British and American forces also made progress in 1943. Large deployments of German troops were defeated in North Africa and Sicily, and the southern portion of the Italian peninsula was occupied, bringing down Mussolini’s regime and taking Italy out of the war. The Allies were also achieving success against Japan, and Germany’s submarine fleet suffered significant losses in the Atlantic, making shipments of supplies and troops from the United States less dangerous. Allied bombing of Germany was causing increasing devastation. The British and Americans no longer worried that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of war, and such a realization relieved some of the pressure for major sacrifices by the Western allies. Moreover, the idea of an advance through the Balkans was beginning to look like a viable alternative to the opening of a second front in northern France. Churchill favored the Balkan approach, but Roosevelt, based on American interests, maintained his previous commitment to a landing on the French coast.
For Stalin, the opening of a second front remained a top priority in relations with his allies. While he of course wanted to relieve the suffering of his battered and exhausted country, he also saw such an opening as a matter of political prestige and a sign of his standing within the Big Three. Not surprisingly, on hearing in June 1943 that Churchill and Roosevelt were planning to postpone the opening of a front in northern France until the next year, his response was icy. “I must inform you,” he wrote his partners on 24 June, “that this is a matter not just of disappointing the Soviet government but of preserving its trust in its allies, trust that has been put to serious tests.”
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In August, the Soviet ambassador, who enjoyed good relations with the British establishment, was pointedly recalled from London. But the allies could not afford total alienation, and none wanted to go anywhere near the point of breaking off relations. This was evident in the decision that soon followed, after contentious negotiation, to hold the first face-to-face meeting of the Big Three. In November 1943 the allies gathered in Tehran, the site proposed by Stalin. This concession by Roosevelt and Churchill at least took some of the sting out of their decision to delay an invasion.
This trip, Stalin’s first outside the Soviet Union since coming to power, did not take him far from the Soviet border. After traveling to Baku by train, he took a short flight to the Iranian capital. As far as we know, this was Stalin’s first and last flight in an airplane, and he appears to have been anxious about it. According to the memoirs of General Sergei Shtemenko, who accompanied Stalin on the trip, a problem developed at the airport in Baku. Stalin refused to fly in a plane piloted by a high-ranking member of Soviet aviation, General Golovanov (mentioned above), and preferred to be flown by a less eminent pilot. “General-colonels rarely fly airplanes; we’d be better off flying with a colonel,” he is quoted as saying.
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Golovanov categorically denies this account, but he does say that while still in Moscow, Stalin wanted to discuss plans for the flight in detail. Among his instructions, he ordered Golovanov to check the reliability of the pilot.
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Stalin apparently had a difficult time during the flight. While meeting with UK Ambassador Archibald Kerr and U.S. Ambassador Harriman in September 1944, he told them that his ears hurt for two weeks afterward.
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The Tehran Conference got under way on 28 November 1943. This was Stalin’s third meeting with Churchill and his first with Roosevelt. Face-to-face contact with Roosevelt was particularly important. Stalin knew that the American and British leaders did not see eye to eye on everything, and one point of difference was the opening of a second front in northern France. Roosevelt and Stalin, each for his own reason, both advocated this second front. Stalin had two powerful cards in his pocket: the Red Army’s victories and a promise to take up arms against Japan after Hitler’s defeat. Beside a desire for good long-term relations with the USSR and its help against Japan, Roosevelt was also motivated by his reluctance to have Red Army troops moving deep into Western Europe. The result was a promise in Tehran that the United States and Great Britain would open a second front in the north of France in May 1944. Discussions also covered future Soviet efforts against Japan, the creation of a postwar international security system, the borders of a postwar Poland, and other issues. Stalin had every reason to come away pleased.
VICTORY AND VENGEANCE
The Allied successes in 1943 left no doubt that Germany would ultimately lose the war, but when? How many lives would be sacrificed before that happened? Having learned a bitter lesson, Stalin no longer tried to assign a timetable to the fall of the Reich. The Germans put up a desperate fight. Holed up in defensive positions, they launched only occasional counterattacks. Meanwhile, the Red Army pushed forward, sometimes quickening the pace, sometimes slowing it. Both sides endured heavy casualties.
During the first five months of 1944 the Red Army achieved impressive victories at both ends of the huge Soviet-German Front, in Ukraine and outside Leningrad. Its forces, fighting fiercely, advanced hundreds of kilometers, in places even going beyond the Soviet border into Romania. But in the center of the Eastern Front, the Germans were unassailable. For the Red Army, the campaign of the summer of 1944 was dedicated to destroying the enemy forces at the front’s center. The well and stealthily prepared operation in Belarus was one of the most significant of the entire war. It led to the destruction of a huge Wehrmacht force.
Celebrating his triumph, Stalin ordered up an impressive propaganda spectacle. For several hours, beginning on the morning of 17 July, a column of more than fifty-seven thousand German prisoners of war, with generals and officers at the head of the line, was paraded through central Moscow. That evening they were loaded onto trains and sent to camps. Crowds of Muscovites lined the streets to observe this extraordinary event. “As the column of prisoners of war passed by,” Beria reported to Stalin, “the population behaved in an organized manner.” He described for the
vozhd
the shouts that could be heard: “Numerous enthusiastic exclamations and salutes in honor of the Red Army and our Supreme Commander-in-Chief,” as well as “anti-fascist cries of ‘Death to Hitler,’ ‘Death to fascism,’ ‘Let the scoundrels die,’” etc. After the columns had passed, crews of water trucks were brought in to pointedly wash the streets clean.
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On 16 August a similar spectacle took place in Kiev.
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This demeaning procession of German prisoners symbolized the impending collapse of Nazism. On 6 June 1944, British, American, and other Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. Overwhelmed by the Red Army in 1944, Germany’s allies Romania and Finland laid down their arms. Red Army troops liberated all Soviet territory, expelled Hitler’s forces from a significant portion of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and moved toward the borders of Germany itself.
These decisive victories were primarily the result of the Soviet Union’s military and economic superiority, attained through the entire country’s sacrifices and exertion. By June 1944 the Soviet armed forces exceeded 11 million people. Red Army assets included field forces numbering 6.6 million, approximately 100,000 mortars and artillery, 8,000 tanks and self-propelled artillery, and 13,000 combat aircraft. In terms of personnel, the ratio of forces along the Soviet-German Front was 1.5:1 in favor of the Red Army; for mortars and artillery, 1.7:1; and for combat aircraft, 4.2:1. The two sides were approximately equally matched in tanks.
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Furthermore, the Soviet side had significant reserves, while the capacity of the Reich and its allies was shrinking by the day. The Red Army and its commanders, led by Stalin, were growing increasingly confident, bolstered by the wealth of their resources and the experience acquired through years of catastrophe and, finally, victory.
For Stalin, managing the army and continuing to increase its might remained a high priority. Furthermore, liberated areas of the country lay in ruins and desperately needed to be rebuilt. The Nazis had exterminated millions of Soviet civilians, especially Jews. Many towns and villages were completely depopulated.
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A 1 July 1944 letter to Stalin from the head of Belarus offers a glimpse of the state of territories that had been under German occupation: “There are 800 people left in Vitebsk; before the war there were 211,000.… Zhlobin has been completely destroyed. There is a small number of wooden buildings and the frames of three stone ones. There is no population in the city.”
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In addition to repairing physical destruction, the liberation of Soviet territories confronted the leadership with new political problems. For varying durations—from a few weeks to three years—tens of millions of people had lived under Nazi occupation. Many had either been forced to collaborate or had done so out of conviction. Many others had fled to serve with pro-Soviet partisans or had done what they could to help them. Most had simply tried to survive in the new order. Stalin felt no responsibility for the suffering of Soviet citizens who, in Soviet bureaucratic language, “resided in occupied territory.” Like soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans, anyone who lived in captured territory was classified as “suspicious.” As part of their reintegration into the USSR, liberated areas had to be cleansed of the taint of occupation, and the means of accomplishing this was mass repression. The crime being prosecuted now was abetting the enemy. Stalin was adamant: no mercy could be shown. On 28 December 1943, Beria submitted a memorandum to him about the discovery in Ukraine of so-called “Volksdeutsche”—people with German roots. This population, Beria claimed, were privileged supporters of the Nazis during the occupation. Stalin gave the order: “Arrest them all and keep them in a special camp under special observation and use them for work.”
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As the war wound down, a new principle shaped Stalinist repression: collective responsibility for collaboration with the occupiers. This principle was expressed in the wholesale internal deportation of a number of Soviet ethnic groups. During late 1943 and the first half of 1944, several peoples were forcibly relocated: Kalmyks, certain North Caucasian ethnic groups (Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, Balkars), and Crimean Tatars, as well as all the Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians living in Crimea. Stalin’s decision to exile these groups was partially motivated by real evidence of collaboration and noncompliance with government mobilization efforts during the war, mainly evasion of recruitment into the army.
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But the principle of collective responsibility and punishment had a broader significance. Even before the war, the government had had difficulty integrating many of these peoples into Soviet society. The war only confirmed that this task had never been completed. Moving them to remote areas of the USSR, in Stalin’s mind, was a way of solving this problem once and for all. But the job had to be done right. Entire peoples, bound by common ancestry and heritage, had to be relocated. If anyone was left behind to keep the ancestral hearth burning, many others would try to escape exile and return home. In the case of Crimean Tatars, Stalin was probably also worried about their proximity to Turkey, which he regarded as a potentially hostile force. As the ethnic deportations continued in mid-1944, the border regions of Georgia were also targeted. They were purged of Turks, Kurds, and a few other ethnic minorities viewed by the Soviet authorities as fertile ground for Turkish influence and espionage. These expulsions were essentially a continuation of Stalin’s long-standing prewar policy of preventative ethnic purging. But the war drove the sweeping nature of the deportations and the decisiveness with which they were carried out. Much of the inhumanity of war stems from the inhuman acts it is used to justify.
The ethnic deportations of 1943–1944 swept up more than a million people. Such a massive endeavor required large numbers of troops and state security personnel. Stalin had the final word in deciding the fates of entire peoples. He was kept constantly informed on the progress of the deportations, and these reports are now available to historians in what is known as “Stalin’s special file” among NKVD materials.
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Because of the number of deportees involved (approximately one-half million), the relocation of Chechens and Ingush was particularly complicated and difficult. Beria went personally to the North Caucasus to oversee the effort. On 17 February 1944 he wired Stalin to report that the preliminary stage of the operation had been completed.
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His telegram made it clear that what the Soviet leadership feared most was “incidents”—resistance by the deportees. For this reason, the authorities relied on the element of surprise. Troops assembled under the pretext of training exercises arrested the most active members of the community as a precaution. Stalin, who followed the operation closely, apparently advised Beria not to rely solely on the “chekist and troop operations” but to also try to undermine solidarity among the deportees. In a 22 February telegram, Beria reported to Stalin that he had carried out his “instructions.” He had summoned top Chechen and Ingush officials and demanded that they help assure that the deportation was carried out without “excesses.” To promote calm, Beria informed Stalin, he solicited the help of religious leaders and other local authorities. In exchange, these officials and elders were promised certain privileges in their place of exile, including increased rations and the right to bring property with them. “I believe that the operation to evict the Chechens and Ingush will be carried out successfully,” he reported.
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The following day, 23 February, he proudly described the beginning of the operation, adding: “There were six attempts to resist by individuals that were suppressed through arrest or use of arms.”
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Stalin could rest assured that the task was in good hands.