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Red Is the Banner. Ankara's rumor mills last week ground out the report that Joseph Stalin was on his way from Moscow to Stalingrad, one of the southern cities which Timoshenko was trying to save. If the story was true, it completed a parallel of Red Army history: Timoshenko fought at Stalingrad (then Tsaritsyn) after the Revolution, when the White Armies of Denikin and Kolchak were trying to crush the new Russia, and (according to orthodox Communist history) Stalin himself superseded the Red generals, saved the city and Russia with a series of campaigns over the land where the Nazis advanced last week.
Stalin then vented a contempt and conviction which have stayed with him, and have done much to shape the modern Red Army. He had no use for the man who was merely a professional militarist; for Stalin, officers and men had to be citizens of the revolution as well. When the Red cause seemed all but lost in south Russia, Stalin wrote to Lenin: "The fact is that our experts are not only psychologically incapable of ruthlessly combatting the counterrevolution, but likewise, being staff workers who know only how to make field sketches and draft plans for realignment, are absolutely indifferent to actual operations, and in general regard themselves as outsiders, as guests."
Timoshenko took care to be no guest at the Red table. He conformed to the pattern of almost all the great careers in the Red Army: he was successively a local, regional and national official of the Party; the while he attended Red Army schools, commanded Red troops in the field. His associates, superiors and teachers were often the generals whom Stalin purged, with the active or passive consent of Timoshenko and the others who survived and rose in the aftermath. The western world has never made up its mind about the purges. It may be that, as Moscow said, traitors to the U.S.S.R. dominated the Red Army, that the first battles of the war with Hitler were won by Stalin's firing squads. At any rate, the Red Army which emerged from the bloodbath must win or lose the last ones. So far, it has lost all but the ones which counted most.
"On Us Alone." Semion Timoshenko came out of the Finnish war with the Order of Lenin, the cherished title of Hero of the Soviet Union, a Marshalship and credit for smashing the Mannerheim Line. Actually he had to share the credit with two others: Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, then & now Stalin's Chief of Staff (TIME, Feb. 16), and Marshal Grigory Kulik, an artillery expert who has lately dropped out of sight.