same, where other marshals like Kulik, Voroshilov or Timoshenko were not up to the task.
The fall of Minsk on June 28 caused a crisis even greater:there were no reports, no data was known. Stalin flew into a rage and in a meeting with his aides he had to see the scuffles between them, especially between Beria, head of the secret service, and Zhukov, probably the only one who dared to raise his voice without fear of reprisals (even to Stalin himself, with whom he also argued bitterly when the other accused him of not be aware of what was happening at the front) and who wanted the war to be directed exclusively by military .
Leaving the meeting, Stalin was deeplydepressed; as some members of the Politburo such as Molotov, Beria and Chadaev recounted in his memoirs, the Vozhd said that they had «sent to hell» Lenin's inheritance and that he was resigning. Molotov thought he was just saying it "to impress" and he didn't give it any more importance, but when they saw the next day that he didn't show up at the Kremlin and didn't answer the phone, they realized that things were more serious. Stalin had retired to his Kuntsevo dacha where, unable to sleep, he paced back and forth doing nothing concrete. For a couple of days, the government was inactive in the midst of war.
Thus, a defense committee was formed formed by his closest associates:Beria, Molotov, Voroshilov and Malenkov and three more Bolsheviks who would propose to Stalin to lead that group; for this, they visited him personally. Stalin, "thin, haggard and gloomy" , he received them suspiciously asking them why they had gone. He thought they wanted to remove him and arrest him, Mikoyan and Beria say, but when they proposed him the chairmanship of the committee he changed his expression ( "the tension disappeared from his face" ). And, although it is not entirely clear how much there was sincere depression and how much was posturing, the crisis was resolved . The country still had its leader, also named verjovnyi (generalissimo); but, as Beria would write, “we witnessed Stalin's moments of weakness. Iosiv Vissarionovich will never forgive us for that move."