Like many of Stalin’s political tools, reprisals against real and imagined collaborators were a double-edged sword. After the exceptional violence of war, attempts to instill a desire for vengeance against collaborators weakened the army’s morale and spawned brutality and abuses. Many incidents served to illustrate the danger of spontaneous eruptions when millions of young men are thrown into a brutal war. Heroism and self-sacrifice coexisted alongside the basest human behaviors and duty, compassion, and decency alongside criminality and rancor. All sorts of people were in the army, including criminals who had been released from the camps early to fight. Documents from 1944 show that Stalin was repeatedly informed of crimes against civilians by soldiers in liberated areas. In late July, Beria wrote him about the arrest of a group of soldiers and junior officers in a tank repair unit in Moldavia after they had gone on a drunken rampage of robbery and rape against the local population.
118
A similar report from Beria in late September informed Stalin of a rape by members of the Red Army in Crimea. This report also recounted instances of robbery and armed encounters with the local police.
119
Summaries of crimes committed by members of the military in September, October, and December also contained descriptions of robberies, rapes, and even murders, both far from the front and close to the fighting.
120
All were committed against Soviet citizens on Soviet territory.
The situation was much worse when the army entered foreign territory, especially Germany. Feelings of vengeance toward Germans, carefully cultivated by Soviet military propaganda, were not the only reasons for a host of crimes—robbery, murder, and rape—by Soviet soldiers and officers against German civilians. Atrocities by the Nazis within the Soviet Union, the exceptional brutality of the war, the ignorance and criminal pasts of some members of the Red Army, and the weakening of discipline under combat conditions all contributed to, but did not excuse, the firestorm of violence.
121
Stalin was informed of his army’s behavior. On 17 March 1945, Beria sent him and Molotov a report on the rapes of German women and their subsequent suicides in eastern Prussia.
122
With the opening of archives from this period, the number of known incidents of this sort will only grow. The history of a dispute with the Yugoslav leadership offers evidence of Stalin’s attitude toward such behavior by his military. In late 1944, when the Red Army reached Yugoslav territory and liberated the country together with Yugoslav units, alarming accounts of crimes by members of the Soviet armed forces began to appear. According to the prominent Yugoslav Communist politician and writer Milovan Djilas, there were more than a hundred cases where women were raped and murdered and more than a thousand robberies. The Yugoslav leadership appealed to the Red Army command but was curtly rebuffed. The Yugoslavs were accused of slander. When the matter reached Stalin, he supported his military men and made crude political accusations against the Yugoslavs. Later, when he decided that the conflict needed to be quelled, he had a conciliatory discussion with Djilas during a dinner at his dacha in April 1945:
Imagine a man who has fought his way from Stalingrad to Belgrade—thousands of kilometers across his desolated land, seeing the death of his comrades and the people closest to him! Can such a man really react normally? And what’s so terrible if he misbehaves with a woman a bit after such horrors? You imagined the Red Army to be ideal. It isn’t ideal and wouldn’t be ideal even without a certain percentage of criminal elements—we opened up the prisons and took everyone into the army.… You have to understand war. And the Red Army isn’t ideal. The important thing was for it to beat the Germans—and it’s beating them well. Everything else is secondary.
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If this was Stalin’s attitude toward crimes committed on the territory of an allied state, where the government was controlled by Communists loyal to Moscow, it is hardly surprising that he had no desire to take serious measures to prevent abuses in Germany. Stalin’s calculations were obvious. All he cared about was the army’s military success. If it could be rewarded for its efforts at the expense of the enemy’s civilian population, that was fine with him. Nor was he especially worried about reproaches by his Western allies. Remarks made to him by President Roosevelt on 4 February 1945, before the Yalta Conference got under way, probably did not evade his attention: “Roosevelt states that now that he has seen the senseless destruction perpetrated by the Germans in Crimea, he would like to destroy twice as many Germans as have been destroyed so far. We definitely have to destroy 50,000 German-Prussian officers. He, Roosevelt, remembers how Marshal Stalin proposed a toast in Tehran to the annihilation of 50,000 German-Prussian officers. This was a very good toast.”
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At some point, however, Stalin had to make a choice. “Misbehaving with women,” which he considered a reward for military success, was clearly turning into a problem. Crimes perpetrated by the Soviet military were beginning to serve Nazi propaganda purposes and were feeding German opposition to the Red Army that was not being expressed against the Western Allies. On the eve of a decisive battle for Berlin, Stalin sent the army a clear political signal. On 14 April 1945,
Pravda
published a scathing critique of a work by the well-known Soviet writer and commentator Ilya Erenburg, hailed for his many furious calls for the killing of Germans. Suddenly these calls, which had been perfectly in harmony with Soviet propaganda, were deemed inappropriate.
Pravda
explained at length that there is no such thing as a united Germany, that not all Germans behave the same, and that many of them—more and more with time—were turning away from Nazism and even fighting it. Judging by the article’s style, it had been touched by Stalin’s pen, and certain fragments were probably its product.
Political posturing and even the introduction of punishment for crimes by Soviet soldiers improved the situation only slightly. Violence toward civilians within the Soviet zone of occupation continued even after the fighting ended. In the summer of 1945, alarmed by the scale of violence, the supreme commander of the occupying Soviet force, Marshal Zhukov, issued orders demanding an end to “plunder, violence, and abuses in regard to the local population.” After these demands had little effect, in early September Zhukov issued a more radical order. Remarking that the “criminality of military service members has significantly grown,” he ordered that soldiers be confined to their barracks and obliged officers to move in with their subordinates to maintain order. Stalin, on learning of this order, demanded that it be rescinded. One argument against it was that “If this order falls in the hands of the leaders of foreign armies, they will not fail to label the Red Army an army of looters.” In place of Zhukov’s strict measures, Stalin proposed more vigorous political work, with the troops bringing guilty officers before so-called officer honor courts. The excesses in Germany continued.
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TWEAKING THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP
On 31 July 1943, Stalin signed a directive addressed to the commanders of the Southern Front that stated, among other things, the following: “I believe it is shameful for Front commanders to allow, through negligence and poor organization, our four infantry regiments to be surrounded by enemy forces. In the third year of war one would think you would have learned how to correctly lead troops.”
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This comment reflects how Stalin felt about his two-year experience at the helm of a country at war. His commanders, he believed, were long overdue in mastering skills that had been lacking or poorly developed when the war first broke out. Probably the supreme commander did not feel this assessment fully applied to himself, but his behavior suggests that he knew there were shortcomings in his leadership during the early stages of the war and he was making an effort to correct them. In style and substance, the military “reforms” he put in place reflected his preferred approach to any problem. Whether he was industrializing a backward country or waging war, his experiments in leadership had many innocent victims.
One reason for the Germans’ early success against Soviet defenses was the low level of competence up and down the Soviet chain of command. Lacking trust in his generals (sometimes with good reason), Stalin managed using the techniques with which he was most familiar: strong-armed police measures that instilled fear. Commanders were forced to work under the watchful eye of political commissars and NKVD “special departments.” Disorganization and panic were addressed through executions in front of the ranks, penalty battalions, and anti-retreat units. Stalin’s parallel army of discipline-keepers rushed from crisis to crisis, both at the front and in the rear. As defensive lines collapsed, the enemy advanced, and Stalin lost faith in his commanders, he developed an array of strategies that wound up depriving commanders of flexibility and often increased Red Army casualties.
These heavy-handed and repressive measures probably do not indicate a conscious choice so much as Stalin’s desperation. As strong as his tendency toward violence was, he was certainly aware of the danger inherent in applying it to his own military during a war. He must have grasped that sending troops into battle with guns at their backs was not the ideal way to instill a fighting spirit. He also must have known that on the battlefield it was particularly important to have a single decision maker able to exercise judgment without a political commissar looking over his shoulder. The catastrophes of 1941–1942 clearly showed that unsophisticated and rushed maneuvers combined with pressure from political commissars were not the road to success. Fundamental changes were needed in the way the war was being managed. But when could he introduce these changes? Obviously not while the Red Army was fighting with desperate intensity to hold back the German advance. An opportunity may have presented itself in early 1942, after the Red Army’s first victories. But Stalin’s impatience and his wager on a quick victory only led to further defeat. The lull that set in during the fall of 1942 was used for other purposes, as can be seen in the careful preparations to encircle the Germans in Stalingrad. On the eve of that victory, Stalin finally turned his attention to introducing fundamental changes.
On 9 October 1942, the Politburo passed a resolution to establish full
edinonachalie
—an ideological buzzword used during forced industrialization to signify a single responsible decision maker—and abolish the institution of the military commissar within the Red Army.
127
Former commissars would now become deputy commanders. A directive signed by Stalin that same day granted officers additional privileges and assigned orderlies to the commanders of all army units, all the way down to the platoon level. The duties of these orderlies included “serving the personal everyday needs of commanding officers and carrying out their assignments.”
128
In January 1943, shoulder boards, which in 1917 had been abolished as a symbol of the tsarist army, were introduced to Red Army uniforms. The title of marshal was given to some senior commanders. The introduction of
edinonachalie,
along with privileges, medals, and promotions, was intended to empower the Red Army’s senior officers. The realities of war forced Stalin to show more trust in his military.
After the war’s chaotic first stage, there was a change in Stalin’s interactions with top military command structures, especially the General Staff. “I have to admit,” Vasilevsky later stated, “that at the beginning of the war the General Staff was thrown into a state of disarray and, strictly speaking, you could not say that it was operating normally.… At the beginning of the war Stalin disbanded the General Staff.”
129
This disarray meant that a great many decisions were made by Stalin alone, without input from the General Staff. As Vasilevsky described it, things began to change only in September 1942.
130
By fall 1943 a regular schedule was established for consultation between Stalin and the General Staff. At the start of his workday, around ten or eleven in the morning, he heard by telephone the General Staff’s first report on the situation at the fronts. Around four or five in the afternoon he heard a report on how things had gone during the first half of the day. Close to midnight, the heads of the General Staff came to him personally with a summary of the day’s events. During these meetings, which took place either at Stalin’s Kremlin office or his dacha, the group would study the situation at the fronts on maps, and directives were adopted to be sent to the field. Other decisions were made as well. Politburo members often took part in these meetings, as did the heads of various military or civilian bodies. In some cases, the heads of the General Staff visited Stalin several times in a day.
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The regularity of these meetings led to better management of the war.
In addition, Stalin had many meetings with other military and civilian leaders. Front commanders were not usually expected to report in person on their assessments and plans, but they were often summoned to Moscow for brief face-to-face meetings. Although Stalin always had the last word, many of these meetings featured a genuine discussion of problems and even debates over large and small questions. A number of memoirs report that as the situation at the fronts improved, meetings grew more businesslike, and the atmosphere became more relaxed and informal. Stalin paced the room as he listened to reports. By remaining on his feet, he lessened the hierarchical divide between him and his military subordinates, who also stood. The
vozhd
smoked a great deal, but others could also smoke without asking permission. Boxes of
papirosas
(filterless Russian cigarettes) lay on the table. Members of the top Soviet leadership sat around the table and kept silent until Stalin asked them a question.
132
Less inclined to dictate his own terms or interfere in operational decisions, Stalin became noticeably more respectful toward the military leaders as the war continued.