Mr Berkovics, Stalin and the War of Deception

In the good old days of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy the best places for political banter were the coffee houses. I shall quote a piece of gossip that did the rounds in both capitals well before my time, but it still amuses me when I think of it: “We all know that Russia is ripe for a revolution, but they lack the people to ignite it. Who would make their revolution, little Mr Bronstein from the Café Central?” (Bronstein was the real name of Trotsky, habitué of this Viennese café before 1917.)

Fast forward to 1939 and the café culture was still vibrant in Budapest. A place to gather for gossip, news and the occasional conspiracy theory. For my exposure to coffee house politics, I must thank Mr Berkovics, who lived next door with his wife. He had an overwhelming interest in politics, but all his wife would allow him was two hours a day to spend at his favourite café, the New York, on the corner of Dohany Street and the Elisabeth Ring street. Mr Berkovics needed an audience but struggled to find one. Eventually, he found an audience of one, and that was me, aged 9 and eager to receive his coffee house wisdom.

To set the scene: it was December 1939, the early days of the Second World War. Another war, now little known, was also being waged. Russia had invaded Finland and there was tremendous sympathy for the Finns in Hungary at the time, maybe because they are our sister nation. The right-wing newspapers supported the Finns because they hated the Soviet Union. The left-wing press supported Finland because they regarded the war as a David and Goliath scenario. There was a call for donations, however small. I remember my father gave five pengo, not a negligible sum at the time. I gave half of my pocket money for a week.

The Hungarian press called it the Russo-Finnish War. The Soviets simplified the matter and called it the Finnish War. By others, including the British, it was known as the Winter War. To Mr Berkovics and his fellow musers at the café, it was known as the War of Deception. At the time, the Russian army was losing territory and armour. Mr Berkovics told me that this was all by design and he explained the theory of the War of Deception: “The Russians want the Germans to think that the Russians are weak. They want to entice the Germans to attack them. The Russians will then whip out their reserves of two million men, who are just waiting in Siberia to go into action and will demolish the Germans. Do you know where Siberia is?” “Yes, of course, “ I said, both hurt and insulted. A month previously, I had read a Hungarian novel from the children’s library entitled, From Kisburgozd to Waterloo, a story about a little Hungarian drummer boy serving in Napoleon’s army. I was also nearly halfway through War and Peace. So, based on my reading, I did know where the Russians would station their reserves.

Mr Berkovics’ family moved away. I met him again in July 1945. Like most of us, he was drained by the war and the tragic death of his wife at Buchenwald. But his appetite for political discussion remained. He still held fast to the theory. “The Germans were enticed to attack. That was the first part of the theory. And three years later, the Russians were in the process of annihilating the German army. Perhaps, this is validation of the theory: enticement first, annihilation second. Are you satisfied with this proof?” Now aged 15 and also considerably wiser, I wasn’t. If the Soviet army was simply pretending to be weak it would not have taken until 1945 to defeat the Germans. Mr Berkovics was ignoring the inconvenient facts.

Back to the theory of the War of Deception. Perhaps, in 1939, it was impossible to imagine a weak Soviet army, so a convoluted theory evolved. The facts were not known until much later, around 1956. Apart from having great confidence in the Soviet Army, what else did Stalin do in the critical period of 1935-1938?  He did his best to destroy the Soviet military apparatus.

This is one of the most sweeping, famous and well-studied episodes of elite repression in history. In less than two years, “over one-half of 1,844 Soviet army officers who held general-grade military ranks by the end of 1936 were repressed, and at least 780 were executed, including three of the country’s five highest-ranked officers. The episode is significant not only because of its scale and speed, but also because of its impact on the preparedness and capacity of the Soviet army.” According to one figure, a total of 24,000 officers of all ranks were discharged and never reinstated in 1935-1938, and nearly 10,000 were arrested in 1935. Historians of the era have considered the 1935-38 purge as one of the main reasons for the massive Soviet losses of life and territory in the first year of the war that followed Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941.

(The figures I am quoting come from a recent publication of the University of Chicago from Feb 2025: The Anatomy of a Great Terror: A Quantitative Analysis of the 1937-38 Purges in the Red Army).

To these figures, I can add two stories which I obtained from Russian friends. The first is about the grandfather of Professor Shamonina of the University of Oxford. He was in the veterinary service during WWII holding the rank of Major and in charge of horses. He was in great demand. In the winter of 1941, the only way to reach the frontline was by horse.

But Shamonina barely avoided being arrested during 1937-39. Being a civilian veterinarian at the time, his strategy of avoiding arrest was to move quickly from one town to another, as soon as he heard rumours of imminent arrests in the lab he worked in at the time. He escaped the purges, survived the war and died in his bed decades later.

The second story is about the grandfather of Professor Shamonin of the University of Regensburg. He was a graduate of the Frunze military Academy, whose teaching staff was heavily purged. He miraculously escaped. Miraculously, because his wife was of noble origin, a great disadvantage in those days, a misfortune compounded by her great beauty which was equally unacceptable. He was officially reprimanded for his wife’s non proletarian looks. Soon after graduation, he became a Major, then a  Colonel,  then a General a year or so later. A rapid ascent due to the vacuum created by Stalin’s paranoia. Unfortunately, he died in action in 1943.

The holders of the theory of the War of Deception were not to be dissuaded. One believer told me “We let [the Germans] in in 1941 and now,” he said in the summer of 1943, “we are in the process of annihilating them. Isn’t that sufficient proof?”

The theory did not match the facts. However, that didn’t matter to those that believed the theory. The Mark Twain quote: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” comes to mind.

Why did Stalin kill off the cream of the Soviet officers? It can be explained by one single word: vanity. The evidence for it comes from Bukharin, a member of the Soviet elite, who told a Russian Menshevik on a trip to Europe that Stalin was a bloody dictator and only happy if everybody acknowledged his genius. This story reminds me of somebody in America. Unfortunately I have forgotten his name.

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