Stalin’s speech of 3 July

Early on the morning of 3 July 1941, eleven days after the German attack on the USSR, the voice of Joseph Stalin came from loudspeakers throughout the Soviet Union for the first time in this war. The announcer Yuri Levitan introduced an address by the chairman of the State Defence Committee, and Stalin began with words his citizens had never heard from him before: “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!” The speech, broadcast from the Kremlin and then repeated on the radio, and printed in Pravda that same day, proclaimed a life-and-death war of the whole nation. Popular war chronologies remember one thing above all from it: that Stalin announced a “scorched earth” policy. That was indeed one of its most important points, but only one of several. The address also announced partisan warfare and the raising of a people’s militia, demanded a merciless struggle against “panic-mongers”, and called the conflict with Germany a patriotic war.

Eleven days of silence

On 22 June it was not Stalin who addressed the nation but the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov. The leader’s silence caused unease at home and speculation abroad. Years later Molotov explained that Stalin had not wanted to speak while the situation remained unclear. According to the log of visitors to his Kremlin office, published in the 1990s, from 22 to 28 June Stalin received dozens of commanders and officials every day, so he was not, as was repeated for years after Nikita Khrushchev, inactive from the first day of the war.

The breakdown came later, when Minsk fell and the Białystok–Minsk pocket closed. On 29 June Stalin went with members of the Politburo to the People’s Commissariat of Defence, where, after a violent scene with Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, he declared, according to the memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan, that Lenin had left them a great state and they had squandered it (he used a far cruder word). He then shut himself away in his dacha at Kuntsevo. The visitors’ log has no entries for 29 and 30 June.

The best-known account of those days was left by Mikoyan. On 30 June members of the leadership gathered at Molotov’s, and Lavrentiy Beria proposed the creation of a State Defence Committee headed by Stalin. When they arrived at the dacha, Stalin was sitting in an armchair in the small dining room and asked: “Why have you come?” It flashed through Mikoyan’s mind that Stalin was expecting to be arrested. But when Molotov said that power had to be concentrated in one pair of hands and that Stalin must head the committee, he agreed without objection. Historians assess this episode in different ways. Roy Medvedev wrote of a “crisis of leadership” in the state. Simon Sebag Montefiore considers a breakdown likely but does not rule out that Stalin partly staged it to test his comrades’ loyalty. Oleg Khlevniuk points out that during the first days the leadership itself did not know the situation at the front, and Stalin simply did not know what to tell the country. What is certain is that the crisis was brief: on 1 July Stalin returned to his office and to work.

The committee, the directive and the text of the speech

By a joint resolution of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Council of People’s Commissars and the party Central Committee, the State Defence Committee (GKO) was set up on 30 June, and all power in the state was concentrated in its hands. It was chaired by Stalin, and its members were Molotov (deputy chairman), Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Central Committee secretary Georgy Malenkov and Beria. In the following weeks Stalin took on further posts: on 10 July he became head of the reorganised Stavka, on 19 July People’s Commissar for Defence, and on 8 August Supreme Commander-in-Chief.

The content of the speech largely repeated a secret directive of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of 29 June, addressed to the party and Soviet organisations of the frontline oblasts. It was there that the order to evacuate or destroy everything that might be of use to the enemy, and to form partisan detachments, was first formulated, often in the very words Stalin repeated on the radio four days later. According to the manuscript published in 2023 by Russia’s Presidential Library, Stalin dictated the text to his secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev and made corrections in pencil himself. In the original version it began with a dry “Comrades!”; the famous “brothers and sisters” and “my friends” were added later.

What Stalin said

Stalin began by admitting that “a grave danger” hung over the country. He listed what the enemy had taken: Lithuania, a considerable part of Latvia, the western part of Belarus and part of western Ukraine, while its air force was bombing Murmansk, Orsha, Mogilev, Smolensk, Kiev, Odessa and Sevastopol. At the same time he claimed that “the enemy’s best divisions and the best units of his air force” had already been smashed and “had found their graves on the battlefield”. This was propaganda with no basis in reality: by then the Wehrmacht had suffered losses but had not lost a single one of its leading formations, whereas the Red Army had lost entire armies in the pockets in Belarus.

He explained the setbacks of the first days by the fact that 170 German divisions had stood fully ready at the border while the Soviet forces still had to mobilise and move up, and by the “perfidious” breaking of the non-aggression pact. He anticipated the question of whether concluding the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with “such perfidious people and fiends as Hitler and Ribbentrop” had not been a mistake. No, he replied: the pact was a peace pact that had given the country a year and a half of peace and time to prepare its defence, and moreover it had not infringed, “either directly or indirectly”, the territorial integrity and independence of the USSR. Stalin naturally made no mention of the fact that the pact had opened the way to the partition of Poland and the annexation of the Baltic states.

The practical part mattered most. The country was to put all its work on a war footing. There could be no place in the ranks for “whimperers and cowards, panic-mongers and deserters”, and all who hindered the defence through “panic-mongering and cowardice” were to be handed over to a military tribunal, “regardless of who they are”. In a forced retreat all rolling stock was to be taken away, and “not a single locomotive, not a single wagon, not a kilogram of grain, not a litre of fuel” was to be left to the enemy. Collective farmers were to drive their livestock east and hand their grain over to the state for removal, and everything that could not be taken away, including non-ferrous metals, grain and fuel, was to be “unconditionally destroyed”. In occupied areas mounted and foot partisan detachments and sabotage groups were to be formed to blow up bridges, wreck roads and communications, and set fire to forests, depots and transport columns, so as to “create unbearable conditions for the enemy and all his accomplices, and hound and destroy them at every step”.

This war, Stalin said, was not an ordinary war between two armies but “a great war of the entire Soviet people” against the German fascist forces. He called it a patriotic war, echoing the term Molotov had already used on 22 June and the Russian tradition of the war of 1812. He mentioned that Moscow and Leningrad were already forming a people’s militia many thousands strong and called for such units to be raised in every threatened city. He recalled with gratitude the “historic speech” of Prime Minister Winston Churchill on aid to the USSR and the US government’s declaration of its readiness to provide assistance. Finally he announced the creation of the State Defence Committee and called on the people to rally “around the party of Lenin and Stalin”.

How it was heard

The British correspondent Alexander Werth later wrote that Stalin spoke in a dull voice, slowly, with a strong Georgian accent, and that listeners could hear the clink of a glass from which he took an occasional sip of water. Many listeners remembered above all the tone: the dictator, until then always remote, was addressing them as if they were his own people and did not hide the fact that the situation was dangerous. For millions it was the first confirmation since the war began that the authorities were functioning at all. The audience, however, was narrower than later legend suggested: under a resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of 25 June, the population had to surrender private radio sets to the authorities within five days, so that they could not listen to enemy propaganda. The speech therefore reached people mainly through the loudspeakers of the wired radio network and through the press – and in the frontline zone, where the network was no longer working, often not at all.

The appeals were quickly turned into action, though not always as intended. Poorly trained and poorly armed militia divisions from Moscow and Leningrad were later thrown against regular troops, and volunteers from the NKVD destruction battalions hunted saboteurs in an atmosphere of spy mania. In many frontline towns the slogan of leaving nothing to the enemy was read as a signal to burn archives and for officials to flee hastily with their families, which witnesses described in their diaries as panic and chaos.

Scorched earth and evacuation

Scorched-earth tactics had been well known in the Russian military tradition since 1812, and in 1941 they were applied on an enormous scale. Bridges and power stations were blown up, grain was burnt and mines were flooded. One of the best-known examples was the demolition in August 1941 of the dam of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station at Zaporozhye, the pride of the first five-year plans. The cost was borne by the population, left without supplies or a roof over their heads, and in November 1941 a Stavka order directed that villages behind the German front be burnt to deprive the enemy of winter quarters.

The other side of the same programme was evacuation. As early as 24 June an Evacuation Council was set up under the Council of People’s Commissars, chaired by the People’s Commissar for Transport, Lazar Kaganovich; on 3 July, the day of the speech, he was replaced by Nikolai Shvernik. Trains travelling against the tide of troops carried whole factories, together with their workforces, to the Urals, the Volga, Siberia and Central Asia. According to Soviet figures cited in the literature, more than 2,500 enterprises, some 1,500 of them large, were moved east in this way in 1941–1942, and well over ten million people were evacuated. Much machinery was lost on the way, and output fell sharply in 1941. Yet without this operation the USSR would not have been able, as early as 1942, to produce more tanks and aircraft than Germany.

Place in the war

The speech of 3 July became one of the canonical texts of the Soviet history of the war. It was after it that the term “Great Patriotic War” entered the official language, and appeals to the nation, the motherland and Russian military traditions displaced class slogans in propaganda. The partisan movement it announced began to form at once, although the first detachments, hastily put together from party activists and NKVD officers, were often quickly destroyed; only in May 1942 was the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement created, and Soviet partisans became a serious force in Belarus and Russia. In the following years the order to destroy “all the enemy’s accomplices” was also turned against the population of the occupied lands whom the partisans suspected of collaborating with the occupier, including Poles in the former eastern lands of the Polish Republic.

The threats against “panic-mongers and cowards” quickly found expression in repression. The day after the speech the commander of the Western Front, General of the Army Dmitry Pavlov, and several of his generals were arrested; they were shot on 22 July. In August Order No. 270 declared soldiers who had been taken prisoner to be traitors, and in July 1942 Order No. 227, “Not one step back!”, introduced blocking detachments. The summer and autumn brought further disasters, from Smolensk to Kiev and Vyazma, but in October Stalin did not leave Moscow, and on 6 and 7 November he spoke there again, at a ceremonial meeting in a metro station and at the parade in Red Square, from which soldiers marched straight to the front.

In the West the speech was taken as proof that the USSR meant to fight to the end rather than conclude a new agreement with Hitler. On 12 July Britain and the USSR signed an agreement on joint action in Moscow, and on 30 July the government of Władysław Sikorski concluded an agreement with the USSR that restored diplomatic relations. Stalin’s voice on 3 July set the tone of the Soviet war for the next four years: a total war, waged regardless of the human cost, in which the nation and the motherland replaced the revolution in propaganda, while the terror against the state’s own citizens did not let up for a moment.