| Summary/Abstract |
ON THE evening of June 21, 1941, just hours before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, people's commissar for defense, and General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, chief of the Red Army General Staff, were at the Kremlin, urging Joseph Stalin in the wake of new reports of German military activity along the western border of the USSR to immediately issue a directive to activate the Soviet Union's previously approved plan of response to a potential German attack. But the Soviet leader was dragging his heels. He was waiting for news from the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
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