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Which, if either, of the apprehensive schools is within a light-year of the truth? What kind of victory does Russia want? The only way even to approximate an answer at this stage, besides examining the nature of the Red successes and their potentialities, is to estimate what Stalin and his Army want, review the known facts as to what Stalin's Government has said it wants.
Front Commander. In trying to gauge how far the Russians can go, it is important to try to see what her military men want. They all seem to want: terrible punishment of the Nazis.
Filip Ivanovich Golikov, a typical front commander, seems to want that. He is young: 45. He fought in the revolution. He is a product of Frunze Military Academy. He is one of few Red generals who have firsthand knowledge of Russia's allies.
Just after the war broke out, he was sent to Britain and the U.S. for staff talks on supply problems. In the U.S. Golikov was treated (and behaved) more like a mystery man than a visiting celebrity. He was observed to be a muscular man with a head which seemed to have been carved from pink glass, to be so short that the handkerchief in Sumner Welles's pocket showed above his clean-shaven crown. Beyond that nothing was known. He disappeared after a brief visit.
Back in Russia he was given command of one of the seven armies that saved Moscow. There he saw what the Germans were capable of doing—but also what his own men could do. Golikov's army defeated two divisions of much-touted Heinz Guderian's Second Tank Army and took the towns of Mikhailov and Yepifan. This year he was promoted from army commander to commander of the Voronezh front. What he has done there, culminating last week in the cracking of the Germans' rigid southern line, suggests that he personally burns for total destruction of the enemy.
Commander in Excelsis. But the key to Russia's military determination is the man who is key to everything in Russia. If Russia's allies knew as much about Joseph Stalin as he knows about them, they would have a much clearer idea of where he stands. The few U.S. and British diplomats and officers who have talked with Stalin say that he knows more than most Washington and London officials about Allied performance, personalities and weaknesses. He has on the end of his blunt tongue the exact dates of and reasons for the fall of Bataan, Corregidor, Singapore, Hong Kong, Rangoon. He says: "Timoshenko is my George Washington" (because Washington retired from Philadelphia to Valley Forge but still won the Revolutionary War); and: "Zhukov, he is my George B. McClellan—except that he has never lost a battle" (McClellan always hollered for more men, more weapons, more supply, more cavalry—but he lost the Seven Days' Battles, June 1862).