World War: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: New Commands

Joseph Stalin shuffled his High Command last week. By doing so, he admitted that Russia had suffered grim defeat. By the way he did it, he served notice that his country was by no means finished.

Timoshenko for Budenny. Joseph Stalin moved his best field general to the area of worst disaster. Marshal Semion Timoshenko had shown that he could at least give the Germans pause, whereas Marshal Semion Budenny, in the south, had dissipated Russia’s manpower and geography.

So Stalin put Marshal Timoshenko in command down south, where the Germans last week threatened to cut Russia off from its oil and from its greatest remaining industrial centers.

Zhukov for Timoshenko. To stem the wave before Moscow, in the absence of Timoshenko, Stalin assigned General of the Army Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov.

General Zhukov first won respect by his close study of Russian communications. The classic Russian military deficiency has been ponderousness in action. This was due to the sluggishness of communications. This, in turn, was due (General Zhukov said) to clerical, rather than physical, causes. No one knew how much rolling stock there was, or where it was; what locomotive sheds, coaling sheds, etc., were available. General Zhukov found out.

Then he did a good job under General Grigory Stern against the Japanese in 1939’s brief border war in Outer Mongolia.

It was he who pressed for heavy use of tanks. He did a better-than-average job in the worse-than-average war with Finland; he did an excellent job as head of the Kiev military district, and, perhaps most important, a bang-up job as a hater of Germany in the months when Russians were not supposed to hate Germany.

His appointment as Chief of Staff in February 1941 was one of the earliest indications that Russia did not trust the Germans (TIME, Feb. 24).

General Zhukov has energy to throw away. As commander at Kiev, he used to ride 20 miles before breakfast, then work twelve hours straight. He fenced with his aides till they were bleary-eyed.

Before Moscow his knowledge of communications, his hatred, his energy and what tanks he had seemed to be standing him in good stead. When the Germans had pressed to practically within view of the capital’s onion-shaped towers, Marshal Zhukov’s men counterattacked and held.

Two for the Future. By this realignment Joseph Stalin seemed to be dividing the front into two great sectors, instead of the previous three. The third, around Leningrad, seemed now to be quiescent; it had changed from a sector to an episode.

This left two men free: Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov from Leningrad and Marshal Budenny from the south. Joseph Stalin did not scrap them. He gave them a new job, the clearest signal yet that Russia will fight to the last snowball: to form great new armies from raw conscripts, armies to take their stand beyond Moscow to fight for the lands beyond the Volga, beyond the Urals. The new armies will be ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-fortified. But they would not be formed if the Russians did not still intend to fight.

One for the Whole. In one sense these changes of command were rhetorical flourishes. Russia had but one commander, Joseph Stalin. Last week, to dramatize this, Joseph Stalin put on a pair of grey breeches, a blue blouse and top boots—like those he wore in the Civil War against the Whites. So equipped, he went aboard an armored train to serve as commander-in-extreme.