Sombre Russia marks 70 years since Nazi invasion Barbarossa

Russia marked 70 years since the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, haunted by a growing realisation in society that Stalin had been caught disastrously unprepared for the attack.

The German Wehrmacht launched Operation Barbarossa in the early hours of June 22, 1941, and would sweep through vast tracts of Soviet territory almost to the point of taking Moscow before finally suffering defeats over the winter.

Russian society has for long been reluctant to criticise Stalin’s reaction but the anniversary saw an unusual spate of material in the popular press lamenting how the leader had stubbornly ignored persistent warnings of attack.

“Soviet intelligence in the last 10 days before the start of war named the date of the Fascist attack precisely or almost precisely,” leading historian Arsen Martirosyan told the mass-circulation Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

“Stalin’s desk was piling up with intelligence reports giving more-or-less precise information about the date of the attack,” he added.

Russian society has only in recent years started to realign its remembrance of the heroism of the Soviet people in the war with the evidence that Stalin’s brutality and naivety greatly handicapped the USSR at the start of the war.

Stalin, who two years earlier had overseen the signing of a notorious non-aggression pact with the Nazis in Moscow, had been sure that Hitler’s forces would not attack the USSR in 1941, Western historians believe.

Meanwhile, Stalin’s ruthless purges in the mid-1930s that cut swathes through the Soviet elite also took out much of the military leadership who would have been involved in planning defence against the Nazis.

In contrast to the military parades and bombastic speeches that mark the May 9 Victory Day remembering the Allies’ defeat of the Nazis in 1945, commemorations of Wednesday’s anniversary were sombre. People gathered with lit candles at the exact time of the invasion, 3.15 a.m., while President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin later attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Moscow.

“We must understand that attempts to distort history can have very serious consequences and can essentially cast doubt on the key principles of the world order,” Mr Putin said.

In Berlin, German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said that the war – known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia – “is seared in the memories of the peoples affected and in the nations of the former Soviet Union”.

After the shock of the invasion, Stalin retreated to his dacha, leaving his trusted foreign affairs supremo Vyacheslav Molotov to address the Soviet people on June 22, and only gave a radio address himself on July 3.

“Fear (of Hitler) was haunting the Soviet political elite and there were discussions,” the director of the history department at the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Chubaryan told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.

“But unfortunately they did not result in discussions of a military nature,” he said.

The mistakes of Stalin have long sat uncomfortably with the modern Russian state’s bid to promote the Soviet victory in the war as a great national achievement of Russia.