Deception in the name of crisis management

Last week I finished reading Sean McMeekin’s mammoth study Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. It’s a weighty book in both senses, by turns overwhelming, depressing, and infuriating. I may or may not write a full review here, but it will certainly be in my year-end reading recommendations. For the time being, here are two passages quoted by McMeekin that struck me pretty forcefully, which I present with a minimum of context and comment.

The first comes from Nikolai Verzhbitski, a Russian journalist who recorded the following in his diary on October 18, 1941, when the Germans had advanced to within a hundred miles of Moscow from the both west and the south. Verzhbitski describes a Moscow prostrated by the invasion:

Who gave the order to close the factories? To pay off the workers? Who was behind the whole muddle, the mass flight, the looting, the confusion in everyone’s minds? . . . Everyone is boiling with indignation, talking out loud, shouting that they have been betrayed, that “the captains were the first to abandon ship” and took their valuables with them into the bargain. People are saying things out loud that three days ago would have brought them before a military tribunal. There are queues: noisy, emotional, quarrelsome, agonising. The hysteria at the top has transmitted itself to the masses.

That’s the crisis and the way the leadership botched it, and, according to Verzhbitski, the people saw clearly the many ways in which their leadership failed them:

People are beginning to remember and to count up all the humiliations, the oppression, the injustices, the clampdowns, the bureaucratic arrogance of the officials, the conceit and the self-confidence of the party bureaucrats, the draconian decrees, the shortages, the systematic deception of the masses, the lying and flattery of the toadies in the newspapers. . . . People are speaking from their hearts. Will it be possible to defend a city where such moods prevail?

This kind of deception, as it turns out, is contagious, and at least some people were alive to that fact. McMeekin quotes an address from Senator Robert La Follette Jr delivered on June 23, 1941, the day after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa:

[I]n the next few weeks the American people will witness the greatest whitewash act in all history. They will be told to forget the purges in Russia by the OGPU, the persecution of religion, the confiscation of property, the invasion of Finland and the vulture role Stalin played in seizing half of prostrate Poland, all of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. These will be made to seem the acts of a “democracy” preparing to fight Nazism.

Amnesty for Stalin, perhaps? “Let’s acknowledge that [he] made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty.” That was more or less the Roosevelt approach, anyway—minus any acknowledgement.

McMeekin also charts the consequences—in the United States!—of criticizing Stalin and the Soviets: purges in the federal bureaucracy, often conforming to enemies lists provided by the Russians; the replacement of diplomatic and military leaders with either Roosevelt lackies or actively pro-Soviet agents; the burial or rewriting of inconvenient reports; official coordination with the press to suppress damaging stories, smear dissenters, and spread Soviet spin; and, of course, widespread, purposeful deception. All in order to win the war, of course.

The more things change. And, of course, Verzhbitski’s concluding question remains pertinent.

The passage of Verzhbitski’s diary quoted by McMeekin comes from Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War, by Rodric Braithwaite, who quotes the diary at greater length. La Follette’s speech was reported in the New York Herald Tribune’s June 24, 1941 issue, which I haven’t been able to access (for free) in full.