What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (review)

Those seeking to study the Soviet experiment during most of its existence had access to only a very limited supply of what could be conventionally described as primary sources. Information from a handful of defectors, and the occasional significant government document published abroad or in samizdat (the underground Soviet press) by such dissident scholars as Roy and Zhores Medvedev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, constituted the basic raw material for our understanding of the often surreal world of Joseph Stalin and his successors. There was, for all meaningful purposes, no such thing as "archival access."

With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of "openness" (glasnost), the situation began to change, for a while at an almost dizzying pace. Russian and FSU (former Soviet Union) scholars and groups like Memorial—an organization built around former dissidents and relatives of the victims of Soviet, and especially Stalinist, "repression"—took to the archives with a zeal rare among their "free world" colleagues, who soon tried to join the "gold rush" to the new wealth of sources. The results were—and continue to be—astounding. Yet, by the end of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, the Old Ways began to reassert themselves, and the archives starting shutting down again. This trend greatly accelerated under Vladimir Putin, and today the plight of would-be researchers into things Soviet is not dissimilar to that of their counterparts not so long ago.

Yet a vast outpouring of literature remains from that brief flowering of the archives, including books like Murphy's What Stalin Knew, which constitutes an important effort to make accessible to a much wider audience a wealth of archivally derived material produced by Russian researchers formerly unavailable in English. (Murphy could have made his debt to the research of others more explicit.¹ )

Therein lies the primary value of the book, since it does not offer any major new interpretations. Murphy's basic argument is already familiar: A plethora of intelligence starting at least during the summer of 1940 provided the Soviet leadership with increasingly accurate and complete information about "Operation Barbarossa," the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union, though Stalin dismissed it as an "English provocation." Murphy's greatest contribution is to complete this picture with unprecedented and systematic detail. He thoroughly mines the published Russian, and occasionally Western, literature to describe intelligence provided by such diverse sources as the Red Army's Intelligence Directorate, the NKVD/NKGB secret police and foreign intelligence sections, diplomatic sources, railroad reconnaissance troops, and foreign governments, including Great Britain and the United States.

With respect to the larger issue of the historiography on Operation Barbarossa, however, What Stalin Knew is less impressive. The central questions today are who exactly had access to this information (recent research, supported to some extent by Murphy's evidence, seems to indicate that this elect group may have been significantly larger than previously thought, perhaps even including the celebrated Georgi Zhukov), and, more importantly, why did Stalin refuse to believe this overwhelming mass of information? Murphy, although he provides the occasional valuable tweak that only a trained ex-intelligence officer could, especially in his analysis of the operation of espionage networks and of German disinformation efforts, does not shed much new light on either of these questions.

The problem for historians with respect to Stalin's behavior in the spring and summer of 1941 is that they are ultimately trying to solve an essentially psychological puzzle. Either Stalin was simply irrational (which seems to be Murphy's interpretation), or the ever-scheming but deluded Stalin thought that he ultimately could make German intentions irrelevant through a preemptory attack (the so-called "Icebreaker" thesis) or a crushing counter offensive, either of which would spread Communism to the rest of Europe. The important point is that this question is at the heart of the historical debate about Barbarossa now, not whether the Soviets should have seen it coming.

Given the limitations described above, however, Murphy's book may stand as the...