Stalin’s politburo and the preparations for war: 1939 - 1941 (an attempt at applying the quantitative approach in alternative history)

The article is a continuation of a series of studies examining the eve of the Great Patriotic War by employing the alternative history methodology developed by the author. The overall goal of this study is to find an answer to the question of whether the catastrophic start to the Great Patriotic War could have been prevented. Earlier studies established that only mobilizations - secret or open - such as had been conducted in the recent past, could have made this possible. The use of quantitative methods to analyze data pertaining to visits to Stalin’s Kremlin office and their correlation with the minutes of the decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) allowed the author to reveal the existence of a so-called “military analytical center” (“war think tank”), comprised of a small group of military men and politicians. The current article aims to study the structure of this “military analytical center” and the role ofits political section represented by members ofthe Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In conducting his research, the author utilized several sources including the visitor log of Stalin’s Kremlin office, documents from the collections of the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, as well as ego-sources (diaries, memoirs, conversation and interview records) of former Politburo members Khrushchev, Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich, People’s Commissars Kovalev, Malyshev and others. The results made it possible to establish that a steady decrease in intensity characterized Politburo members’ participation in military meetings throughout the entire period from August 1939 to June 1941. Further, a study of the composition of the military meetings reveals, at its core, the presence of two groups of the most active participants that together formed, in effect, a “military analytical center”. The analysis of activity trends of both groups revealed important changes. By the spring of 1941, Stalin began to nominate another group consisting of Zhdanov and Beria to replace Voroshilov and Malenkov, formerly the most active military advisers, with Malenkov becoming the clear favorite in the military conferences. The new “nominees”, who did not have significant experience in resolving “defense issues”, were increasingly called upon to discuss them as the war approached. This new circumstance greatly contributed to limiting the role and functions of the political section in the activities of Stalin’s “military-political center”. The article supports the conclusion that in the period from August 1939 to June 1941, the role of Politburo members as military advisers to Stalin declined. At the same time, the General Secretary’s status as the one and only undisputed military authority was reinforced. In practice, this meant that the political section of Stalin’s “military-political center” became a sort of decoration, deprived of any opportunity to recognize the alternative presented by the emerging situation, and to make the one decision that could have avoided the catastrophe of 1941.