Fighting on all Fronts (31 page)

Despite Stalin’s manoeuvring, war was virtually inevitable, and his approach to it combined avarice and cowardice. On 5 May 1941 he told his generals they were entering an “era during which the Soviet state would develop and expand”.
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At that time he expected to make the first move,
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believing Hitler would not start a war on two fronts and would first defeat Britain before acting.
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In June, however, Stalin was warned no less than 80 times that Germany was about to invade:
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Communist railway workers in Sweden, resistance fighters in Poland, and numerous other agents reported the massive buildup of forces in the east. German high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft flew over Soviet territory on more than 300 occasions…
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Unfortunately, Stalin’s fear of displeasing Hitler had become “maniacal” , according to General Zhukov, the most important Soviet military figure of the war.
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So while senior commanders called for a general alert, Stalin responded by saying that “it would be premature to issue that order…border units must not allow themselves to be provoked”.
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This mistake came very close indeed to losing the entire war
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because it gave Operation Barbarossa (the German codename for the invasion of the Soviet Union) the overwhelming element of surprise. The experience of Oleg Ozerov shows the consequences:

I was a participant in the fighting from the very start, 4am on the morning of 22 June 1941… The terrible pressure of the fascists compelled us to withdraw from prepared positions. The route was difficult and long. Enemy aircraft commanded the sky, German tanks bypassed our positions and threatened to surround us… It was totally unlike what we were told to expect; that we would be fighting “on the enemy’s territory, and at little cost in blood”.
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On the first morning 1,200 aircraft were destroyed, mostly on the ground.
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After the first day the Germans had penetrated some 60 km.
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By the end of the first week “virtually all of the Soviet mechanised corps lost 90 percent of their strength”.
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In the period June to December 1941 the Germans took some 3 million prisoners of war (POWs). Their fate was tragic. The total number of Soviet POWs who died from hunger, cold and torture was 5 million.
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The impact on civilians was similar. Grossman was a witness:

I’ve never seen anything like what I am seeing now… Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight lanes… This isn’t a flood, this isn’t a river, it’s the slow movement of a flowing ocean, this flow is hundreds of metres wide. Children’s heads, fair and dark, are looking out from under the improvised tents covering the carts, as well as the biblical beards of Jewish elders, shawls of peasant women, hats of Ukrainian uncles, and the black-haired heads of Jewish girls and women. What silence is in their eyes, what wise sorrow, what sensation of fate, of a universal catastrophe.
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With Stalin close to a nervous breakdown it fell to Molotov to inform a stunned population by radio that yesterday’s friend had committed an aggression “unprecedented in the history of civilisation”.
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By 3 July Stalin’s courage had returned but he gave no hint of apology. “The war of fascist Germany against the USSR began under favourable conditions for their army, and unfavourable ones for the Soviet army.” His speech
combined two key elements. The first was an appeal for “a great war of all the Soviet peoples against the German-fascist army…a fatherland war”. Yet even as the general secretary called for war by the people, it was not a war for the people but for his repressive regime.

Stalin would not be Stalin if he did not call for the extermination of the internal enemy. With no sense of self-reflection Stalin declared: “We must organise merciless struggle against all disorganising forces, deserters, panic-mongers… All those whose cowardly panic interferes with defence must be immediately judged by military Tribunal, regardless of who they are”.
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It was ironic that the people’s war that Stalin now invoked was hampered by his own past policies. It is difficult to ascertain popular opinion under a totalitarian state but a study of NKVD (secret police) files in Volodosk, Eastern Ukraine, gets over this obstacle. Lack of enthusiasm for war showed itself in 1940 when the government sought to raise three battalions from the area: 500 invitations to recruitment offices were issued, 40 individuals attended but only three actually joined the Red Army.
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Significantly, the imperialist seizure of Eastern Poland was disapproved of: “The Bolsheviks said that we didn’t need any foreign land. So why are they crossing the Polish frontier and seizing foreign land”.
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On the eve of Barbarossa comments like this were recorded: “Advance towards socialism? We are miles behind the bourgeois countries,” and “Communism is supposed to be less about worrying about work, and more about yourself.” Thus the latest extension of working hours felt like “the imposition of martial law” and just “a way of replenishing the prisons”. The most negative views were expressed by women whose husbands had been purged. Even after 22 June one woman said: “We are happy if the Germans cross the Soviet Union’s frontier as our men will be released from prison. Hitler will replace the current leaders. That would make them cry, but we are crying too.” Another opined: “Thank goodness the war has begun…without the Communists life will be better”.
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The mood in the Soviet Union changed very quickly once the imperialist character of the invaders was revealed. German soldiers were told: “For your personal glory you must kill 100 Russians. Have no heart and no nerves—in war they are unnecessary. Extinguish pity and compassion, kill all Russians; none should remain—old, women, girls or boys. Kill. That will save you from defeat and guarantee your land forever”.
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The general guideline for German rule was: “Under no circumstances should the status quo be maintained… This will necessarily lead to the extinction of both the [native agriculture] industry and larger segments
of the population… Tens of millions of people in these areas will become superfluous and either die or have to move to Siberia”.
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Along with this came the Holocaust and involved directly targeted murder, such as the mass shooting of 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, Kiev.

Other horrors were recorded by Grossman. He described conditions for miners under the Germans: “One day of absence from work meant a concentration camp… They were beaten with lashes while working”.
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He interviewed a young teenage boy:

“Where is your father?”

“Killed,” he answered.

“And mother?”

“She died.”

“Have you got brothers and sisters?”

“A sister. They took her to Germany.”

“Have you got any relatives?”

“No, they were all burned in a partisan village”.
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Werth, another eyewitness, summed up the general reaction to the carnage:

They were robbing, and looting and killing; when they were retreating they would burn down every house, and in the depth of winter civilians were left without house and home… The anger and resentment against the Germans, mixed with a feeling of infinite pity for the Russian people, for the Russian land, defiled by the invader, produced an emotional reaction of national pride and national injury.
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Volodosk’s NKVD registered the impact of Nazi aggression on popular consciousness. During the first half of 1941 there were 2,304 army deserters and 1,684 draft dodgers; but between 22 June and 1 September 1941 the figure for deserters was 59.
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In workplaces large-scale collections were held to support the army. The 2,270 workers of a locomotive factory set out to “double and then triple production” norms. This may have been management propaganda but it was the case that at the end of 1941 output had exceeded the annual norm by 123 percent. Thousands of local people also became blood donors.
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War from below, a people’s war, was a common phenomenon in the Second World War and the Soviet Union was no exception. Many
commentators have argued that it was this which rescued the country. Volkogonov, historian and former head of the Soviet military’s psychological warfare department, writes: “In those dark days, the enemy struck blow after blow and Stalin felt that only a miracle would save him. But it was the people who saved him, the people who found the strength to stand firm”.
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It was this readiness of ordinary people to risk their lives in fighting fascism that turned the situation around. And, as one veteran puts it: “We were not defending Stalin, but our homes and families… At the front, in our battery were Armenians, Kazakhs, Russians and representatives of other nationalities. There were many nationalities in my unit. There were those who didn’t want to fight, but we were an example of heroism”.
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Another explains that: “For me Stalin appears to have been the embodiment of an evil genius—cunning, but absolutely amoral and ruthless. We did not win the war thanks to Stalin, but despite him!”
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The people’s war saved the Soviet Union in spite of Stalin. It does not follow that it was an independent alternative to Stalin.

In the rest of Europe the rapid advance of Axis forces either drove governments into exile (as in Greece or Yugoslavia) or induced them to collaborate (like Vichy France). In these circumstances resistance movements were relatively free of Allied imperialism and reflected the needs of the ordinary people who participated. That was not the case in the Soviet Union. The social atomisation wrought by Stalinism, fear of repression and the destruction of viable alternatives such as Trotskyism, made it virtually impossible to generate a collective response that stood apart from the regime.

This did not mean that the state could do without the people’s war. One difficulty Stalin faced was that official “Communist” ideology was tarnished by association with repression and exploitation, so it was sidelined. On the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1941 Stalin talked of a war inspired by “our great ancestors”, victorious in battles in 1242, 1380, over Poland in the 1600s, and against Napoleon.
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Relations with the Russian Orthodox Church were also carefully cultivated.
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Instead of combating extreme German nationalism with internationalism, he invoked Russian chauvinism.

The dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 was emblematic of the new direction in internal propaganda as well as a move to placate Britain and the US. To the extent that such reactionary appeals were felt to be effective, this unfortunately proved the lack of a meaningful alternative on offer. But such chauvinism came with a price—the alienation of numerous non-Russian victims of “Russification” under the tsars.

The presence of people’s war but its lack of independent self-expression was evident in four arenas: the Red Army, partisan struggles, among Soviet citizens in the unoccupied areas and non-Soviet movements under Nazi occupation.

It was in the Red Army that the mettle of the people’s war was tested to the greatest degree. According to one fairly conservative estimate, the Soviet Union suffered 10 million military deaths. Britain and the US lost 300,000 and 274,000 respectively.
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This disparity cannot be attributed to inferior fighting abilities on the part of the Red Army. Although 3.2 Red Army soldiers died for every one German,
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this ratio was partly due to the disastrous way Stalin allowed millions of his soldiers to be captured and killed early on. The ratio of Allied to Axis deaths on the eastern front was 1.3 to 1 compared to 2.2 to 1 in the west.
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The shattering assault of the Wehrmacht did lead to disarray and a loss of nerve. In July 1942 Stalin’s Order 227, “Not one step backwards” introduced draconian penalties for “cowards and deserters”. Anyone who surrendered would be “be shot on the spot” and their family arrested.
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This undoubtedly helped restore order and stem the rout. But soon afterwards the war from below against fascism became a self-generating phenomenon and so, as one veteran puts it, “The impact of Order 227 was not prolonged. Already after a few months…it was more or less ‘forgotten’ as more punishment measures were not needed”.
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The Battle of Stalingrad, fought during the winter of 1942-1943, is generally recognised as the key turning point in the fortunes of war. Before this event the Axis powers were in the ascendant. Afterwards their doom was generally predicted, even though many years of fighting lay ahead. Chuikov, a key commander at Stalingrad, told Grossman: “A soldier who’d spent three days here considered himself an old-timer. Here, people only lived for one day”.
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Viktor Karelin lost both hands in fighting and describes the circumstances:

We had to fight the enemy step-by-step, one room after the other, floor after floor, structure after structure… I made it to the middle of the street in two or three leaps. And suddenly a burst of fire flashed in front of my eyes…my left forearm began to burn with pain. A round had passed through it… Then I looked at my right hand. The fingers on my gloves had been mangled into unrecognisable shreds, like the frayed ends of a
rope… A mine detonated several metres behind me… Twice my comrades had tried to drag me out from under fire, each time unsuccessfully. One Soviet soldier was killed, the other seriously wounded.
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While civilians, partisans and soldiers centred their fight on the Nazi enemy, the state focused on maintaining its grip. It fought the imperialist rival but continued to suppress its own population. Order 227 had established penal battalions to which those who had been imprisoned by the enemy were sent. Almost half a million Red Army POWs ended up in these units. Alexander Revich, who escaped from the Germans twice, was one: