Max Hastings in his new book tells the full story of one of the most shocking episodes of the secret war, when Stalin sacrificed the lives of 70,000 troops to confuse the Germans about his intentions on the Eastern Front in 1942.
Through the services of the double agent Alexander Demyanov, a Russian who “defected” to the Germans but continued working for the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, Stalin leaked plans of a massive offensive near Moscow.
The intention was to divert German resources away from the real attack, the Red Army’s pincer movement at Stalingrad which became a turning point in the war.
Hastings writes in The Secret War that the Soviet deception, Operation Monastery, was “one of the greatest such schemes of the war”, on a par with the Anglo-American plan to confuse the Germans about D-Day.
It came, however, at a terrible price: “Only in Stalin’s dreadful world could 70,000 lives have been sacrificed, without sentiment or scruple, to serve the higher purposes of the state.”
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Demyanov, who came from an aristocratic background, became an NKVD informer to escape a charge of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda.
On November 19, 1942 the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, its historic double envelopment behind the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. “Four days later, however,” Hastings writes, “a second thrust by six armies was unleashed on the Kalinin front at Rzhev 100 miles north-west of Moscow — Operation Mars. This engaged large German forces, but ended in a costly repulse, with all four thrusts being smashed by the Wehrmacht at a cost of 70,000 Russian dead.”
Half a century later Pavel Sudoplatov, the celebrated Soviet intelligence chief, wrote in his memoirs that Operation Mars was betrayed in advance on Stalin’s orders — and without the knowledge of General Zhukov, who led the Moscow offensive — to divert German forces.
“Some Westerners find it inconceivable that even Stalin could have knowingly consigned hundreds of thousands of his own people to death or disablement merely to support a ruse de guerre,” Hastings writes. “But the evidence seems strong, indeed almost conclusive, that Sudoplatov told the truth.”