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In the last months of 1930 the newspapers announced the execution of dozens of economists, engineers and other specialists. Arraigning real or supposed opponents of Stalin’s rule on trumped-up charges of ‘wrecking’ was found to be an effective way of explaining failures and attributing blame to others than the leadership. Such travesties of justice also served a psychological need of the public - that of identifying ‘the sinful’, the supposed authors of all their woes. As the pace of construction heated up and more shortcomings came to light the ‘show trial’was used more frequently, along with the Party purge.

In a series of trials in the later 1930s, prominent Party men including economic planners were tried publicly and executed, some for transparently false economic as well as political ‘crimes’ such as plotting to market butter containing broken glass. A public ever eager to see those in authority diminished was heartened by the spectacle, but the victims included scapegoats for the failures of industrialization. Ukrainians were not disappointed to see most of the provincial Party leaders fall. And as the purges cut wider they created huge possibilities for promotion. In 1938 the armed services were purged. Perhaps because of his long-standing acquaintance with German generals under military co-operation agreements, Tukhachevskii, the Chief of Staff, was shot, along with most of the senior commanders. Their replacements were raw and, on the whole, less able.

The new commanders were rushed through staff college and other training schemes in the hope of equipping them for command in time. But the critical juncture was only months away and, though the feared security agency itself was also purged, the leadership of the Soviet Union’s defences had been much weakened.

Stalin, the controlling genius of Russia’s fortunes, no doubt had his moments of paranoia, confusion, even panic, when confronting situations of which he was not the master. He also had the destructive capacities of a believer. He was, however, aware of the costs of his action. He subsequently confessed that the protracted struggle with the peasants over collectivization was the fiercest he had known: ‘It was terrible,’ he told Churchill. ‘Four years it lasted.’ ³⁰ The economic transformation cost the Soviet Union heavily in lives, although manipulation of the census figures for the late 1930s distorted the truth for some time. The scale of the deception has been calculated to have been as high as 2.9 million deaths, and it was most pronounced for provinces like Komi and Karelia, where GPU hard-labour camps had been sited. Such camps had been used ‘on a gigantic scale.’ ³¹ Furthermore, what Stalin saw as political stabilization achieved by the purges of the later 1930s was highly destructive of talent and expertise in every imaginable field. Such was the price. What had it bought?

The chief benefit was in large quantities of military hardware and capacity. By 1941 the Red Army could field more than half of all the tanks in the world, including a thousand excellent T-34 tanks. A further forty T-34S were rolling off the production lines every week. There were almost 2,000 fighter aircraft in service, including numbers of the MiG-3. ³² At its best, the standard of weapon design was excellent. Nevertheless, there were serious problems. Production of the better models was too slow, and the equipment was not distributed to best advantage. The ideas of the Red Army’s leading tanks specialist, D. Pavlov, had prevailed over those of Tukhachevskii. ³³ And after the purges there were problems of leadership, personified by the incompetent Marshal Voroshilov, who was responsible for a series of organizational mistakes which were to show up when hostilities began.

The Second World War was preceded by two curtain-raisers. The first clash to involve the Soviet Union came in August 1939, over the territory of Khalkhin-Gol in the Far East, which was in dispute with Japan. ³⁴ The second, in the autumn and winter of 1940, was with Finland. In the first, Soviet troops, deploying several hundred of the new tanks under General Zhukov, were successful in heavy fighting. In the second, Soviet forces were out-manoeuvred and badly mauled by Finnish troops who were seriously outnumbered. Although the Finns were eventually ground down by overwhelming force, ³⁵ the encounter did not bode well for the Soviet Union when Hitler ordered his surprise invasion in 1941.