Notes

INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF POWER

 1. In Russia Stalin’s reputation has shifted from a low point in the 1990s to a much more positive level, in part due to state-sponsored propaganda. In 2010, 60 per cent of Russians polled supported legislation to protect the memory of Stalin’s state and the Soviet Army during the Second World War. By 2015 a slight majority of Russians polled by Levada expressed a favourable view of Stalin generally. D. Khapaeva, ‘Triumphant Memory of the Perpetrators in Putin’s Policy of Re-Stalinization’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49:1 (March 2016), pp. 61−73; pp. 7−8. See also T.H. Nelson, Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019).

 2. Cf. M. Edle, Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

 3. R.G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020) is the most convincing portrait of these years. See also S. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Penguin, 2016), who employs the paradoxical motif in different ways. My use of the term, which I first employed with respect to foreign policy, differs from his. See A.J. Rieber, ‘Stalin as Foreign Policy Maker: Avoiding War, 1927–1953’, in S. Davies and J.R. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 140–59, and editors’ introduction, ‘Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas’, pp. 1–18; p. 9. I expanded upon this theme in my Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

 4. A.J. Rieber, ‘Stalin: Man of the Borderlands’, American Historical Review 5 (December 2001), pp. 1,683–96.

 5. I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1946–52), vol. 4, pp. 74–81, vol. 6, p. 399, vol. 8, pp. 14, 173 and 263. For an extended analysis see Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle, pp. 93–6.

 6. Historians have tended to place different emphases on the modern and the so-called neo-traditional character of the emerging Soviet society. See a summary in M. David-Fox, ‘Multiple Modernities vs Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54:4 (2006), pp. 535–55. My book seeks to reconcile these two perspectives through the agency of paradox.

 7. S. Rosefielde, ‘Documented Homicides and Excess Deaths: New Insights into the Scale of Killing in the USSR during the 1930s’, Communist and Postcommunist Studies 30:3 (September 1997), pp. 321–31 distinguishes among six different categories of excess deaths. By combining losses attributed directly to collectivization (about 800,000) and those within Gulag camps, he arrives at a figure of over 1 million peasants killed, based on NKVD sources; see chart, ibid., p. 327.

 8. The coercive measures employed to eliminate the peasant property-owners (kulaks) and force the remainder into kolkhozes or collective farms triggered mass resistance verging on civil war. A. Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and L. Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

 9. R.W. Davies, O.V. Naumov and S.G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Progress: The Soviet Economy, 1934–1936 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

 10. This was the verdict of a review by a commission of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1966 on the initiative of Aleksei Kosygin, one of the leading economists in Leningrad during the war years. But his proposed reforms of the Stalinist system failed to take hold. M. Lewin, Le Siècle soviétique (Paris: Fayard, 2003), pp. 413–15.

 11. K.E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), chap. 3.

 12. M.J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 255–85.

 13. From a large literature see J.A. Getty and O.V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, updated and abridged edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and W.Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) with extensive bibliographical commentary, pp. 1–6.

 14. According to the International Red Cross the number was 3.8 million. Argumenty i fakty 6 (1990), p. 8.

 15. For a brief survey of the Soviet historiography of the Second World War see V.M. Kulish, ‘Sovetskaia istoriografiia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, in Iu.N. Afanasev (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografiia (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1996), pp. 274–311. On the Western side the revisionist works of G. Gorodetsky, Grand Illusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016) and G. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) present Stalin as a rational statesman, pragmatic and realistic in both his preparation for war and his conduct of it.

 16. The most celebrated and extreme example of this aspect was the Stakhanovite (shock workers) movement, which – as L.H. Siegelbaum pointed out in his Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) – was intense but short-lived. R. Thurston, ‘The Stakhanovite Movement: The Background to the Great Terror in the Factories, 1935–1938’, in J.A. Getty and R.T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 142–62 focuses on tensions on the factory floor created by the movement, leading to denunciations for ‘wrecking’. For a more positive interpretation of an emerging Soviet working class, see K.M. Straus, Factory and Community in Stalin’s Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 1: MOBILIZATION AND REPRESSION AT THE CENTRE

 1. Moshe Lewin described the process as an emerging ‘system of orderly bureaucracy’ undermined by ‘extralegal’ means. ‘The Social Background of Stalinism’, in R.C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 111−36; p. 135.

 2. Samples of the most important works are P. Holquist, ‘“Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History 69:3 (1997), pp. 415–50; P. Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); P. Holquist, ‘Violent Russia: Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905–1921’, Kritika 4:3 (spring 2003), pp. 627–52; E. Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); A. Weiner, ‘Introduction: Landscaping the Human Garden’, in Weiner, Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–10.

 3. The title of chap. 10 in J. Erickson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918–1941 (London: Macmillan, 1984).

 4. R.J. Brody, ‘Ideology and Political Mobilization: The Soviet Home Front during World War Two’, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1,104 (October 1994) gives a comprehensive picture of the institutional basis, while documenting the shortcomings in the Agitprop work admitted by party stalwarts on the eve of and during the war.

 5. R. Tucker, ‘On Revolutionary Mass-Movement Regimes’, in The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalinist Change, rev. edn (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 3–19; pp. 7, 16, 18.

 6. P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); V. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) for the important role of one aspect of visual art.

 7. Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin; Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War.

 8. War scares are a recurrent if understated theme in Soviet history, beginning with the tense situation in 1923 reaching one climax in 1927 and another in 1930 and remaining thereafter as a touch-point for army reform and mobilization of the civilian population under the banner of patriotism. See M. von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 184, 196–7, 291–2, 336–7.

 9. For the conflicting views within the Comintern see A. Di Biagio, ‘Moscow, the Comintern and the War Scare’, in S. Pons and A. Romano (eds), Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914–1945 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), pp. 83–102.

 10. J.P. Sontag, ‘The Soviet War Scare of 1926–27’, Russian Review 34:1 (January 1975), pp. 66–77.

 11. A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 228–9 cites Soviet statistics showing an increase in defence spending by 286 per cent from 1937 to 1938 and a decrease in the quantity of machine tools imported from abroad from 78 to 10 per cent.

 12. L.S. Komarov, Rossiia tankov ne imela. Dokumental’no-khudozhestvennoe povestvovanie (Chelyabinsk: L.S. Komarov, 1994).

 13. L. Samuelson, ‘Wartime Perspectives and Economic Planning: Tukhachevsky and the Military Industrial Complex’, in Pons and Romano (eds), Russia in the Age of Wars, pp. 186–214; pp. 206–9 (quotation p. 206, with italics in original).

 14. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, pp. 244–7 and W.E. Odom, Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).

 15. A. Romano, ‘Permanent War Scare: Mobilization, Militarization and Peasant War’, in Pons and Romano (eds), Russia in the Age of Wars, pp. 103–19; pp. 103–8.

 16. N.S. Simonov, ‘“Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets”: The 1927 “War Alarm” and Its Consequences’, Europe-Asia Studies 48:8 (1996), pp. 355–64: p. 357.

 17. Romano, ‘Permanent War Scare’, pp. 108–10.

 18. Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle, pp. 113–15; A. Graziosi, ‘Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales à travers les rapports du GPU d’Ukraine de février–mars 1930’, Cahiers du monde russe 35:3 (1994), pp. 437–72.

 19. Throughout the crisis, Stalin hammered away at the distinction between Bukharin’s abstract formula on the inevitability of war and the specific prediction of Zinoviev and Kamenev on the imminent possibility of war. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 10, pp. 47–8, 53–4, 59, 81–2, 86–7, 199–200. Over the following months, his verbal manipulations of ‘dangers’ and ‘threats’ proliferated wildly. See the full record in N.V. Nagladin, Istoriia uspekhov i neudach sovetskoi diplomatii. Politologicheskii aspekt (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1990), pp. 84–6.

 20. Voroshilov’s letter to the head of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, Jan Gamarnik, on 17 March in RGASPI, f. 74, op. 2, d. 93, listy 39–39b as cited in Romano, ‘Permanent War Scare’, p. 118.

 21. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 7, listy 102–3 as cited in Simonov, ‘“Strengthen the Defence”’, p. 362.

 22. ‘I.V. Stalin, pis’ma’, in V.S. Lel’chuk (ed.), Sovetskoe obshchestvo. Vozniknovenie, razvitie, istoricheskii final, 2 vols (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennnyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1997), vol. 1, p. 427 ff.; L.T. Lih, O.V. Naumov and O.V. Khlevniuk (eds), Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), letter 56, pp. 190–6; for a reprint of the trial see S.A. Krasil’nikov et al. (eds), Sudebnii protsess ‘Prompartii’ 1930 g. Podgotovka, provedenie, itogi, 2 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2016). A printed brochure, Materialy po delu kontrrevoliutsionnoy ‘Trudovoy krestianskoy partii’ i gruppirovki Sukhanova-Gromana (Iz materialov sledstvennogo proizvodstva OGPU) was widely distributed among party and state directors on Stalin’s orders. Stalin to Molotov, 2 August 1930 in Lih, Naumov and Khlevniuk (eds), Stalin’s Letters, letter 56, pp. 199–200. See also T.H. Ostashko, ‘Vlast’ i intelligentsia. Dinamik vzaimootnoshenii na rubezhe 1920–1930-kh godov’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 2 (1998), pp. 19–24.

 23. Bailes, Technology and Society, pp. 122–40. The purges were aimed mainly at oppositionists and many of the leading engineers were spared, helping to restore standards of quality with less emphasis on the class origins of students and more on preparation in maths and science. Ibid., pp. 223–9 et passim; quotation on p. 242. This remains the standard work, though published before the archives were open.

 24. R.W. Davies, Crisis and Progress in the Soviet Economy, 1931–1933 (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164–76; p. 176.

 25. Ibid., p. 475.

 26. A. Livschiz, ‘Pre-Revolutionary in Form, Soviet in Content? Wartime Educational Reforms and the Post War Quest for Normality’, History of Education 35:4–5 (July–September, 2006), pp. 541–60; pp. 543–7. For the general problem of hooliganism before the war see S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times – Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 152–3.

 27. E.T. Ewing, Separate Schools: Gender, Policy and Practice in Postwar Soviet Education (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), pp. 82, 184. The end of the war sparked a new debate in which the proponents of a return to co-education rejected the idea that separate educational classes offered any substantive arguments in favour. But the controversy only ended with Stalin’s death. Ibid., p. 191.

 28. J. Dunstan, Soviet Schooling in the Second World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan and Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1997), chap. 5.

 29. G. Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, ed. I. Banac and trans. J.T. Hedges, T.D. Sergay and I. Faion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), entry for 11 November 1937, pp. 69–70. Years later Molotov resorted to the same explanation for the terror. F.I. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym. Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow: Terra, 1991), p. 254.

 30. W. Hedeler, ‘Ezhov’s Scenario for the Great Terror and the Falsified Record of the Third Moscow Show Trial’, in B. McLoughlin and K. McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 34–55; p. 52. See also Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, pp. 422–5 and B. McLoughlin, ‘Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937–8: A Survey’, in McLoughlin and McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror, pp. 118–52; pp. 122–3 and 142.

 31. O.V. Khlevniuk, ‘The Reasons for the Great Terror: The Foreign-Political Aspect’, in Pons and Romano (eds), Russia in the Age of Wars, pp. 159–69.

 32. Terror was a defining characteristic of the Socialist Revolutionaries. O.H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 67–74. Trotsky was responsible for the most complete theoretical justification of terror in constructing the socialist state. L. Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935).

 33. The multiple causation of the purges has been well documented although its roots in pre-revolutionary Russia are less well explored. For recent representative examples see J.A. Getty, The Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); G.T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Chur and New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991); Getty and Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror; O.V. Khlevniuk, 1937. Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow: Respublika, 1992); H. Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror and D. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power and Terror in Interwar Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See the bibliography in McLoughlin and McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror, pp. 14–18. A great deal of evidence suggests widespread participation, not only by the NKVD and party organs, but by ‘ordinary people’ as well. For the vast and devastating effect of the purges on the private lives of Russians see O. Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2007), especially chap. 4.

 34. O.V. Khlevniuk et al. (ed.), Politbiuro. Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996) and Khlevniuk, ‘Stalin as Dictator’, in Davies and Harris (eds), Stalin, pp. 108–20, especially pp. 110–11.

 35. Paul Hagenloh has argued that by 1937 the purges lost every semblance of popular participation and utopian visions. See his Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

 36. See the suggestive comments in R. Service, Stalin: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 286–7.

 37. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 349–51. Tukhachevsky, however, did not sign the statement.

 38. The preferences of Stalin and Trotsky constituted a reversal of their ideas at the outset of the civil war. For the history of these debates see R.L. Garthoff, How Russia Makes War: Soviet Military Doctrine (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954); Erickson, The Soviet High Command, chap. 7; and for the Frunze reforms, von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, especially chap. 5.

 39. P.A. Zaionchkovsky, Samoderzhavie i russkaia armiia na rubezhe XIX–XX stoletii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1973), chap. 6; W. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 29–36, 260–2. Solzhenitsyn’s fictional account of Colonel Vorotyntsev captures the spirit of the ‘young Turks’ in his August 1914 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), see especially pp. 112–13.

 40. See, among others, S. Naveh, ‘Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky’, in H. Shukman (ed.), Stalin and His Generals (London: Phoenix Press, 1997), pp. 255–74, and Samuelson, ‘Wartime Perspectives and Economic Planning’, pp. 187–214. Cf. S.W. Stoecker, Forging Stalin’s Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), especially pp. 164–8, who minimizes Tukhachevsky’s clashes with Voroshilov and his differences with Stalin.

 41. A.S. Bubnov, S.S. Kamenev and M.N. Tukhachevsky, Grazhdanskaia voina, 2 vols (Moscow and Leningrad: Voennyi vestnik, 1930), B.M. Shaposhnikov, Na Visle. K istorii kampanii 1920 goda (Moscow: Voennyi vestnik, 1928). The entire dispute is thoroughly reviewed in N. Kuzmin, ‘Ob odnoi nevypolnennoi direktiva Glavkoma’, VIZh (September 1962), pp. 49−52.

 42. Erickson, The Soviet High Command, appendix I, Tukhachevsky’s letter to Zinoviev, 18 July 1920, pp. 784–5.

 43. G.K. Zhukov, Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia (Moscow: Novosti, 1969), pp. 115–16; S. Biriuzov, ‘Predislovie’, in M.N. Tukhachevsky, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Voenizdat 1964), vol. 1, pp. 1–11; and Marshal Tukhachevsky. Vospominaniia druzei i soratnikov, N.I. Koritskii et al. (comp.) (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1997).

 44. P.A. Zhilin (ed.), Zarozhdenie i razvitie sovetskoi voennoi istoriografii. 1917–1941 (Moscow: Nauka, 1985), pp. 11–13, 17–19.

 45. V.M. Ivanov, Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1990), pp. 234–5.

 46. L. Samuelson, ‘Mikhail Tukhachevsky and War-Economic Planning: Reconsiderations on the Pre‐War Soviet Military Build‐up’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9:4 (1996), pp. 804–47.

 47. Biriuzov, ‘Predislovie’, p. 8.

 48. For Stalin’s political difficulties see R. Conquest, The Great Terror (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 27–31; for Zhukov’s estimation, see K.I. Simonov, ‘Zametki k biografii G.K. Zhukova’, VIZh 12 (December 1987), pp. 42–57; p. 42.

 49. M.N. Tukhachevsky, ‘Novye voprosy voiny’, VIZh (February 1962), pp. 62–77; pp. 66–7, 70–5.

 50. Ivanov, Marshal Tukhachevsky, pp. 253–4.

 51. Ibid., pp. 255–6, 273.

 52. A.P. Romanov, Raketam pokoriaetsia prostranstvo (Moscow: Politizdat, 1976), pp. 31–4; Iu.A. Pobedonostsev and K.M. Kuznetsov, Pervye starty (Moscow: DOSAFF, 1972), p. 24.

 53. Zhilin, Zarozhdenie, pp. 74–4, 152–4; M.N. Tukhachevsky, ‘O novom polevom ustave RKKR’, in M.N. Tukhachevsky, Izbrannye sochineniia, 2 vols (Moscow: Krasnaia zvezda, 1937), vol. 2, pp. 245–9. See also Erickson, The Soviet High Command, p. 390.

 54. M.N. Tukhachevsky, ‘Voprosy sovremmenoi strategii’, in Tukhachevsky, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 1, pp. 244–61; p. 246.

 55. Tukhachevsky, ‘Voennye plany nyneshnei Germanii’, in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 233–9. There was perhaps a touch of wistfulness in Tukhachevsky’s regret that France had failed to implement the innovative ideas of de Gaulle on armoured warfare. The two men were old friends, having been prisoners of war together in Ingolstadt, then rivals on opposite sides of the battle lines in Warsaw in 1920, only to meet again in France in 1935. There was a striking similarity in their strategic thinking. When de Gaulle made his last visit to the Soviet Union in 1966, he asked to meet the survivors of Tukhachevsky’s family. The request was denied. Ivanov, Marshal Tukhachevsky, pp. 3–5.

 56. M.N. Tukhachevsky, ‘Kharakter pogranichnykh operatsii’, in Tukhachevsky, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 2, pp. 217–21.

 57. Ivanov, Marshal Tukhachevsky, pp. 285–6.

 58. In 1933 he wrote to Voroshilov that his adherence to old-fashioned tactics was ‘sowing confusion in the minds of the commanders’. Biriuzov, ‘Predislovie’, p. 18.

 59. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, p. 44.

 60. D.A. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia. Politicheskii portret I.V. Stalina, 2 vols (Moscow: Novosti, 1989), vol. 1, pt 2, p. 261.

 61. O.F. Suvenirov, ‘Represii v partorganizatsii RKKA v 1937–1938 gg’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 6 (1990), pp. 37–49; ‘Delo o tak nazyvaemoi “anti-sovetskoi trotskistskoi voennoi organizatsii v Krasnoi armii”’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 4 (1989), pp. 44–80; pp. 42–61. For the argument that Stalin’s repression of the army leaders was based on an exaggerated concern over security and his long-term suspicion of professional officers, see P. Whitewood, ‘Stalin’s Purge of the Red Army and the Misperception of Security Threats’, in J. Ryan and S. Grant (eds), Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Contradictions and Complexities (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 38–51; pp. 40–50.

 62. A.A. Kokoshin, Armiia i politika. Sovetskaia voenno-politicheskaia i voenno-strategicheskaia mysl’, 1918–1991 gody (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995), pp. 50–1.

 63. G.A. Stefanovsky, ‘Politicheskie organy armii i flota’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 6 (1989), pp. 18–32; p. 24 citing military archives.

 64. ‘Zapiska M.P. Kirponosa i N.N. Vashugina k N.S. Khrushchevu, 16/18 apreliia 1941’ and ‘Zapiska A.I. Zaporozhetsa v Sektretariat TsK VKP(b), 25 apreliia 1941’, in Izvestiia TsK KPSS 5 (May 1990), pp. 195–7.

 65. Stefanovsky, ‘Politicheskie organy’, p. 27.

 66. Conquest, The Great Terror, especially pp. 228, 485, and Erickson, The Soviet High Command, pp. 449–52.

 67. R.R. Reese, ‘The Red Army and the Great Purges’, in Getty and Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror, pp. 198–214; p. 213. Soviet sources estimated the number of repressed at 40,000. Institut marksizma-leninizma, Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina Sovetskogo Soiuza, 1941–1945. Kratkaia istoriia (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1965), pp. 39–40; VIZh 4 (1963), p. 65; Pravda, 29 April 1988. In certain frontier military districts like Kiev, the replacement of the top officers was extremely high, including 100 per cent of corps commanders and 96 per cent of divisional commanders. O.F. Suvenirov, ‘Vsearmeiskaia tragediia’, VIZh 3 (1989), pp. 39–48; pp. 47–8.

 68. R.A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 213.

 69. B.A. Starkov, ‘Narkom Ezhov’, in Getty and Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror, pp. 21–39; p. 37.

 70. G. Roberts, Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2022), pp. 154–64.

 71. H. Shukman, ‘Introduction’, in Shukman (ed.), Stalin and His Generals, pp. 1–9; pp. 3–4.

 72. One of the reasons for Stalin’s angry dismissal of Voroshilov from command of the Leningrad front in the early months of the war was his reliance on workers’ battalions instead of conventional defences for the city. D. Volkogonov, ‘Klimenty Yefremovich Voroshilov’, in Shukman (ed.), Stalin and His Generals, pp. 313–26; p. 318.

 73. Pospelov et al., Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny Sovetskogo Soiuza 1941–1945, 6 vols (Moscow: Institut marksizma-leninizma pri TsK KPSS, 1960–65), vol. 3, pp. 419–21.

 74. The following relies heavily on Iu.A. Gorkov, Kreml’. Stavka. Genshtab (Tver’: RIF LTD, 1995), pp. 55–65.

 75. M. Zakharov, General’nyi shtab v predvoennye gody (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1989), pp. 219–20.

 76. V.P. Naumov et al. (eds), Rossiia XX vek. Dokumenty. 1941 god, 2 vols (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 1998), vol. 1, doc. 134, p. 289.

 77. Gorkov, Kreml’, pp. 61–2.

 78. The idea of a pre-emptive strike was initiated by V. Suvorov (Rezun), Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990) with a Russian edition in 1992. The book gave rise to an extensive debate in Russia. See G. Gorodetsky, Mif ‘Ledokhoda’. Nakanune voiny (Moscow: Progress-Akademiia, 1995). For Western refutations of the central thesis see G. Gorodetsky, ‘Was Stalin Planning to Attack Hitler in June 1941?’, RUSI Journal 131:2 (1986), pp. 69–72; D.M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 1–8; T.J. Uldricks, ‘The Icebreaker Controversy: Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler?’, Slavic Review 58:3 (autumn 1999), pp. 626–43; and J. Erickson, ‘Barbarossa June 1941: Who Attacked Whom?’, History Today 51:7 (July 2001), pp. 11–17. A recent revised view of Icebreaker that finds ‘the circumstantial evidence [for a pre-emptive strike] compelling’ is C. Bellamy, ‘Brute Force and Genius: Stalin as War Leader’, in Ryan and Grant (eds), Revisioning Stalin, pp. 63–78; p. 72.

 79. Among the various strategic plans worked out on the eve of the war, one signed by Timoshenko and K.A. Meretskov stood out by emphasizing the offensive. See B.N. Petrov, ‘O strategicheskom razvertyvanii Krasnoi Armii nakanune voiny’, in G.A. Bordiugov (ed.), Gotovil li Stalin nastupitel’nuiu voinu protiv Gitlera? Nezaplanirovannaia diskussiia. Sbornik materialov (Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995), p. 66. Under Zhdanov’s instructions the Political Section of the Red Army launched a major campaign to justify any war fought by the Soviet Union as just and to inspire the Red Army with the offensive spirit. V.A. Nevezhin, ‘Vystuplenie Stalin 5 maia 1941 g. in povorot v propaganda. Analiz direktivnykh materialov’, in ibid., pp. 150–8.

 80. K.A. Meretskov, Na sluzhbe narodu, 5th rev. edn (Moscow: Veche, 1988), pp. 100–5, 170–9, 193–200, 214; Iu.Ia. Kirshin, ‘Kontseptsiia mirovoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii i sovetskaia voennaia doktrina’, Soviet Union/Union Soviétique 18:1–3 (1991), pp. 80–99. For more details see A.J. Rieber, ‘Zhdanov in Finland’, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1,107 (February 1995), pp. 8–12.

 81. Gorkov, Kreml’, p. 65, quoting A. Vasilevsky, Nakanune, Arkhiv presidenta Rossiisskoi Federatsiia, f. 73, op. 2, d. 3.

 82. V.A. Anfilov, Doroga k tragedii sorok pervogo goda (Moscow: Akopov, 1997), pp. 201–7.

 83. G.K. Zhukov, ‘Iz neopublikovannykh vospominanii’, Kommunist 14 (September 1988), pp. 87–101; pp. 97–9.

 84. S.V. Stepashin and V.P. Iampol’sky (eds.), Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine. Sbornik Dokumentov, Nakanune (noiabr’ 1938 g.–dekabr’ 1940 g.), 2 vols (Moscow: A/O Kniga i biznes, 1995), vol. 1, bk 1, docs 4 and 5, pp. 22–5, 26–8. That it was taken seriously by the commander of the Kiev military district and first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, N.S. Khrushchev, is clear from the letter of the latter to Timoshenko requesting confirmation and discussion in the Military Council. The decree creating the special departments (ibid., doc. 6, pp. 29–30), signed by Voroshilov and Beria, represented a tactical victory for Beria in his campaign to gain ascendency over the army, which the commissar of defence was obliged to endorse. This was another occasion on which Beria and Zhdanov were on opposing sides.

 85. Ibid., p. 35.

 86. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 149–50. Colonel Glantz has provided the most devastating picture of the unpreparedness of the Soviet Union for war. See also Iu.A. Gor’kov and Iu.N. Semin, ‘Konets global’noi lzhi. Operativnye plany zapadnykh pogranichnykh voennykh okrugov 1941 sviditel’svuiut – SSSR ne gotovilsiia k napadeniiu Germaniiu’, VIZh 2 (March–April 1996), pp. 5–17, and VIZh 4 (July–August 1996), pp. 3–17, translated into English in Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 270–88.

 87. Ibid., pp. 178–80.

 88. The rapid and deep penetration of the German forces gave rise to a postwar controversy between Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Vasilevsky maintained that the ‘main strength’ of the Red Army should have been mobilized, placed on full military alert and deployed on the frontiers in order to repulse the German attack. Zhukov countered that the Red Army’s concentration of ‘all its strength’ on the frontiers would have played into the strategic plans of the Germans, led to the annihilation of the frontier forces and increased the chances of German success; ‘Moscow and Leningrad would have been occupied in 1941.’ Gorkov, Kreml’, pp. 66–7.

 89. Two very large collections of documents contain intelligence reports: V.P. Naumov et al. (eds), Dokumenty 1941, and Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, the official publication of the security services (FSB), which seeks to justify its predecessor by arguing that the intelligence was ample and accurate enough to predict the time and scope of the attack, but that the information was disregarded by Stalin and the Supreme Command.

 90. V. Lota, Sektretnyi front General’nogo shtaba (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2005), pp. 36, 46–7, 60–8.

 91. D. Holloway, ‘Stalin and Intelligence: Two Cases’. I am grateful to Professor Holloway for sharing his unpublished manuscript with me.

 92. Ibid. See also Gorodetsky, Grand Illusion, pp. 222–6 and Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, pp. 64–70. Stalin was not alone in holding this view. Meretskov later wrote: ‘we could not stay out of the war until 1943, of course . . . but it was not inconceivable (ne iskliucheno) that we could stay out of the war until 1942’. Na sluzhbe, pp. 195–6. It is not clear to what degree Stalin was influenced in this view by Zhdanov or Beria.

 93. Pospelov et al., IVOV, vol. 1, p. 65; M. von Boetticher, Industrialisierungspolitik und Verteidigungskonzeption der UdSSR 1926–1930: Herausbildung des Stalinismus und ‘äussere Bedrohung’ (Düsseldorf: Drostel, 1976).

 94. M.Iu. Mukhin, ‘Evoliutsiia sistemy upravleniia sovetskoi oboronoi promyshlennost’iu v 1921–1941 godakh i smena prioritetov “oboronki”’, in G.B. Nabatov et al. (comp.), Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina. Voprosy istorii. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-metodicheskoi konferentsii 18–20 aprelia 2000 g. k 55-letiu Pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Nizhny Novgorod: Nizhegorodskii gos. universitet, 2000), pp. 9–14.

 95. J.R. Azrael, Managerial Power and Soviet Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 100 and note 88; p. 228.

 96. Bailes, Technology and Society, pp. 353, 366–8.

 97. A.F. Khavin, ‘Razvitie tiazheloi promyshlennosti v tretei piatiletke (1938–iiun’ 1941 gg.)’, Istoriia SSSR 1 (1959), pp. 10–35.

 98. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 228–30; P.K. Oshchepov, Zhizn’ i mechta. Zapiski inzhenera-izobretatelia, konstruktora i uchenego (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1967); G.S. Isserson, ‘Zapiski sovremennika o M.N. Tukhachevskom’, VIZh 4 (April 1963), pp. 64–78; pp. 67–8; ‘Speeches of B.P. Beschev and N.M. Shvernik at the XXII Party Congress’, Current Digest of the Soviet Press 14:2 (7 February 1962), pp. 24–5, and 14:5 (28 February 1962), pp. 25–6.

 99. B.L. Vannikov, ‘Iz zapisok Narkoma vooruzheniia’, VIZh (February 1962), pp. 78–86.

100. R.W. Davies, M. Harrison, O.V. Khlevniuk and S.G. Wheatcroft, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, vol. 7: The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 165–7.

101. M. Harrison, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment and the Defence Burden, 1940–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 23 citing M.V. Terpilovsky (ed.), Finansovaia sluzhba Vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v period Voiny. Organizatsia finansirovaniia Sovetskoi armii i Voenno-morskogo flota vo vremia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1967), p. 29. The following figures represent the increase in industrial production as cited in Harrison, p. 68, with sources in appendices, table B1, ibid. p. 180.

Increase in Industrial Production, 1940–41

	1940	1941
Combat aircraft	8,331	12,377
Armoured vehicles	2,794	6,590
Guns	15,343	40,547
Shells	43,000,000	83,000,000
Small arms	1,916,000	2,956,000
Cartridges	3,006,000,000	4,335,000,000

 102. A.M. Nekrich, 1941. 22 iuniia, 2nd edn (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1995), pp. 74–6; M. Mukhin, ‘The Market for Labor in the 1930s: The Aircraft Industry’, in M. Harrison (ed.), Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 180–209; pp. 196–206.

 103. M. Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

 104. Khavin, ‘Razvitie tiazheloi promyshlennosti’, pp. 11–15.

 105. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 2, pp. 73, 78.

 106. B.L. Vannikov, ‘Oboronnaia promyshlennost’. SSSR nakanune voiny. Iz zapisok Narkoma’, Voprosy istorii, vol. 10 (1968), pp. 116–23; p. 123 for aviation; see Bailes, Technology and Society, chap. 14.

 107. Pospelov et al., IVOV, vol. 3, pp. 421–5; D.N. Bolotin and A.A. Bumagin, Sovetskoe strelkovoe oruzhie za 50 let. Katalog (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1983), p. 314; Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 2, p. 74.

 108. M. Harrison, ‘N.A. Voznesensky (1 December 1903–30 September 1950): A Soviet Commander of the Economic Front’, Warwick Economics Research Paper Series no. 242, University of Warwick, Department of Economics, 1983, p. 336. I am grateful to Professor Harrison for permission to cite his paper.

 109. Associated with the diplomacy and embodied in the alliances with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935 endorsed by the Comintern the same year, collective security signified co-operation with anti-fascist forces against the rise of Nazi Germany.

 110. Ministerstvo inostrannykh del SSSR, Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR. 1939, 2 vols (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1992), vol. 1, doc. 2, pp. 10–12. See also V.V. Sokolov, ‘Na postu zamestitelia Narkoma inostrannykh del SSSR (O zhizni i deiatel’nosti B.S. Stomoniakova)’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 5 (1988), pp. 111–26, and A.A. Roshchin, ‘V Narkomindele nakanune voiny’, Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn’ 4 (1988), pp. 120–6; pp. 122–3.

 111. Perkins et al., FRUS, pp. 318, 398, 449–50, 517, 645; Z. Sheinis, Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov. Revoliutsioner, diplomat, chelovek (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989), p. 348; Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, Series C, 6 vols (London: HMSO, 1949–83), vol. 6, p. 1,003; R. Coulondre, De Staline à Hitler. Souvenirs de deux ambassades, 1936–1939 (Paris: Hachette, 1950), chaps 8 and 10.

 112. Sheinis, Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, p. 350. Litvinov refused to participate in any of the sessions organized by the party within the Foreign Commissariat to denounce enemies of the people in its ranks.

 113. Sokolov, ‘Na postu’, pp. 148–50.

 114. Z. Shtein, ‘Sud’ba diplomata. Shtrikhi k portretu Borisa Shteina’, in N.V. Popov (comp.), Arkhivy raskryvaiut tainy . . . Mezhdunarodnye voprosy. Sobytiia i liudi (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1991), pp. 286–306.

 115. The committee to select new cadres for the Commissariat was composed of Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Dekanozov – and Litvinov! Even those who were newly recruited experienced moments of frightening insecurity before being finally vetted. V.V. Sokolov, ‘Posol SSSR F.T. Gusev v Londone v 1943–1947 godakh’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 4 (2005), pp. 102–28; p. 103.

 116. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, p. 98.

 117. G. Gorodetsky (ed.), The Maisky Diaries: The Wartime Revelations of Stalin’s Ambassador in London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 171, 218 and 267. In defending himself to Gusev, Maisky pointed out that the embassy staff in London was composed of insufficiently prepared men without experience; one intern, a former tractor driver, had no English. Ibid., pp. 268–9.

 118. For the fate of the Litvinovtsy, see S. Dullin, Men of Influence: Stalin’s Diplomats in Europe, 1930–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and A. Kocho-Williams, ‘The Soviet Diplomatic Corps and Stalin’s Purges’, Slavonic and East European Review 86:1 (2008), pp. 90–110; pp. 90–102.

 119. J. Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–1939 (London: St Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 234–5 on the press; Sheinis, Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, pp. 368–70.

 120. V. Mastny, ‘The Cassandra in the Foreign Commissariat: Maxim Litvinov and the Cold War’, Foreign Affairs 54:2 (1976), pp. 366–76; G. Roberts, ‘Litvinov’s Lost Peace, 1941–1946’, Journal of Cold War Studies 4:2 (spring 2002), pp. 23–54; for Molotov’s behind-the-back dealings with Stalin’s consent, Perkins et al., FRUS, pp. 579–80; on Vyshinsky, Sheinis, Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, p. 419; on Dekanozov, Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 455, 472 and A. Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: Dutton, 1964), p. 94.

 121. Perkins et al., FRUS, pp. 567–8; for his meeting with the British ambassador see E. Estorick, Stafford Cripps (London: Heinemann, 1949), pp. 253–7. Others included Ribbentrop, of course, on 19 August 1939 to negotiate the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Turkish foreign minister Șükrü Saraçoğlu in October 1939 and the Japanese foreign minister Y. Matsuoka (twice) in 1941 to negotiate the neutrality treaty. M. Beloff, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1936–1941, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), vol. 2, pp. 371–4.

 122. Perkins et al., FRUS, pp. 515–16.

 123. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, pp. 98–9.

 124. A. Gromyko, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 24. By and large this is an extremely disappointing and uninformative memoir.

 125. Having succeeded Maisky in London, Gusev was regarded as something of a non-entity by top British officials. Gorodetsky (ed.), The Maisky Diaries, pp. 538–9.

 126. Ibid., pp. 339 and 360.

 127. A.A. Gromyko et al. (eds), Diplomaticheskii slovar’, 3 vols (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1960–64), vol. 1, pp. 328, 413–14, 417; vol. 2, p. 412; vol. 3, p. 449; N.V. Novikov, Put’ i pereputia sovetskogo diplomata. Zapiski, 1943–1944 (Moscow: Nauka, 1975) and V.M. Berezhkov, Stranitsy ot diplomaticheskoi istorii (Moscow: Partizdat, 1984), p. 129.

 128. N.V. Novikov, Vospominaniia diplomata. Zapiski, 1938–1947 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989), pp. 4–25. By this time Novikov was important enough to be included among the very few top officials, mainly members of the Politburo, who received copies of diplomatic dispatches of major importance.

 129. AVP, fond Molotova, op. 5, por. 383, papka 32, listy 1–2 (undated).

 130. Ibid., listy 7–22.

 131. Ibid., listy 40–1.

 132. V.V. Aldoshin and Iu.V. Ivanov (comps), Sovetsko-amerikanskie otnosheniia. 1945–1948 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2004), doc. 138, pp. 12–21. A translation with commentary is in ‘The Novikov Telegram, Washington, September 27, 1946’, Diplomatic History 15:4 (autumn 1991), pp. 527–38. See also K.M. Jensen (ed.), Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan and Roberts ‘Long Telegrams’ of 1946 (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1991) and Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, pp. 305–6.

 133. Aldoshin and Ivanov, Sovetsko-amerikanskie otnosheniia. 1945–1948, doc. 198, p. 430.

 134. Volokitina et al., VE, vol. 1, doc. 227, p. 673.

 135. I.S. Kulikova, ‘Zavetnye tetrady A.M. Kollontai’, Voprosy istorii KPSS (8 August 1989), pp. 106–7.

 136. R. Dennett and J.E. Johnson (eds), Negotiating with the Russians (Boston, MA: World Peace Foundation, 1951), especially P.E. Mosely, ‘Techniques of Negotiation’, pp. 210–28.

 137. This was particularly true of Loy Henderson and George Kennan. In a long dispatch dated 16 November 1936, Henderson compared the practice of ‘isolating members of foreign missions [which was] borrowed by the Soviet government from the old tsarist government’. Perkins et al., FRUS, p. 318. See also Kennan’s memo of 24 November 1937, in which he reported ‘an anti-foreign campaign of almost unparalleled intensity’ that made little distinction between ‘neutral’ states like the USA and Germany and Japan. Ibid., p. 398. Even Joseph Davies was repelled by the tendency towards isolationism in the Soviet government. Ibid., p. 548. See also D. Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), the fullest account, though it is not necessary to accept his somewhat artificial division between the Riga and Yalta axioms. There is nothing so good for similar reactions among academics who later entered government service during the war.

 138. Sir Stafford Cripps was particularly sensitive to these currents. Estorick, Stafford Cripps, p. 257. See also M. Hughes, Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia, 1900–1939 (London: Hambledon Press, 1997), pp. 211–21.

 139. For a revised interpretation see G. Roberts, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012) which argues for a more independent role for Molotov.

 140. S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928–1939’, Slavic Review 38:3 (September 1979), pp. 377–402, and Straus, Factory and Community.

CHAPTER 2: MOBILIZATION AND PURGES ON THE PERIPHERIES

 1. T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 8–9, 317, 312–18, 351.

 2. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 207.

 3. T.H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 369, 371, 373.

 4. Martin, Affirmative Action, pp. 329–32; see also G. Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), especially pp. 60–2.

 5. V.N. Khaustov et al. (eds), Lubianka. Stalin i VCHK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD. Ianvar’ 1922–dekabr’ 1936 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), doc. 227, pp. 235–6. See also doc. 537, p. 682 for Postyshev’s report on the frontier districts of Kiev region.

 6. Martin, Affirmative Action, pp. 332–3.

 7. M. Gelb, ‘An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans’, Russian Review 54:3 (July 1995), pp. 389–412; pp. 389–92; P. Polian, Ne po svoei vole . . . Istoriia i geografiia prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: Memorial, 2001), pp. 91–3. Terry Martin, who concurs with Gelb that this was the first case of ‘ethnic cleansing’, estimates that in 1922 only a third of the deported Koreans held Soviet passports. T. Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History 70:4 (December 1998), pp. 813–61; pp. 833–5.

 8. Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police, pp. 277–81. To be sure, the police were not too discriminating in identifying ethnic groups caught up in their operational sweeps.

 9. M. Jansen and N.V. Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), pp. 93–8.

 10. McLoughlin, ‘Mass Operations’, p. 123. By the time the national operations were terminated in the autumn of 1938, a total of about 350,000 people had been swept up, of whom 247,157 had been condemned to death. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, p. 99.

 11. A.V. Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 1928–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999), docs 235, 236, pp. 393–5.

 12. KPSS, Dvenadtsatyi s’ezd RKP(b). Stenograficheskii otchet, 17–25 aprelia 1923 goda (Moscow: Politizdat, 1968), pp. 503–5 (Grinko); pp. 569–74 (Skrypnyk); pp. 576–82 (Rakovski); pp. 612–13 (Bukharin); pp. 648–61 (votes on amendments).

 13. R.S. Sullivant, Soviet Politics and the Ukraine, 1917–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 82–3.

 14. E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1971), vol. 2, p. 195.

 15. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 5, pp. 244–7, 329–30.

 16. Sullivant, Soviet Politics, chaps 3 and 4.

 17. Martin, Affirmative Action, p. 360 lists this as one of several errors, including weakening cultural ties between Ukraine and Russia and threatening the status of Russians in Ukraine through forced Ukrainianization. Ibid., pp. 352–4.

 18. Ibid., p. 361.

 19. I.D. Nazarenko (ed.), Ocherki po istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Ukrainy , 3rd edn (Kyiv: Institut istorii partii TsK KP Ukrainy, 1972). See also Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 251–9.

 20. P.N. Wexler, Purism and Language: A Study in Modern Ukrainian and Belarus Nationalism (1840–1967) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1974), pp. 158–65, records the attack on Ukrainian linguistic specialists as favouring dialecticism and archaisms in order to render the language different from Russian.

 21. J.A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), chaps 2 and 3.

 22. T. Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 162–7.

 23. M.S. Totoev, Istoriia Severo-Ossetinskoi ASSR (Ordzhonikidze: Severo-Ossetinskoe knizhnoe izd., 1966), p. 247; B.E. Kalmykov, Stat’i i rechi (Nal’chik: Kabardino-Balkarskoe knizhnoe idz., 1961); M.O. Kosvena and B.A. Gardanov, Narody Kavkaza, 2 vols (Moscow: Insititut etnografiia imeni Miklukhno-Makala 1960–62); Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 287.

 24. N.F. Bugai and A.M. Gonov, Kavkaz. Narody v eshelonakh (20–60-e gody) (Moscow: INSAN, 1998), pt 3.

 25. Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 249–50; D.M. Lang, ‘A Century of Russian Impact on Georgia’, in W.S. Vucinich (ed.), Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp. 219–47; pp. 238–9. R.G. Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); S. Gazarian, ‘Eto ne dolzhno povtoritsa’, Zvezda 2 (1989).

 26. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, vol. 1, bk 1, doc. 133, pp. 270–8. French intelligence interpreted the connection between Georgian émigrés and German espionage in Iran as a means of promoting internal disturbances in the Soviet Union in order to detach the oil region of Azerbaijan, initially to unite it to Turkey then, as in 1918, to join it to a government which would give the Germans economic control. Ibid., appendix, ‘Captured Material’, doc. 5, pp. 333–4.

 27. Ts.P. Agaian, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Armenii (Yerevan: Alestan, 1967), pp. 365–66; Aktivnye bortsy za Sovetskuiu vlast v Azerbaidzhana (Baku: Azerbaidzhanskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1957).

 28. M.S. Iskenderov, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Azerbaidzhana (Baku: Azerbaidzhanskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1962), pp. 540–3 with extensive lists of purged leaders; Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 344.

 29. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti, vol. 1, bk 1, doc. 41, pp. 94–5.

 30. S.B. Baishev, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Kazakhstana (Alma Ata: Kazakhskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1963), pp. 376–7; S. Tashiliev, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Turkmenistana (Ashkabad: Turkmenistanskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1965), pp. 494–6; A.K. Kazakbaev, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Kirgizii (Frunze: Izd. Kyrgyzstan, 1966), pp. 284–9; E.V. Vasil’ev et al. (eds), Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Tadzhikistana (Dushanbe: Institut tarikhi partiia, 1964), pp. 177–9; E.Iu. Iusupov et al. (eds), Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Uzbekistana (Tashkent: Izd. Uzbekistan, 1964), pp. 373–7; Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Block of Rights and Trotskyites’ Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Moscow, March 2–13, 1938 (Moscow: People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, 1938), pp. 217–25, 348; Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, docs 216, 217, 218 and 219, pp. 372–5.

 31. Ibid., docs 221, 222, 223, pp. 377–9.

 32. There were, to be sure, numerous non-Russian Slavic commanders of exceptional talent like Konstantin Rokossovsky, Sergei Shtemenko, Sergei Rudenko, Kirill Moskalenko, to mention only the leading commanders. See the essays in Shukman (ed.), Stalin and His Generals.

 33. E.H. Carr, Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935 (New York: Pantheon, 1982) and for a Soviet anti-Stalinist critique, B.M. Leibzon and K.K. Shirinia, Povorot v politike Kominterna. K 30-letiiu VII Kongressa (Moscow: Mysl’, 1965).

 34. J. Humbert-Droz, La Crise de croissance de l’Internationale communiste (Milan: Instituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1968), pp. 33–4, 40 et passim; N.E. Rosenfeldt, Stalin’s Secret Chancellery and the Comintern: Evidence about the Organizational Patterns (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels, 1991), pp. 49, 59, 62–3 et passim.

 35. B. Lazitch, ‘Two Instruments of Control by the Comintern: The Emissaries of the ECCI and the Party Representatives in Moscow’, in M.M. Drachkovitch and B. Lazitch (eds), The Comintern: Historical Highlights. Essays, Recollections, Documents (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp. 45–65, and Lazitch, ‘Stalin’s Massacre of the Foreign Communist Leaders’, in ibid., pp. 167–9, 173; pp. 139–74.

 36. La Correspondance internationale 2 (9 January 1929), 23 (13 March 1929), 37 (4 May 1929), 38 (8 May 1929), 49 (12 June 1929), and X plenum IKKI. Mezhdunarodnoe polozhenie i zadachi Kommunisticheskogo internatsionala, vol. 1 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1929), pp. 235–7 (Ulbricht), pp. 16–20 (Kuusinen), pp. 62–4 (Manuilsky); Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 1, pp. 306–9.

 37. F.I. Firsov and I.S. Iazhborovskaia, ‘Komintern i Kommunisticheskaia partiia Pol’shi’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 12 (December 1988), pp. 20–35; pp. 31–3.

 38. ‘Novye dokumenty G. Dimitrova’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 8 (August 1989), pp. 53–79; pp. 75–7.

 39. Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre (Moscow: People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, 1937), pp. 6–18, 574–5. See also H. Kuromiya, ‘Accounting for the Great Terror’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 53:1 (2005), pp. 86–101; p. 91.

 40. The Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre, pp. 159–61, 192, 196.

 41. ‘Materialy fevral’sko–martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b), 1937 goda’, Voprosy istorii (1995), pp. 3–26; pp. 11–14.

 42. Dimitrov, Diary, entries for 20 and 25 June 1937, pp. 62, 65–6. See also F.I. Firsov, ‘Dimitrov, the Comintern and Stalinist Repression’, in McLoughlin and McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror, pp. 56–81.

 43. W.J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 116–19, quotation on p. 116. The resolution of the Comintern Executive on the Polish question in January 1936 accused the party of every sin in the book: left sectarianism, right nationalist deviation, factional struggles and infiltration by Polish intelligence. Ibid., pp. 121–4.

 44. Snyder, Sketches, pp. 117–19. Snyder casts serious doubt on the Polish spy mania of the NKVD. Ibid., pp. 120–6.

 45. N. Petrov and A. Roginsky, ‘The “Polish Operation” of the NKVD, 1937–8’, in McLoughlin and McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror, pp. 153–72.

 46. Ibid., pp. 170–1; Snyder, Sketches, pp. 119–21.

 47. Firsov and Iazhborovskaia, ‘Komintern’, pp. 48–51.

 48. Chase, Enemies, pp. 287–9. The formal dissolution came only nine months later, reflecting Stalin’s preference to delay publication of the resolution in order to avoid demoralizing other parties.

 49. Snyder, Sketches, pp. 143–4.

 50. A. Burmeister, Dissolution and Aftermath of the Comintern: Experiences and Observations, 1937–1947 (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1955), pp. 1–2; I. Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 67–8; G. Ionescu, Communism in Romania, 1944–1962 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 43, 352, 355; Sovetskaia istoricheskaia entsiklopediia, 16 vols (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1969–76), vol. 13, p. 951; C. Chaqueri, ‘Sultanzade: The Forgotten Revolutionary Theoretician of Iran – A Biographical Sketch’, Iranian Studies 17:2/3 (spring–summer 1984), pp. 215–35; pp. 226, 234. T. Atabaki, ‘Incommodious Hosts, Invidious Guests. The Life and Time of Iranian Revolutionaries in Soviet Union (1921–1929)’, in S. Cronin (ed.), Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 147–64; p. 160. K. McDermott and J. Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 148–9.

 51. ‘Za pravil’noe osveshchenie istorii kompartii Latvii’, Kommunist 12 (1964), pp. 65–9; pp. 67–8; G. Zvimach, Latyshskie revoliutstionnye deiateli (Riga: Latyshskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1958), pp. 87–93; V. Mishke, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Latvii, 2 vols (Riga: Latyshskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1966), vol. 2, pp. 369–74, 378, 444; A. Trapāns, ‘The Latvian Communist Party and the Purge of 1937’, Journal of Baltic Studies 11:1 (1980), pp. 25–38.

 52. A. Pankseev and A. Liban, Ocherki istorii Kommunisticheskoi partii Estonii, 3 vols (Tallin: Estonskoe gos. izd-stvo, 1961–1970), vol. 3, pp. 39–41. According to one report, a leading Estonian communist imported in the baggage trains of the Red Army had lived in Russia since childhood and was a railway substation master when he was lifted to prominence. J.A. Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 125.

 53. P.D. Grishchenko and G.A. Gurin (eds.), Bor’ba za Sovetskuiu pribaltiku v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 1941–1945, 2 vols (Riga: Liesma, 1966), vol. 1, p. 24.

 54. Burmeister, Dissolution, pp. 5–12.

 55. ‘Muzhestvo protiv bezzakoniia’, Problemy mira i sotsializma 7 (1989), pp. 89–92; p. 91.

 56. Firsov, ‘Dimitrov, the Comintern and Stalinist Repression’, pp. 75–7.

 57. Dimitrov to Andreev, 3 January 1939, in Chase, Enemies, doc. 44, pp. 307–8.

 58. Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security, pp. 222–3.

 59. D.L. Brandenberger, ‘The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism: A Case Study of the Editing of Stalin’s 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(b)’, Revolutionary Russia 29:1 (2016), pp. 1–23; pp. 10–14 emphasizes the domestic, replacing international aspects of the revolution by the construction of ‘socialism in one country’ as the key to the history of the party.

 60. Ibid., p. 10.

 61. Grishchenko and Gurin (eds.), Bor’ba za Sovetskuiu pribaltiku, vol. 1, pp. 22–3; K. Tazva, ‘Poet-borets’, in S. Tashliev (ed.), Ob estonskoi literature. Sbornik literaturno-kriticheskikh stat’ei (Tallinn: Estonskoe gosudarstvennoe izd., 1956).

 62. For insights into the attitudes and rationalizations of sympathetic Western visitors to the Soviet Union in these years which have parallels with the behaviour of embattled communists see M. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

CHAPTER 3: FORGING THE SINEWS OF WAR

 1. C. Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978), pp. 127–37 and A. Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im ‘Fall Barbarossa’ (Heidelberg: C.F. Mueller, 1981).

 2. D.M. Glantz, Before Stalingrad: Barbarossa – Hitler’s Invasion of Russia 1941 (Stroud: Tempus, 2003), pp. 50–60. See also A.I. Kruglov, ‘O nekotorykh prichinakh bol’shoi poter’ Sovetskikh Vooruzhennykh sil v pervom periode Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, in Liudskie poteri SSSR v period Vtoroi mirovoi voiny. Sbornik statei (Saint Petersburg: Izd-vo Russko-Baltiski informatsionnyi tsentr Blits, 1995), pp. 71–123; pp. 97–9. A.A. Grechko et al. (eds), Istoriia Vtoroi mirovoi voiny 1939–1945, 12 vols (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1982 edn), vol. 4, pp. 35, 137–9.

 3. P.N. Knyshevsky et al. (eds), Skrytaia pravda. 1941 god. Neizvestnye dokumenty (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1992), pp. 77–98.

 4. N.S. Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1, Commissar, 1918–1945, ed. S. Khrushchev (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2004), p. 304.

 5. ‘Dokumenty russkoi istorii’, Istochnik 2:15 (1995), pp. 112–13.

 6. For accounts of individuals who met with him see T.B. Toman, ‘Partiia v pervye mesiatsy voiny’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 7 (July 1991), pp. 36–49; pp. 37–8.

 7. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, pp. 51–3.

 8. F. Chuev, Tak govoril Kaganovich. Ispoved’ stalinskogo apostola (Moscow: Otechestvo, 1992), p. 88.

 9. ‘Iz tetriadi zapisi lits I.V. Stalinym 21–28 iiunia 1941,’ Izvestiia TsK KPSS 6 (1990), pp. 196–222; pp. 216–20.

 10. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s’ezdov konferentsii i plenum TsK 1938–1945, 9th edn (Moscow: Politizdat, 1985), pp. 211, 212 and 213. See also Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, pp. 89–91, who argues in general for Stalin’s vigorous response to the attack.

 11. ‘Otvety P.K. Ponomarenko na voprosy professora G.A. Kumaneva (2/11/1978)’, in G.A. Kumanev, Riadom so Stalinym. Otkrovennye svidetel’stva (Moscow: Bylina, 1999), pp. 93–144; p. 121.

 12. Dimitrov, Diary, entry for 22 June 1941, pp. 166–7.

 13. A.I. Mikoian, Tak bylo. Razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), p. 389. C. Pleshakov, Stalin’s Folly. The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) portrays Stalin as a distraught nervous wreck, and then is hard put to explain his recovery or that of the Soviet Union.

 14. Service, Stalin, p. 414 suggests the intriguing possibility that Stalin might have staged this scenario, imitating Ivan IV’s well-known withdrawal to a monastery in order to test the loyalty of the boyars.

 15. Mikoian, Tak bylo, pp. 390–2.

 16. Voprosy istorii KPSS 9 (1990), p. 95; ibid. 6 (1991), pp. 217–18.

 17. E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reform, 1945–1964 (Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1993), p. 17.

 18. W. Anders, An Army in Exile: The Story of the Second Polish Corps (London: Macmillan, 1949). For a vivid eyewitness account see J. Czapski, Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941–1942, trans. A. Lloyd-Jones (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018). The search was too late for the 22,000 Polish officers massacred at Katyn.

 19. N.F. Bugai, L. Beriia–I.Stalinu. ‘Soglasno vashemu ukazaniiu’ (Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995), pp. 36–9. Beria’s agents hunted down Volga Germans in the ranks of the Red Army and by 1945 had expelled and re-settled in labour camps 33,625 Volga German veterans.

 20. ‘Deportatsiia Nemtsev (sentiabr’ 1941–fevral’ 1942 g.)’, in Deportatsiia Narodov SSSR (1930–1950-e gody), pt 2, comp. O.I. Milov (Moscow: Institut etnologiia, 1995) comp. O.L. Milov (Moscow: Institut etnologiia 1995), pp. 118–19; Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti, vol. 2, bk 1, pp. 559–6; N.F. Bugai (comp.), Iosif Stalin–Lavrentiu Beriia. ‘Ikh nado deportirovat’ . . .’ Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992), pp. 62–3. By an order of GOKO over 100,00 of the deportees between the ages of seventeen and fifty were mobilized for railway construction and timbering for the duration of the war. V.A. Auman and V.G. Chebotareva (eds), Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh 1763–1992 gg., 2 vols (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi institut gumanitarnykh programm, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 168–9.

 21. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti, vol. 2, bk 1, doc. 505, appendix, p. 528.

 22. Grishchenko and Gurin (eds), Bor’ba za Sovetskuiu pribaltiku, vol. 1, pp. 112–14; A.M. Budreckis, The Lithuanian National Revolt of 1941 (Boston, MA: Lithuanian Encyclopedia Press, 1968).

 23. Grishchenko and Gurin (eds), Bor’ba za Sovetskuiu pribaltiku, vol. 2, pp. 191, 239–43, 291 ff.; A.S. Chaikovs’kyi, Nevidoma viina. Partizans’kyi rukh Ukraïni 1941–1944 rr. Movoiu dokumentiv, ochyma istoryka (Kyiv: Ukraina, 1994), pp. 16–25, 173–5.

 24. Grishchenko and Gurin (eds), Bor’ba za Sovetskuiu pribaltiku, vol. 2, pp. 191, 239–43, 291 ff.

 25. ‘Telegramma iz Gomela’ (29 June 1941), Izvestiia TsK KPSS 6 (1990), pp. 214–15 and ‘“Polozhenie na Pinskom napravlenii”, ne pozdnee 30 iiunia 1941’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 6 (1990), pp. 214–16. An occasional marginal comment by Stalin, ‘Clarify’, proves he was reading these reports. On the eve of the war, the lack of preparedness in air defence was particularly serious with many projected airfields in an incomplete state, lacking aircraft to prevent German reconnaissance. ‘Telegramma iz Murmanska’ (19 June 1941), Izvestiia TsK KPSS 5 (1990), pp. 155–214; p. 206.

 26. According to German field reports the local population greeted the invaders with bread and salt, but the local Communist Party representatives praised the Belarusian peasantry’s high level of patriotism. For the German reports, see N. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), chap. 13; for the party reports, see ‘Polozhenie v raione El’nia’, pp. 193–95, and ‘O razvitii partizanskogo dvizheniia’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 7 (1990), pp. 193–216; p. 210.

 27. L. Rein, The Kings and the Pawns: Collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 263–72. For the involvement of the local police in the murder of Jews, see also M. Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 38, 46, 60, 65 et passim.

 28. Sheptyts’kyi had a long history of opposing pro-Russian Orthodox priests and secret proselytizing in Habsburg Galicia before the First World War. His reputation earned him the hostility of the top tsarist military commanders who personally supervised his arrest and deportation to Kiev during their occupation of Galicia in September 1914. M. von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 37–40.

 29. H.J. Stehle, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the German Regime’, in P.R. Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts’kyi (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1989), pp. 125–144; p. 129.

 30. Toman, ‘Partiia v pervye mesiatsy voiny’, p. 43.

 31. N.G. Tomilina et al. (eds), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. Dva tsveta vremeni. Dokumenty lichnogo fonda N.S. Khrushchev, 2 vols (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2009), vol. 1, doc. 1, p. 15. This collection gives a positive picture of Khrushchev’s realistic and hard-hitting reporting to Stalin on the shortcomings and successes of the southwestern front during the war.

 32. ‘Dokumenty russkoi istorii’, Istochnik 2:15 (1995), p. 114. These accusations were contained in a letter by ‘an ordinary party member’ to Stalin on 18 August 1941.

 33. The following is based on the perceptive article by E.S. Seniavskaia, ‘Dukhovnyi oblik frontovogo pokoleniia. Istoriko-psikhologicheskii ocherk’, Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta 8:4 (1992), pp. 39–51.

 34. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh 12 (December 1987), p. 51.

 35. For the campaign of 1940 see K.-H. Frieser, Blitzkreig-Legende. Der Westfeldzug, 1940 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1995) and the exceptional account of the German operational victories in France and the Soviet Union in 1941 in A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2007), pp. 368–80 and 486–506.

 36. Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle, pp. 170–3.

 37. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 1, pp. 191–2, 198–9.

 38. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti, vol. 2, docs 277–329 are a sample covering the first five days of the war.

 39. ‘Spetsvodka UNKGB po g. Moskve i Moskovskoi oblasti 1-mu sekretariu MK i MGK VKP(b). A.S. Shcherbakovu o reagirovanii naseleniia na vystuplenie I.V. Stalina, 3 iiulia 1941’, in ibid., doc. 356, pp. 161–9.

 40. ‘Moskovskie chekhisty v oborone stolitsy, 1941–1944’, VIZh 1 (1991), p. 10.

 41. ‘Prikaz NKGB SSSR, NKVD SSSR i Prokuratury SSSR . . . o poriadke privlecheniia k otvetstvennosti izmennikov rodiny i chlenov ikh semei, 28 iuniia 1941’, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti, vol. 2, doc. 332 and notes, pp. 114–15.

 42. Ibid., pp. 37–8, 42–3. Later, they were credited with an important contribution to the rapid advance of the Red Army in Manchuria in 1945.

 43. I.I. Petrov, ‘Iz istorii partiinogo rukovodstva pogranichnymi voiskami (1941–1944 gg.)’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 1 (January 1985), pp. 36–41.

 44. A.J. Rieber, ‘Civil Wars in the Soviet Union’, Kritika 4:1 (2003), pp. 129–60.

 45. Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopastnosti, vol. 1, bk 2, note, p. 179. This massive undertaking created a security nightmare as ‘hostile elements’ concealed themselves among the evacuated. Ibid., doc. 362, p. 178.

 46. Iu.L. D’iakov and G.A. Kumanev, Kapital’noe stroitel’stvo v SSSR, 1941–1945 (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), pp. 5–20.

 47. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 1, pp. 176–7.

 48. The following is based on Harrison, ‘N.A. Voznesensky’, the best treatment of Voznesensky’s early career – although the author now considers his view of Voznesensky’s ‘moderation’ overly optimistic. Personal correspondence, 26 January 2021.

 49. Its purpose was ‘to concentrate the full panoply of power in the government’ in its hands; it ordered ‘all citizens, party members, soviet, Komsomol and military organizations to obey its decisions and decrees’. L.P. Kosheleva, L.A. Rogovaia and O.V. Khlevniuk (eds), Sovetskoe Voenno-Politicheskoe Rukovodstvo v Gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny. Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony SSSR. Politbiuro TsK VKP(b). Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov SSSR (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole Muzeon, 2020), doc. 1, p. 43.

 50. One illustrative example was Mikoian’s whirlwind tour of the grain-surplus provinces in November–December 1942 which revealed startling shortfalls in production. Ibid., docs 174–7, pp. 255–70.

 51. Ibid., pp. 34–8.

 52. Reports on the failure of the party organizations to take emergency measures in key areas like the Donbas stressed the need for greater centralization of decision-making in a single person at every level. ‘Iz istorii Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny; Zapiska P.F. Iudina I.V. Stalinu, 4 oktiabria 1941’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 12 (1990), pp. 208–9.

 53. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 1, pp. 176–7.

 54. Toman, ‘Partiia v pervye mesiatsy voiny’, pp. 37–9.

 55. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh 10 (October 1987), p. 63.

 56. The protocols of the bureau occupy pp. 361–659 in Kosheleva, Rogovaia and Khlevniuk (eds), Sovetskoe Voenno-Politicheskoe Rukovodstvo. Its creation in December 1942 signalled an attempt to introduce more rational and co-ordinated decisions in transportation and military production. Ibid., p. 28.

 57. D’iakov, Kapital’noe stroitel’stvo, pp. 20–3.

 58. Harrison, Soviet Planning, pp. 94–102. The Bureau of the Sovnarkom routinely brought in specialists to deal with urgent problems. Among the more active members were A.I. Mikoian, A.N. Kosygin, the GOKO plenipotentiary in Leningrad, and Nikolai Shvernik, dealing mainly with evacuation and the assignment and distribution of workers. Kosheleva, Rogovaia and Khlevniuk (eds), Sovetskoe Voenno-Politicheskoe Rukovodstvo.

 59. Harrison, Soviet Planning, pp. 167, 193–204; A.V. Vasilevsky, Delo vsei zhizni, 4th edn (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1983), pp. 482–3. Voznesensky published his Voennaia ekonomika SSSR v period Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1948), in which he summarized some of these achievements. For the controversy over the work see pp. 254–60.

 60. Mikoian, Tak bylo, pp. 422–5.

 61. D’iakov, Kapital’noe stroitel’stvo, pp. 46–7, 120–30. See Bailes, Technology and Society for prewar problems with delays between research and development due to their separate organization.

 62. Vannikov, ‘Oboronnaia promyshlennost”, pp. 127–8; Mikoian, Tak bylo, p. 424.

 63. Vannikov, ‘Oboronnaia promyshlennost”, pp. 131–4.

 64. Mikoian, Tak bylo, pp. 394–401 shows his tough negotiating stance as well; J. Sapir, ‘The Economics of War in the Soviet Union During World War II’, in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 208–36; pp. 232–3; G.A. Kumanev and L.M. Chuvakov, ‘Sovetskii Soiuz i Lend-Liz, 1941–1945’, in G.N. Sevost’ianov (ed.), Voina i obshchestvo, 1941–1945, 2 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 60–87. Lend-Lease supplied 100 per cent of Soviet requests for radios, 83.5 per cent for steel, 70 per cent for railway flat wagons, and 70 per cent for grain, though only 44 per cent for aluminium and 42.3 per cent for aircraft, in addition to 100,000 trucks and 10,200 motorcycles. Ibid., pp. 366–7.

 65. Stalin’s telephone instructions to Zhdanov and Kuznetsov, 4 October 1941, Izvestiia Tsk KPSS 12 (1990), p. 208.

 66. Harrison, Soviet Planning, pp. 63–79, gives the more positive side. His work is based mainly on A.M. Belikov, ‘Transfert de l’industrie soviétique vers l’est (juin 1941–1942)’, Revue de l’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 43 (1961), pp. 35–50, and A.M. Belikov, ‘Tiazhelaia promyshlennost’ – v glubokii tyl’, in I.Ia. Poliakov (ed.), Eshelony idut na Vostok. Iz istorii perebazirovaniia proizvoditel’nykh sil SSSR v 1941–1942 gg. Sbornik statei i dokumentov (Moscow: Nauka, 1966); cf. T. Dunmore, The Stalinist Command Economy: The Soviet State Apparatus and Economic Policy, 1945–1953 (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 34, which suggests that the economic importance of the evacuation has been exaggerated.

 67. Vannikov, ‘Oboronnaia promyshlenost”, pp. 133–4; A.V. Mitrofanova et al. (eds), Rabochii klass SSSR nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1938–1945 gg., 3 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1984), vol. 3, pp. 206–11; V.A. Vinogradov et al. (eds), Sovetskaia ekonomika na kanune i v pervoi period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1938–1945 gg., 5 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), vol. 5, pp. 172–9, 188.

 68. Sapir, ‘The Economics of War’, pp. 221–2, 229 and 232–3.

 69. H. Hunter, ‘Successful Spatial Management’, in S.J. Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), pp. 47–58; pp. 50–4.

 70. A.V. Khrulev, ‘Stanovlenie strategicheskogo tyla v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine’, VIZh 6 (June 1961), pp. 64–86; pp. 78–80.

 71. G.A. Kumanev, ‘Sovetskie zheleznodorozhniki v pervyi period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1942)’, Istoriia SSSR 1 (1959), pp. 36–52.

 72. Vinogradov et al. (eds), Sovetskaia ekonomika, vol. 5, pp. 425–8; Hunter, ‘Successful Spatial Management’, p. 55.

 73. Pospelov et al., IVOV, vol. 3, p. 376; vol. 4, p. 157; vol. 6, p. 341; vol. 7, p. 49; Strana sovetov za 50 let. Sbornik statisticheskikh materialov (Moscow: Statistika, 1967), p. 53.

 74. Harrison, Accounting for War, p. 262.

 75. Iu.V. Arutiunian, Sovetskoe krest’ianstvo v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1970), pp. 75, 118, 183.

 76. Ibid., pp. 45–60.

 77. W. Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 127–45.

 78. Ibid., pp. 98–111.

 79. The contribution of Lend-Lease deliveries in feeding the Russian population was relatively modest. Most importantly, shipments of canned meat, animal fats and vegetable oils supplemented the diet of the Red Army soldiers. The total grain deliveries amounted only to about one month’s supply for the Red Army. Ibid., pp. 119–22.

 80. A.M. Volkov, ‘Kolkhoznoe krest’ianstvo SSSR v pervye poslevoennyi gody’, Voprosy istorii 6 (1970), pp. 3–19.

 81. Zhukov, ‘Iz neopublikovannykh vospominanii’, p. 97.

 82. Vasilevsky, Delo, pp. 466–7; S.M. Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff at War, 1941–1945 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), chap. 7.

 83. Ibid., pp. 114, 344; G.K. Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971), p. 267.

 84. Khrulev, ‘Stanovlenie strategicheskogo tyla’, pp. 64–9, 76–80.

 85. ‘Istoriia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny. Delo marshala G.I. Kulika (ianvar’–mart 1942 g.)’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 4 (August 1991), pp. 197–210.

 86. O.V. Khlevniuk, ‘Stalin and the General: Reconstructing Trust during World War II’, Europe-Asia Studies (October 2021), pp. 1–22.

 87. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh (October 1987), pp. 60–1.

 88. Vasilevsky, Delo, pp. 242, 486–7 and 492–3; Zhukov, Memoirs, pp. 281–4; Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff, pp. 184–5, 241–2.

 89. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh (October 1987), p. 62.

 90. Zhukov, Memoirs, p. 237; Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh (December 1987), p. 44. But after the Kharkov disaster, Stalin angrily removed him from his post and never again allowed him to command a front.

 91. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 1, pp. 326–8.

 92. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh (December 1987), p. 42.

 93. N.I. Savinkin and K.M. Bogoliubov (comps), KPSS o Vooruzhenykh sil Sovetskogo Soiuza. Dokumenty, 1917–1981. Sbornik (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1981), pp. 358–61; Erickson, The Soviet High Command, p. 603.

 94. Zhukov, Memoirs, p. 361.

 95. J. Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 47–54, 57–66 for a summary of the literature on Stalin’s role at Moscow.

 96. Vasilevsky, Delo, pp. 130–1, 180–1; Zhukov, Memoirs, pp. 288–9.

 97. The Politburo harshly criticized Voroshilov’s conduct during his tenure as minister of defence during the Finnish War and as commander of the northwestern front in the first year of the Fatherland War, sending him to the rear for ‘military work’. Kosheleva, Rogovaia and Khlevniuk (eds), Sovetskoe Voenno-Politicheskoe Rukovodstvo, doc. 167, pp. 226–31.

 98. Fresh light on the relations of Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Antonov with Stalin can be found in Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 1, pp. 329–43.

 99. E.F. Ziemke and M.E. Bauer III, Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1987), pp. 506–8. See also Pospelov et al., IVOV, vol. 5, p. 236 and Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad, p. 403.

100. The rush to the front created an immediate problem of finding replacements for the 47,000 leaders of the party, Komsomol and trade union organizations, not to speak of the over 500,000 regular party members. I.M. Shliapin, M.A. Shvarev and I.Ia. Fomichenko, Kommunisticheskaia partiia v period Velikoi Otechestvenoi voiny (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1958), p. 48.

101. A. Statiev, ‘Penal Units in the Red Army’, Europe-Asia Studies 62:5 (2010), pp. 730–9.

102. S.A. Tiushkevich, Sovetskie Vooruzhennye sily. Istoriia stroitel’stva (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1978), pp. 20–82, 314–28 and 344–52.

103. Ibid., pp. 295–8.

104. R.H. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, 3 vols (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 91, 132.

105. Garthoff, How Russia Makes War, pp. 103–5, 108–9; Ziemke and Bauer, Moscow to Stalingrad, p. 512; Ivanov, Marshal Tukhachevsky, p. 289.

106. Simonov, ‘Zametki’, VIZh (October 1987), p. 61.

107. Tiushkevich, Sovetskie Vooruzhennye sily, pp. 293–4, 329–30.

108. R.R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 124–5.

109. J. Erickson, The Road to Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 80, 134, 214.

110. D.M. Glantz and J.M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

111. Mikoian, Tak bylo, pp. 452–61 for the formation of the Reserve Front; Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff, pp. 219–26 and Vasilevsky, Delo, pp. 298, 301 for the military planning. Figures differ on the total forces engaged if not the results. Cf. ibid., pp. 306–10 and Erickson, The Road to Berlin, pp. 80, 134, 214.

112. Zhukov, Memoirs, p. 542; Vasilevsky, Delo, p. 346.

113. Zhukov, Memoirs, p. 542.

114. Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff, p. 401. Shtemenko’s account should dispel the myth that Stalin was playing Zhukov against Konev in order to provoke rivalries among the generals.

115. Quoted in Werth, Russia at War, p. 739.

116. Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff, pp. 456–64.

117. Ibid., pp. 446–50.

118. K. Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 24.

119. This is one firm conclusion that emerges from the debate over whether Stalin was planning a ‘preventative’ attack. See for example M.I. Mel’tiukhov, ‘Spory vokrug 1941 goda. Opyt kriticheskogo osmysleniia odnoi diskussii’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 3 (1994), pp. 4–22.

120. ‘Partorg rotu N.L. Sheshenina I.V. Stalinu, ne pozdnee 22 avgusta, 1941’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 9 (1990), pp. 193–215; pp. 204–6.

121. ‘Ponomarenko I.V. Stalinu’ (telegrams 2 July and undated 1941, from Ponomarenko to Stalin), ibid. 7 (1990), pp. 158–216; p. 196.

122. Beria to Stalin, 8 August 1941, in ibid., pp. 197–8; ‘Ob organizatsii bor’by v tylu germanskikh voisk’, ibid., p. 217.

123. L.D. Grenkevich, The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944: A Critical Historiographical Analysis, ed. D. Glantz (London: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 6–7 and 84–6.

124. P. Ponomarenko, ‘Idet beshenaia natsionalisticheskaia propaganda tovarishchu Stalinu, I.V. 21 June 1943’, in ‘Dokumenty russkoi istorii’, Istochnik 2:15 (1995), pp. 120–2; includes a condemnation of the commander of the Bryansk partisan detachments.

125. I.G. Starinov, ‘Podrivniki na kommunikatsiia agressora’, Voprosy istorii 2 (1988), pp. 97–110; p. 109, gives the important testimony of a participant.

126. N.I. Epoletov, ‘Iz opyta raboty kompartii po razvitiiu partizanskogo dvizheniia (1941–1944)’, Voprosy istorii KPSS 5 (May 1987), pp. 99–109; pp. 106–8.

127. The party made strenuous efforts to provide new cadres to work with the partisans. For example, by the end of the war in Belarus, 3,900 activists were trained and sent behind the lines. Most of these, however, arrived after 1943 and never exceeded 1 per cent of the total number of partisans. Ibid., p. 108.

128. C. Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology 1910–1939 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 135–6; S. Fitzpatrick and Y. Slezkine (eds), In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 9; W.Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

129. R.D. Markwick and E. Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 84, 149, 151–3.

130. Ibid., p. 229.

131. Slepyan, Stalin’s Guerrillas, pp. 186–8, 199–201.

132. RGASPI, f. 69, op. 10, d. 160, 3 June 1943, as cited in Markwick and Charon Cardona, Soviet Women, pp. 141–2.

133. Ibid., p. 245.

134. A.J. Rieber, ‘Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay’, in H. Ragsdale (ed.), Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge and Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center, 1993), pp. 315–59.

CHAPTER 4: THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INTELLIGENTSIA

 1. For analysis of the shifting meanings of the term ‘intelligentsia’ as applied to the Russian and Soviet scientific community see M.D. Gordin and K. Hall, ‘Introduction: Intelligentsia Science inside and outside Russia’, Osiris 23:1 (2008), pp. 1–19.

 2. S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

 3. L.R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 160–4; H.D. Balzer, ‘The Engineering Profession’, in Balzer (ed.), Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 55–88, and ‘Conclusion’, ibid., pp. 293–319; pp. 297–8; for the early origins of the technocratic approach in Russia see A.J. Rieber, The Imperial Russian Project: Autocratic Politics, Economic Development and Social Fragmentation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), chap. 5; for a comprehensive analysis of technocracy see Bailes, Technology and Society, pp. 95–121.

 4. A.A. Baikov, ‘Zadachi AN SSSR’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 1–2 (1944), pp. 24–30, and ‘Iosifu Vissarionovichu Stalinu’, ibid., pp. 20–1, expressing delight at Stalin’s praise of the academy.

 5. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2, pp. 60, 116, 160.

 6. V.P. Gar’kin and G.A. Shirokov, Otechestvennaia voina i vyshaia shkola 1941–1945. Sbornik materialov (Samara: Samarskii Universitet, 2008); Shirokov, Nauka. Tretii front 1941–1945. Sbornik materialov (Samara: Samarskii universitet, 2008); and Shirokov, Otechestvennaia voina i nauka 1941–1945. Sbornik materialov (Samara: Samarskii Universitet, 2008). See also L.S. Leonova, ‘Deiatel’nost’ vyshei shkoly i Akademicheskikh uchrezhdenii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriiia 6 (November–December 2010), pp. 73–87.

 7. For the unique aspects of the Soviet institute as an organizing structure for research and development see L.R. Graham, ‘The Formation of Soviet Research Institutions: A Combination of Revolutionary Innovation and International Borrowing’, in D.K. Rowney and G.E. Orchard (eds), Russian and Slavic History (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1977), pp. 49–75 and M.B. Adams, ‘Science, Ideology and Structure: the Kol’tsov Institute, 1900–1970’, in L. Lubrano and S.G. Solomon (eds), The Social Context of Soviet Science (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 173–204.

 8. V.E. Gromov et al. (eds), ‘Vklad uchenykh v oborone strany (1941–1945 gg.)’, in G.D. Komkov et al. (eds), Akademiia nauk SSSR. Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (first edition), 2 vols (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), p. 341.

 9. N. Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 97–8.

 10. The following is based mainly on Gromov et al. (eds), ‘Vklad uchenykh v oborone’, pp. 344–52.

 11. Ibid., p. 347. Fersman was an established geologist before the revolution.

 12. D.J.B. Shaw and J.D. Oldfield, ‘Soviet Geographers and the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945: Lev Berg and Andrei Grigorev’, Journal of Historical Geography 47 (January 2015), pp. 40–9; pp. 40–5. After the closure of Fersman’s Commission for Geological-Geographical Services to the Red Army in the second half of 1943, much of its work transferred to departments of the military. Geographers in the institute turned their attention to assisting in the rehabilitation of war-ravaged regions.

 13. In a telegram sent to Komarov, Shvernik, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, welcomed ‘your initiative in mobilizing the resources of the Ural’. Cited in Gromov et al. (eds), ‘Vklad uchenykh v oborone’, p. 349. The party organs in the region were instructed to co-operate.

 14. Ibid., pp. 368–75. In the exploration and development of the ‘New Baku’, the local party organization was credited with contributing transport and physical labourers, illustrating indirectly the disparity between the abilities of the scientists and the party organizations to meeting the challenge of providing new sources of energy and raising levels of productivity.

 15. S. Kaftanov, Sovetskaia intelligentsia v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow: Ogiz, 1945), pp. 60–80 et passim.

 16. Mitrofanova et al. (eds), Rabochii klass SSSR, vol. 3, p. 261.

 17. V.D. Esakov (comp.), Akademiia nauk v resheniiakh Politbiuro TsRKP(b)–VKP(b), 1922–1952 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), docs 250, 259, 261 and 273, pp. 274–5, 282–3, 284–5 and 291.

 18. Leonova, ‘Deiatel’nost’ vysshei shkoly’, p. 86.

 19. Gromov et al. (eds), ‘Vklad uchenykh v oborone’, p. 361.

 20. M. Mirsky, Istseliaiushii skal’pel’. Akademik N.N. Burdenko (Moscow: Znanie, 1983), pp. 57–67 and 131–60.

 21. A.M. Cienciala, N.S. Lebedeva and W. Materski (eds), Katyn: A Crime without Punishment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 262–4.

 22. Gromov et al. (eds), ‘Vklad uchenykh v oborone’, pp. 355–60, 366, 367.

 23. Sapir, ‘The Economics of War’, pp. 215, 228–9.

 24. On 23 June an enlarged plenum of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences outlined its commitment to war-related work. B.I. Kozlov, ‘Akademiia nauk SSSR v gody voiny. Urok istorii’, Vestnik RAN 75:5 (2005), pp. 387–92.

 25. ‘Iosifu Vissarionovichu Stalinu’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 1–2 (1944), pp. 20–1 and Baikov, ‘Zadachi AN SSSR’, pp. 24–30.

 26. Pravda, 24 September 1943.

 27. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 175, d. 302, the reference provided to me courtesy of Karl Hall. Landau continued to do brilliant work and to cover himself politically, contributing on the theoretical side to the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, for which he received Stalin Prizes in the dictator’s final years of 1949 and again in 1953. R. Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 33.

 28. G. Gorelik, ‘The Top-Secret Life of Lev Landau’, Scientific American 277:2 (August 1997), pp. 72–7. Gorelik was briefly permitted access to the files of the KGB in 1991.

 29. D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 10–11; for the early career of Vernadsky see ibid., pp. 29–34; for his organization of the Uranium Commission in 1940, see ibid., pp. 60–2; for its difficulties in obtaining governmental support in the early years of the war, see ibid., pp. 88–102.

 30. Ibid., p. 112 and K.E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V.I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 177. Vernadsky’s essay was only published in Piroda in 1975. The reasons for the delay may be imagined.

 31. O.V. Khlevniuk et al. (eds), Stalin i Kaganovich. Perepiska 1931–1936 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), doc. 533, pp. 486–7. Kuibyshev and Kaganovich recommended the detainment of Kapitsa, whose work they insisted had ‘military significance’. Stalin concurred with the reservation that Kapitsa should not be formally arrested. Stalin to Kaganovich and Kuibyshev, 21 September 1936, ibid., doc. 540, p. 492; Esakov (comp.), Akademiia nauk, doc. 169, pp. 195–6; doc. 272, p. 290.

 32. Gromov et al. (eds), ‘Vklad uchenykh v oborone’, p. 363. One of his collaborators was Lev Landau. Akademiia nauk v resheniiakh Politbiuro TsK RKP–VKP(b)–KPSS 1922–1991, vol. 1 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), doc. 272, p. 290.

 33. Kapitsa to Beria, 26 April 1939 and to Stalin, 14 June 1940, in J.W. Boag, P.E. Rubinin and D. Shoenberg (eds), Kapitza in Cambridge and Moscow: Life and Letters of a Russian Physicist (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990), pp. 350–1. Migdal later recalled that when he became an academician Kapitsa told him, ‘Well now you really have got a Stalin Studentship’. Ibid., p. 351.

 34. Kapitsa to V.M. Molotov, 14 October 1943 and to Niels Bohr, 28 October 1943, in ibid., pp. 353–5 and communication (by radio?) to Paul Langevin, 23 January 1945, in ibid., p. 361.

 35. Kapitsa to G.M. Malenkov, 3 March 1944, in ibid., p. 360.

 36. Kapitsa to G.M. Malenkov, 23 March 1944, in ibid., p. 361.

 37. Kapitsa to Stalin, 19 April 1943, 13 October 1944, 14 March 1945 and 13 April 1945, in ibid., pp. 349, 361, 363–5 and 366–7.

 38. P.L. Kapitsa, ‘Ob organizatsii nauchnoi raboty v Institute fizicheskikh problem’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 6 (1943), pp. 75–89; pp. 79–82.

 39. V. Soifer, Vlast’ i nauka. Istoriia razgroma genetiki v SSSR (Saint Petersburg: Ermitazh, 1989), pp. 364–7.

 40. Ibid., p. 97 and T.D. Lysenko, ‘O nekotorykh osnovnykh zadachakh sel’skokhozaistvennoi nauki’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 5–6 (1942), pp. 49–59.

 41. Kaftanov to Pravda, 1 April 1942 and 18 June 1944 quoted in Leonova, ‘Deiatel’nost’ vysshei shkoly’, pp. 78 and 81.

 42. Soifer, Vlast’ i nauka, p. 370.

 43. Kapitsa, ‘Ob organizatsii’, pp. 90–4 for comments of Ioffe and Shtern; A.F. Ioffe, ‘Fizika i voina’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 5–6 (1942), pp. 66–76; see also L.A. Orbeli, ‘Biologiia i voina’, ibid., pp. 76–85; P.L. Pevsner, ‘Kharakteristika sovremennogo sostoianiia silikatnoi promyshlennosti Urala’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 7–8 (1942), pp. 84–90; I.A. Dobrosev, ‘Ural-Stanovoi khrebet oborony’, Vestnik Akademiia nauk 4–5 (1943), pp. 26–35.

 44. A. Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1990), chap. 4 especially pp. 96–7 and 100. The phrase was Enrico Fermi’s.

 45. G.A. Kumanev (ed.), Tragicheskie sud’by. Repressirovannye uchenye Akademii nauk SSSR. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Nauka, 1995) and D.A. Sobolev, ‘Istoriia Samoletov 1919–1945’, Repressii v Sovetskoi aviapromyshlennosti (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997). A.L. Kiselev and E.S. Levina, Lev Aleksandrovich Zil’ber (1894–1966). Zhizn’ i nauka (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), who discovered a means of curing pellagra in subzero environments.

 46. G.A. Ozerov, Tupolevskaia sharaga, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Possev, 1973), p. 37; S. Gerovitch, ‘Stalin’s Rocket Designers’ Leap into Space: The Technical Intelligentsia Faces the Thaw’, Osiris 23:1 (2008), pp. 189–209; pp. 189–90. Korolev luckily was removed at the last moment from a list of seventy-four military specialists and defence engineers sentenced to death by Stalin in September 1938.

 47. A.I. Shakhurin, Kryl’ia pobedy, 3rd edn (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), pp. 247–8 and V.P. Naumov and Iu. Sichagev (comps), Lavrentii Beriia: Stenogramma iul’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 1999), p. 175.

 48. Naumov and Sichagev, Lavrentii Beriia, pp. 145–7.

 49. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 144. True to his word Stalin dismissed Kapitsa from his post but allowed him to continue his research at a small laboratory. Stalin’s action closely resembles his response to Beria’s request to arrest Zhukov.

 50. V.P. Kozlov et al. (eds), Istoriia stalinskogo gulaga. Konets 1920–pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov v semi tomakh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), doc. 169, pp. 445–6.

 51. Ibid., pp. 446–50. After the war, the imprisoned specialists continued to contribute to the design of turbo-jet engines and the organization of a construction bureau to manufacture them. Ibid., doc. 170, pp. 450–51 and note 324, pp. 584–5.

 52. A.I. Kokurin and N.V. Petrov (comps), GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei). 1918–1960 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), p. 276.

 53. The following is based mainly on Holloway’s classic study, Stalin and the Bomb.

 54. Ibid., pp. 46, 54 and 58.

 55. Ibid., p. 69 quoting Vernadsky’s diary.

 56. Zhukov, Vospominaniia, p. 334.

 57. In a long conversation with Kurchatov, Stalin made both these points, proposing to increase the rewards and raise the living standards of scientists, yet expressing reservations about the devotion of leading figures like Kapitsa, Sergei Vavilov and Ioffe. Kurchatov’s notes, cited in Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 147–9. He made even more sweeping comments on the ‘insufficiently educated feelings of Soviet patriotism’ of the scientific as well as the entire intelligentsia to the writer Konstantin Simonov. W.G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 126. By putting Beria in charge of the atomic project Stalin made clear his belief that scientists had to be kept under surveillance even while working for the motherland.

 58. V.S. Gott (ed.), Filosovskie voprosy sovremennoi fiziki (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1988), pp. 22–5, 64–5, 297 and 406.

 59. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 146–7, 245–50; V.P. Glushko, Rocket Engines GDL-OKB (Moscow: Novosti, 1975); Glushko, Razvitie raketostroeniia i kosmonavtiki v SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1987); J. Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 1997); B.N. Malinovskii, Akademik V. Glushkov. Stranitsy zhizni i tvorchestva (Kiev: Anukova Dumka, 1993); T.A. Grichenko and A.A. Stognii, ‘Viktor Mikhailovich Grichenko i ego shkola’, Matematichni mashin i sysтеми 4 (2006), pp. 3–14.

 60. Soifer, Vlast’ i nauka, p. 370–1; D. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 152–8.

 61. Graham, Science in Russia, p. 167.

 62. H.D. Balzer, ‘Conclusion’, in Balzer (ed.), Russia’s Missing Middle Class, pp. 298–300; pp. 298–99.

 63. M.J. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, in M. McCauley (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 71–94; pp. 81–92.

 64. A term which literally means braking or slowing down of the mechanism of state as an integrated hierarchical system. M. Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drift and Drive of a Superstate (New York: New Press, 1995), p. 313.

 65. R.B. Day, Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow, 1945–1975 (London: Routledge, 2016), chap. 1, pt 4.

 66. ‘Izuchenie ekonomiki i politiki zarubezhnykh stran’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 5 (1945), pp. 77–84.

 67. There is some evidence that Varga gave testimony against Kun during his trial. B. Kovrig, Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kádár (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), p. 128; W.J. Chase, ‘Microhistory and Mass Repression: Politics, Personalities and Revenge in the Fall of Béla Kun’, Russian Review 67:3 (2008), pp. 454–83; p. 477.

 68. Dimitrov, Diary, entries for 16 September 1938 and 13 May 1943, p. 273, italics in original.

 69. E. Varga, ‘Reshaiushchaia rol’ gosudarstva v voennom khozaistve kapitalisticheskikh stran’, Mirovaia khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 1 (1945), pp. 11–21. There is an eerie foreshadowing here of what President Eisenhower would later call the ‘military-industrial complex’.

 70. ‘Problema promyshlennogo tsikla posle voiny. (Doklad akad. E.S. Varga i preniia)’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 2–3 (1945), pp. 79–87.

 71. I. Lemin, ‘Vsemirno-istoricheskaia pobeda’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 5 (1945), pp. 6–22. In an earlier work, I had erroneously placed Lemin among the advocates of ‘the Western threat’ camp, not having had access to this article. He corrected my mistake when I was his host at Northwestern University in 1964 during his visit to the United States. He told me then that ‘Stalin understood nothing of the economic situation after the war’.

 72. For example, I. Trakhtenberg, ‘Finansirovanie voiny i infliatsiia’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovoe politika 2–3 (1945), pp. 3–21; L. Frei, ‘Poslevoennye voprosy vneshnei torgovoi politiki’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 1 (1945), pp. 55–66; p. 65, who praises Litvinov’s views on international trade in 1933; A. Troianovsky, ‘Pamiati velikogo presidenta’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 5 (1945), pp. 46–53, commemorating Roosevelt on the occasion of the president’s death and stressing the need for postwar co-operation. M Bokshinitsky, ‘Vtoraia mirovaia voina i izmeneniia v promyshlennosti SShA’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 4 (1945), pp. 30–45; pp. 43–4. I. Dreizenshtok, ‘Zheleznodorozhnyi transport SShA i ego poslevoennye perspektivy’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 3 (1945), pp. 58–70; pp. 68–9. S. Vishnev, ‘Razvitie vooruzhennykh sil derzhav v khode Vtoroi mirovoi voiny’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 5 (1945), pp. 35–45. S. Zakharov, ‘Mirovaia profsoiuznaia konferentsiia v Londone’, Mirovaia khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 4 (1945), pp. 3–7; despite differences between left and right unions the author perceived hope for the ending of the historic split in the working class. Iu. Vintser, ‘Poslevoennye plany natsionalizatsii v Anglii i SShA’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 2–3 (1945), pp. 54–60.

 73. P. Lisovsky, ‘Krymskaia konferentsiia’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 2–3 (1945), pp. 22–32; p. 32.

 74. S. Sladovskoi, ‘Polozhenie v Italii’, Mirovoe khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 4 (1945), pp. 14–15, and K. Dimitrov, ‘Agrarnyi vopros i agrarnaia reforma v Rumynii’, Mirovaia khoziastvo i mirovaia politika 6 (1945), pp. 13–20. They also welcomed as another sign of unity the international support for the position of a Soviet trade union delegation in London by radical unions in France (the CGT), the US (the CIO) and Italy ranged against the old reformist unions of the Amsterdam group, the AFL in the US and certain British unions. Zakharov, ‘Mirovaia profsoiuznaia konferentsiia v Londone’, pp. 3–7.

CHAPTER 5: ON THE CULTURAL FRONT

 1. To describe this process, the term cultural revolution was introduced into the literature and most fully developed by S. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). It generated an extensive debate summarized by M. David-Fox, ‘What is Cultural Revolution?’, Russian Review 58:2 (April 1999), pp. 181–201. See aso Fitzpatrick’s reply, ‘Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Russian Review 58:2 (April 1999), pp. 202–9.

 2. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, pp. 248–50.

 3. I.M. Gronsky and V.N. Perel’man (comps), Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsionnoi Rossii. Sbornik vospominanii, statei, dokumentov (Moscow: Izabratel’noe iskusstvo, 1973), doc. 69, p. 166. The author was reporting on a meeting of a Politburo commission in Stalin’s study and lasting six to seven hours, held sometime in April–May 1932. Gronsky subsequently became the secretary for the organizing committee of the First Congress of Soviet Writers.

 4. Zhdanov’s optimistic letter to Stalin on the results was refuted by reports of the Secret Political Department of the NKVD based on informers at the congress. Babel called it ‘a literary requiem’. A. Novikov-Priboi listened ‘in pain; orders in literature are the end’. Valerian Pravdukhin denounced it as ‘a servile gathering’, and so forth. Ibid., docs 70, 71, 72, 73, pp. 167–71. Even Gorky was disillusioned; he deplored the appointments to the Union Executive Committee as ‘ignorant people who will be directing people who are significantly more literate than they are’. Ibid., doc. 74, p. 172. Once the congress disbanded, the criticisms multiplied. Ibid., doc. 75, p. 176. The police reports also denounced ‘hostile, great power chauvinistic moods’ among the poet-translators from the national languages. Ibid., doc. 76, p. 177.

 5. M. Zezina, ‘Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers in the early 1950s’, Europe-Asia Studies 46:4 (1996), pp. 649–61; p. 649 describes the First Congress in the words of one of its participants as being conducted in ‘a vicious atmosphere’. Despite its protocols, the congress had not been summoned after its founding meeting in 1934 until after the war. The plenums were held irregularly instead of three times a year. Ibid., p. 650.

 6. M. Friedberg, ‘Literary Culture: “The New Soviet Man” in the Mirror of Literature’, in D.N. Shalin (ed.), Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 239–58.

 7. J. Förster, ‘Das Unternehmen “Barbarossa” als Eroberungs- und Vernichtungs-Krieg’, in H. Boog et al. (eds), Das deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, 4 vols (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), vol. 4, Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, pp. 413–50 and O. Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For the Soviet reaction see ‘Nota narodnogo komissara inostrannykh del V.M. Molotova o chudovishchnykh zlodeianiiakh zverstvakh i nasiliiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v okkupirovannykh sovetskikh raionakh i ob otvetstvennosti Germanskogo pravitel’stva i komandovaniia za eti prestupleniia’ (Moscow, 27 April 1942), documenting the atrocities and sent to all embassies having relations with the Soviet Union.

 8. M. Gefter, ‘Stalin umer vchera . . .’, in A.A. Protashchik (ed.), Inogo ne dano (Moscow: Progress, 1988), p. 305, and the essays in Gefter (ed.), Iz tekh i etikh let (Moscow: Progress, 1991).

 9. G. Bordiugov, ‘Ukradennaia politika’, Komsomolskaia pravda, 5 May 1990, as quoted in Zubkova, Obshchestvo, p. 14.

 10. K.C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 12–20 gives extensive statistics on the press. For the ‘paradoxical’ outcome, see p. 14.

 11. J. von Geldern, ‘Radio Moscow: The Voice from the Center’, in R. Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 44–61; pp. 51–4.

 12. C.D. Shaw, ‘Making Ivan-Uzbek: War, Friendship of the Peoples, and the Creation of Soviet Uzbekistan, 1941–1945’, doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.

 13. E.M. Malysheva, ‘Sovetskaia publitsistika i SMI v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny. Opyt aktualizatsii’, in I.I. Gorlova et al. (eds), Kulturnoe nasledie severnogo Kavkaza kak resurs mezhnatsional’nogo soglasiia. Sbornik nauchnykh statei (Moscow-Krasnodar: Institut naslediia and Iuzhnyi filial, 2015), pp. 364–5. It is estimated that Ehrenburg alone published 1,500 pieces during the war.

 14. Partiinost’ or party-mindedness was the ideal of Bolsheviks; russo-centrism was a theme stressing the Russian component of the Soviet Union; Soviet patriotism was invented to encompass all the nationalities. These were already being combined in 1938 by the party propagandists. See B. Volin, ‘Velikii russkii narod’, Bol’shevik 9 (1 May 1938), pp. 26–36; V. Kirpomin, ‘Russkaia kultura’, Bol’shevik 12 (June 1938), pp. 47–63; and Editorial, ‘Velikaia druzhba narodov SSSR’, Bol’shevik 13 (13 July 1938), pp. 1–7.

 15. A. Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

 16. Cf. K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), especially chaps 1 and 6, which are suggestive in dealing with the same phenomenon in a literary context.

 17. For party membership drawn from archives, see Pospelov et al., IVOV, vol. 6, pp. 342 and 365; for concern over new recruits, see Shliapin, Shvarev and Fomichenko, Kommunisticheskaia partiia, pp. 47–8; M.E. Brodskaia, Verolomnoe napadenie fashistskoi Germanii o Sovetskii Soiuz. Mobilizatsiia partiei sovetskogo naroda na otpor vragu (Chardzhou: 1957), p. 13; E.I. Iaroslavsky, Chego trebuet partiia ot kommunistov v dni Otechestvennoi voiny (Leningrad: Partizdat, 1945), pp. 8–9.

 18. For a content analysis in 1942 and 1943 see D.J. Dallin, The Changing World of Soviet Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956).

 19. Pospelov et al., IVOV, vol. 6, pp. 369–70.

 20. Ibid., pp. 344, 355–7.

 21. E. Razin, ‘Lenin o sushchnosti voiny’, Bol’shevik 1 (January 1943), pp. 46–54 quoting Lenin on p. 48. Stalin’s contribution was emphasized in M. Leonov, ‘Lenin o voine i roli moral’nogo faktora v nei’, Agitator i propagandist Krasnoi armii 6 (March 1945), pp. 19–32.

 22. V. Chuvikov, ‘Uchenie Lenina–Stalina o voinakh spravedlivykh i nespravedlivykh’, Bol’shevik 7–8 (April 1945), pp. 14–26; pp. 25–6.

 23. For the contemporary debate during the ‘Fatherland War of 1812’ among conservatives over the nature of patriotism see A.M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers and Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), pp. 123–42.

 24. Stalin revived the use of the term rodina for the first time in 1933 when he praised the pilots who had dramatically rescued the crew of an ice breaker that had sunk in the Arctic Ocean; it was then incorporated into May Day slogans and anti-fascist fiction. D.L. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 99, 101–2, 116–18. Rodina can mean ‘native land’, as distinct from otechestvo, which may mean ‘state’.

 25. I.V. Stalin, On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (London: Hutchinson, 1943), p. 5–9. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, p. 94, calls it a ‘bravura performance’.

 26. D.L. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

 27. I. Vinogradov, ‘Zhizn’ i smert’ sovetskogo poniatiia “druzhba narodov”’, Cahiers du monde russe 36:4 (December 1995), pp. 455–62; p. 460. Martin, Affirmative Action, chap. 11.

 28. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, pp. 43–5.

 29. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2, pp. 8, 9. Cf. N.K. Shil’der, Imperator Aleksandr Pervyi, 3 vols (Saint Petersburg: Surovin, 1904), vol. 3, p. 83 and especially Alexander’s letter to Baron Shtein, 27 March 1812, ibid., p. 497. Isaac Deutscher was the first to remark on the close historical parallels between the two campaigns: Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 463.

 30. O. Budnitskii, ‘Istoriia voiny s Napoleonom v sovetskoi propagande, 1941–1945’, Rossiiskaia istoriia 6 (2012), pp. 157–69. See also L. Yaresh, ‘The Campaign of 1812’, in C.E. Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History, 2nd edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), pp. 268–75.

 31. S. Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 176, 179.

 32. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2, p. 203.

 33. Ibid., p. 35; L.R. Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1969), p. 77; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, pp. 116–24, 145–57.

 34. The rehabilitation of Ivan served many purposes. M. Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) points out his usefulness in justifying Soviet expansion into the Baltic states in 1939 and 1940. D.L. Brandenberger, ‘Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic: Rehabilitating Ivan IV under I.V. Stalin’, Russian Review 58:4 (1999), pp. 635–54. For Peter see N.V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 280–2.

 35. G. Reavey, Soviet Literature Today (London: L. Drummond, 1946), pp. 49–56; C. Corbet, Une Littérature aux fers. Le pseudo-réalisme soviétique (Paris: La Pensée universelle, 1975), p. 187; L. Yaresh, ‘Ivan the Terrible and the Oprichnina’, in Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History, pp. 220–9.

 36. See A. Miller, ‘The Romanov Empire and the Russian Nation’, in S. Berger and A. Miller (eds), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), pp. 309–68, and for the army A.J. Rieber, ‘Nationalizing Imperial Armies: A Comparative and Transnational Study of Three Empires’, in ibid., pp. 595–605.

 37. ‘Istoricheskie korni nemetskogo fashizma. Stat’ia akademika R.Iu. Vippera. Avgust, 1941’, Istoricheskii arkhiv 4 (2000), pp. 187–204; pp. 187–8. It is striking that Vipper not only endorsed the longue durée approach of the Annales school but foreshadowed the Sonderweg concept of postwar German historians.

 38. D.L. Brandenberger and A.M. Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931–1941’, Europe-Asia Studies 50:5 (July 1998), pp. 873–92.

 39. J. Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012) stresses the visual representations. For film see P. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–53 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001).

 40. Compare the views of S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) and J. Hellbeck, ‘Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographies and Text’, in I. Halfin (ed.), Language and Revolution: Making Political Identities (London: Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 135–60, who both stress the internalization by the population of ‘Bolshevik speak’, to the sceptical perspective of S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and S.A. Shinkarchuk, Obshchestvennoe mnenie v Sovetskoi Rossii v 30-e gody. Po materialam Severozapada (Saint Petersburg: Iz Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta ekonomiki i finansova, 1995). The collection of documents, K. Bukov et al. (comps), Moskva voennaia, 1941–1945. Memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty (Moscow: Mosgoarkhiv, 1995), based on official and unofficial sources, also presents a variegated picture; the memoirs stressing patriotic sentiments, the diaries and secret police reports revealing complaints and even anti-Soviet views. All these works are based on local or regional archives and raise the same problem of how representative their findings are of different strata of the population and of the country as a whole.

 41. ‘Materialy plenuma TsK VKP(b) (1944)’, Istoricheskii arkhiv 1 (1992), pp. 61–5; p. 62. This was the only plenum of the Central Committee held during the war and it merely rubber-stamped Stalin’s proposals.

 42. Quoted in Werth, Russia at War, p. 743.

 43. Communist activists sought to resuscitate the cult of heroes and apply it to the common soldier in the trenches of Stalingrad. J. Hellbeck, Die Stalingrad Protokolle. Sowjetische Augenzeugen berichten aus der Schlacht (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2012).

 44. F.J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 7–10, Gorky quote on p. 7. The tale of Ilia Muromets also provided the structure for the symphonic tone poem of the same name by the head of the Musicians’ Union, Reinhold Glière. Bogatyri had been famously portrayed on canvas in 1898 by Viktor Vasnetsov and hung in the Tretiakov Gallery.

 45. Ibid., pp. 20, 25–7.

 46. A collection of folk tales on the war is Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii dom), Ocherki russkogo narodnopoeticheskogo tvorchestva sovetskoi epokhi (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1952), pp. 459–523.

 47. Miller, Folklore for Stalin, pp. 36 and 75 ff.

 48. K. Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 80–1.

 49. E. Polyudova, Soviet War Songs in the Context of Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 8, 23, 26, 28.

 50. A. Tvardovsky, ‘Vasily Tyorkin’, in J. von Geldern and R. Stites (eds), Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 371–7; p. 371.

 51. V.S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 4–7, with excerpts from several poets; J. Brooks, ‘Pravda Goes to War’, in Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment, pp. 9–27; pp. 17–19, and R. Sartorti, ‘On the Making of Heroes, Heroines and Saints’, in ibid., pp. 176–93; pp. 176–80.

 52. See for example R.P. Shaw and Y. Wong, Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evaluating Nationalism and Patriotism (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and D. Bar-Tal and E. Staub (eds), Patriotism: In the Lives of Individuals and Nations (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1997).

 53. Cf. Martin, Affirmative Action and F. Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

 54. Pravda, 28 November 1941, 21 January 1942, 5 September 1942 and Izvestiia, 2 April 1942 to the Ukrainians; Pravda, 20 January 1942, 1 October 1942 to the Belarusians; ibid., 1 October 1942 to the Latvians; ibid., 3 March 1942 to the Estonians; and Izvestiia, 29 April 1942 to the Lithuanians.

 55. Tomoff, Creative Union, pp. 24, 27, 66–7.

 56. V. Orlov, ‘Prokofiev and the Myth of the Father of Nations: The Cantata Zdravitsa’, Journal of Musicology 30:4 (autumn 2013), pp. 577–620; p. 583.

 57. Morrison, The People’s Artist, p. 178. His colleague Myaskovsky described it as ‘fantastical, monstrously, even yet mainly interesting’. Ibid., p. 179. Morrison in a rare slip misnumbers the quartet as the first.

 58. ‘Rech’ I.V. Stalina na devnadtsatogo godovshchina oktiabrskoi revoliutsii’, Bol’shevik 21 (November 1944), pp 1–8; p. 8. In the monthly review of events, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi obzor’, as well as individual articles, the phrases ‘Soviet land’ and ‘Soviet people’ were frequently employed to suggest the multi-national character of the country. Bol’shevik 22 (December 1944), pp. 23–4; Bol’shevik 2 (January 1945), p. 14.

 59. An early example of this was the speech of Politburo member A.S. Shcherbakov, Pod znamenem Lenina, 22 ianvariia 1942 (Gorky: Gorkovskoe obl. kn-vo, 1942), pp. 3–31, p. 10.

 60. The most comprehensive treatment is Tillett, The Great Friendship, chap. 4. See also K.F. Shteppa, ‘The “Lesser Evil” Formula’, in Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History, pp. 107–19.

 61. I. Vlasov, ‘O sovetskom patriotizme’, Propagandist i agitator Krasnoi armii 5 (March 1945), pp. 17–18.

 62. A.Ia. Vyshinsky, Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo – Gosudarstvo novogo tipa. Doklad, pochitannyi na sessii Akademii nauk SSSR, 20 noiabria 1942 g. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1943), pp. 15–19, 28 and 37–8; Vyshinsky, Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo v Otechestvennoi voine (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1944), pp. 2, 10, 16, 41.

 63. M.I. Kalinin, Stat’i i rechi. 1941–1946 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1975), especially ‘Chto nachit byt’ sovetskim patriotom v nashi dni’, pp. 36–9 and ‘Edinaia boevaia sem’ia’, pp. 289–94.

 64. B. Schechter, ‘“The People’s Instructions”: Indigenizing the Great Patriotic War among “Non-Russians”’, Ab Imperio 3 (2012), pp. 109–33; p. 110.

 65. N.A. Kirsanov, Partiinye mobilizatsii na front v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo universiteta, 1972), pp. 155–82.

 66. In addition a campaign of letter-writing between soldiers and the home front was inaugurated to provide an emotional link to their defence of their motherland. Schechter, ‘“The People’s Instructions”’, pp. 114–22.

 67. E.M. Malysheva, Ispytanie. Sotsium vlast’. Problem vzaimodeistviia v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Maikop: Adygeia, 2000), pp. 211 and 216.

 68. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 1, p. 256. Three and a half thousand Chechen and Ingush women had already been decorated with the medal for factory production, ‘For the Defence of the Caucasus’. Malysheva, Ispytanie, p. 216.

 69. ‘Materialy plenuma’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, p. 62.

 70. E.A. Beliaev and N.S. Pyshkova, Formirovanie i razvitie seti nauchnykh uchrezhdenii SSSR. Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Nauka, 1979). The Ukrainian and Belarusian Academies had existed since the early years of the Soviet state. A. Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917–1970) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 90, 203–6.

 71. KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, pp. 114, 119, 125–9, 131.

 72. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, pp. 123–9. Pankratova had been a student of M.N. Pokrovsky, the dean of Soviet historians in the early period and a favourite of Lenin who had denounced tsarist imperialism as having created a ‘prison of nations’. Under party pressure she participated in a denunciation of her teacher. See B.D. Grekov et al. (eds), Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii M.N. Pokrovskogo. Sbornik statei, 2 vols (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1939–40). But clearly she continued to cherish part of his legacy. See R.E. Zelnik, The Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005), pp. 27–35.

 73. S. Yekelchyk, ‘Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian “Heroic Pasts”, 1941–1945’, Kritika 3:1 (2002), pp. 51–80; pp. 68–77.

 74. Schechter, ‘“The People’s Instructions”’, pp. 130–1; Tillett, The Great Friendship, pp. 159, 84–100; and Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, pp. 123–6.

 75. L.L. Mininberg, Sovetskie evrei v nauke i promyshlennosti SSSR v period Vtoroi mirovoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg. Ocherki (Moscow: ITS-Garant, 1996), pp. 136, 189, 378; for the above statistics, pp. 12–14 and 18.

 76. S. Redlich, ‘Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union, 1941–42’, Soviet Jewish Affairs 1:2 (1971), pp. 90–8.

 77. The following is based on S. Redlich, ‘The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the Soviet Union’, Jewish Social Studies 31:1 (January 1969), pp. 25–36.

 78. G. Estraikh, ‘The Life, Death and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’, East European Jewish Affairs 48:2 (2018), pp. 139–48; pp. 140–2.

 79. M. Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 281–3, 309–10.

 80. The Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre, p. 482 et passim.

 81. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, pp. 220–4.

 82. Kukryniksy, Sobranie proizvedenii v 4-kh tomakh, 4 vols (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1982–88), vol. 2, fig. 41; see also figs 9, 13, 26, 34, 46, 57 (1942); 26, 82, 92, 109, 115 (1943); Kukryniksy, Vtroem (Moscow: Khudozhnik, 1975), pp. 118, 156.

 83. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2, p. 162; Kukryniksy, Sobranie, vol. 2, fig. 39. For other examples see A.K. Pisiotis, ‘Images of Hate in the Art of War’, in von Geldern and Stites (eds), Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, pp. 141–56.

 84. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, pp. 174–5.

 85. H. Ermolaev, Mikhail Sholokhov and His Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 46–6. The story was translated and widely circulated in the West. See for example M. Sholokhov, B. Gorbatov, W. Wassilewska, K. Simonov and F. Panferov, Soviet War Stories (London: Hutchinson, n.d. [1944?]).

 86. For some examples see Malysheva, ‘Sovetskaia publitsistika’, pp. 367–70. Ehrenburg made effective use too of captured diaries and letters received by German soldiers. J. Hellbeck, ‘“The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens”: Personal Writings from the German–Soviet War and Their Readers’, Kritika 10:3 (summer 2009), pp. 571–606; see especially pp. 585–604. According to front folklore, instructions were given to reuse newspaper as necessary, ‘except for the articles of Ehrenburg’.

 87. The wartime articles are conveniently assembled and translated in I. Ehrenburg and K. Simonov, In One Newspaper: A Chronicle of Unforgettable Years, trans. A. Kagan (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985); see pp. 143–50 for ‘The Science of Hatred’.

 88. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, pp. 177–9. The author questions the effectiveness of this propaganda compared to reports of German atrocities. Ibid., pp. 197–201.

 89. D.J. Youngblood, ‘A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War’, American Historical Review 106:3 (June 2001), pp. 839–56; pp. 841–4; Sartorti, ‘On the Making of Heroes, Heroines and Saints,’ pp. 176–93; pp. 185–6. P. Kenez, ‘Black and White: The War on Film’, in Stites (ed.) Culture and Entertainment, pp. 167–8; pp. 157–75.

 90. V. Kepley, In the Service of the State: The Cinema of Alexander Dovzhenko (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

 91. L.A. Kirschenbaum, ‘“Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families”: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda’, Slavic Review 59:4 (winter 2000), pp. 825–47; J. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). It seems to be the case, as with other campaigns based on letters to the editor, that the official propaganda apparatus manipulated genuine expressions of emotions and opinions arising spontaneously from the population. To what extent remains unclear.

 92. For an early invocation of the lyrical theme in literature, see A. Miasnikaia, ‘Otechestvennaia voina i sovetskaia literatura’, KI 7 (1942), pp. 68–75.

 93. The following is based on K. Clark, ‘Shostakovich’s Turn to the String Quartet and the Debates about Socialist Realism in Music’, Slavic Review 72:3 (autumn 2013), pp. 573–89 and more generally her book, The Soviet Novel.

 94. Clark, ‘Shostakovich’s Turn’, p. 299.

 95. As early as February 1942, Stalin sought to deflect criticism in the Western press on the cult of hatred by denying that the Red Army had any intention of annihilating the German people and destroying a German state. Pravda, 23 February 1942.

 96. Even his orders, however, could not immediately bring to a halt the mass rapes of German women and pillaging of German homes that were concealed at the time but amply documented since. O. Budnitskii, ‘The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945’, trans. S. Rupp, Kritika 10:3 (summer 2009), pp. 629–82; pp. 637–47, 662–7.

 97. I. Ehrenburg, The War: 1941–1945, trans. T. Shebunina in collaboration with Y. Knapp (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 19, 29–33, 176. Ehrenburg did not resent so much the politics of the thing as the distortion of his views, which were more nuanced than Goebbels – or Aleksandrov – had painted them. But then again, the Soviet leadership had never appreciated his individual approach. As Shcherbakov put it early in the war, when Ehrenburg complained that his pieces were being cut: ‘You shouldn’t try to be original.’ Ibid., p. 13.

 98. Sergius had been acting patriarch from Tikhon’s death in 1924 to his arrest and imprisonment in 1927. Freed in 1934 and restored as acting patriarch, he was elected patriarch of Moscow and All Russia in 1943.

 99. D. Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984) and P. Walters, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 483 (January 1986), pp. 135–45.

100. A. Dickinson, ‘Quantifying Religious Oppression: Russian Orthodox Church Closures and Repression of Priests, 1917–1941’, Religion, State and Society 28:4 (2000), pp. 327–35. E.P. Titkov, Dukhovnyi mech Velikoi pobedy. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Arzamas: AGPI, 2010), pp. 15–16.

101. R.R. Reese, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church and “Patriotic” Support for the Stalinist Regime during the Great Patriotic War’, War and Society 35:2 (May 2014), pp. 131–53; pp. 135, 137. Reese concludes that the contributions of the Orthodox Church in patriotic giving and charitable activities was ‘a conscious means to challenge state policies’ and mobilize ‘support for itself at Stalin’s expense’. Ibid., p. 153.

102. Ibid., pp. 138–9, 145–6, 150–1. This does not include additional, more modest funds raised by the Renovationist and even the Josephite churches.

103. Ibid., p. 141.

104. ‘Proshu vashikh ukazanii’, Dokladnye zapiski predsedatelia Soveta po delam Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi G.G. Karpov v TsK VKP (b) i SNK SSSR, 1943’, Istoricheskii arkhiv 2 (2000), doc. 17, pp. 153–86; pp. 176–8, Karpov to Stalin and Molotov.

105. T.A. Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, ed. and trans. E.E. Roslof (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 28 and 38–9. Local soviet, communist and Komsomol authorities engaged in anti-religious propaganda before the war were unhappy and often offered resistance to reopening. There were still a few Renovationist churches open until 1948.

106. M.V. Shkarovsky, ‘Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ v 1943–1957 godakh’, Voprosy istorii 8 (1995), pp. 36–56, and Shkarovsky, Tserkov’ zovet k zashchite rodiny: Religioznaia zhizn’ Leningrada i Severo-Zapada v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Saint Petersburg: Satis derzhava, 2005), pp. 78–9.

107. W.C. Fletcher, ‘The Soviet Bible Belt’, in Linz (ed.), The Impact, pp. 91–106, emphasizes the rapid increase in the underground schismatic churches but indicates that the defections would have been far greater if there had been no patriarch in Moscow.

108. O.Iu. Vasil’eva, ‘Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’, 1927–1943’, Voprosy istorii 4 (1994), pp. 35–46; p. 41.

109. M.V. Shkarovsky (ed.), ‘V ogne voiny. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ v 1941–1945 gg. (Po materialam Leningradskoi eparkhii)’, Russkoe proshloe 5 (1994), pp. 259–316; pp. 264–6. For a picture of the widespread anti-communist and pro-German sentiments among the local clergy and the ‘mission’ in the western borderlands see the letter of an emissary of the Leningrad and Novgorod eparchy to Metropolitan Aleksei in ibid., doc. 14, pp. 290–5. In April 1944, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) wrote to the Reichskommissar of Ostland that ‘the Orthodox bishopric too wishes the fall of the Soviet regime, but possibly and even more definitively, its hopes are no longer tied to a German victory’. Z. Balevits, Pravoslavnaia tserkov’ Latvii pod sen’iu svastiki (1941–1944) (Riga: Zinatne, 1967), p. 80.

110. B. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State: 1939–1950 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1996), pp. 103.

111. ‘Proshu vashikh ukazanii’, doc. 18, p. 178.

112. Ibid., p. 179; Iu. Shapoval, ‘The Ukrainian Years, 1894–1949’, in W. Taubman et al. (eds), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 8–43.

113. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, pp. 137–8, 146.

114. Sovnarkom to Stalin and Beria, 30 April 1945, in ‘Proshu vashikh ukazanii’, doc. 19, pp. 179–82. For the American response see Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers, 1945, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1967), pp. 111–23. A TASS reporter told Charles Bohlen that the Soviet Union fully intended to use the Orthodox Church in the Balkans as an instrument of struggle against the Roman Catholics. Ibid., 1944, vol. 4, p. 1,214 ff.

115. ‘Proshu vashikh ukazanii’, doc. 20, p. 183.

116. D. Kalkandjieva, The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917–1948: From Decline to Resurrection (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), pp. 311–38. The ‘Democratic’ churches in Eastern Europe did have their canonical status raised, including the establishment of the first Bulgarian patriarchate since the fourteenth century. Ibid., p. 337

117. Chumachenko, Church and State, pp. 87–103.

118. R.J. Sontag and J.S. Beddie (eds), Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office as Released by the Dept of State (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1948), pp. 91–4, 96.

119. S. Plokhy, ‘The Call of Blood: Government Propaganda and Public Response to the Soviet Entry into World War II’, Cahiers du monde russe 53:2/3 (2012), pp. 293–319; pp. 301–2.

120. Sontag and Beddie (eds), Nazi-Soviet Relations, pp. 105–6.

121. Plokhy, ‘The Call of Blood’, uses the NKVD reports on the mood of the Ukrainian population to indicate the positive reception to annexation, especially among Ukrainian academics, but based on the ethnic rather than the class principle emphasized in the official media.

122. Dimitrov, Diary, entry for 27 February 1941, p. 150.

123. Joking with his associates in a bomb shelter in September 1941, Stalin remarked that ‘If we win we’ll give East Prussia back to Slavdom, where it belongs. We’ll settle the whole place with Slavs’. Ibid., entry for 8 September 1941, p. 193. Of course, in this case, he wasn’t joking.

124. KI 5 (1942), p. 16; see also ibid. 3–4 (1942), pp. 98–9.

125. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1,338, listy 2–3, Shcherbakov to Stalin with Stalin’s signature of approval.

126. Dimitrov, Diary, entry for 1 September 1941, p. 192; M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 26; H. Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology (Notre Dame, IL: Notre Dame University Press, 1953), pp. 231–2.

127. ‘Vozvanie k slavianam vsego mira uchastnikov vtorogo Vseslavianskogo mitinga sostoiavshevosia v g. Moskve 4–5 aprelia 1942’, Vestnik AN SSSR 4 (1942), pp. 26–30; G.F. Aleksandrov, ‘Otechestvennaia voina sovetskogo naroda i zadachi obshchestvennykh nauk’, Vestnik AN SSSR 5–6 (1942), pp. 22–37.

128. E.V. Tarle, ‘Tevtonskie rytsari i ikh “nasledniki”’, Vestnik AN SSSR 5–6 (1942), pp. 38–48.

129. Notes on the conversation of I.V. Stalin with Orlemanski, 28 April 1944, in Volokitina et al., VE, vol. 1, doc. 3, pp. 36–42; see also Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, pp. 210–11.

130. W.M. Franklin and W. Gerber (eds), Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 532, 604; T. Sharp, ‘The Russian Annexation of the Koenigsberg Area, 1941–45’, Survey 23:4 (1977), pp. 156–62; McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2, pp. 184–6; D. Anishev, ‘Pol’skii narod na puti k svobode i nezavisimosti’, Svobodnaia mysl’ 5 (2010), pp. 57–70, reprinting article from Bol’shevik 13–14 (July 1944), pp. 49–61.

131. E. Taborsky, ‘Beneš and Stalin: Moscow, 1943 and 1945’, Journal of Central European Affairs 13 (1953), pp. 154–81; pp. 167, 178–9.

132. Volokitina et al., VE, vol. 1, doc. 37, p. 132. Stalin later dropped this idea but it suggests how uncertain he was about the postwar organization of the Balkans.

133. P.E. Mosely, ‘Soviet Policy and Nationality Conflicts in East Central Europe’, in Mosely, The Kremlin and World Politics: Studies in Soviet Policy and Action (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 221–46.

134. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 459–61. American Trotskyists composed a piquant ditty at the time, ‘My Darling Party Line’ (to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’), with the stanza, ‘Leon Trotsky was a Nazi/ We knew it for a fact/ Pravda said it, we all read it/ Before the Nazi-Soviet Pact.’ The last verse ended ‘Volga boatmen sail the Rhine’. Recording in possession of author.

135. N.S. Lebedeva and M.M. Narinsky (eds), Komintern i Vtoraia mirovaia voina, pt 1, do 22 iiunia 1941 g. (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1994), docs 5 and 6, pp. 73–6, 85–6. The Italian party was also firm in its denunciation of fascism, asserting that if war did break out it would lead to a destruction of fascism ‘as one of the conditions opening up before the peoples of capitalist Europe a new future which will promise freedom, peace and social progress’. Ibid., doc. 5, p. 80. This was followed by a stringent prohibition against communists volunteering for national legions (in the spirit of the Spanish Civil War) to fight against Nazi Germany. Ibid., doc. 13, pp. 96–8.

136. Ibid., doc. 27, pp. 156–7; doc. 28, pp. 164–5; doc. 34, p. 183; doc. 35, pp. 185; doc. 36, p. 188. Meanwhile, confusion was rampant among the Austrian and German rank and file. Ibid., doc. 23, pp. 138–9; doc. 26, pp. 154–5; doc. 39, pp. 143–7.

137. T. Judt (ed.), Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939–1948 (London: Routledge, 1989), especially the essays by G. Swain, ‘The Comintern and Southern Europe, 1938–43’, pp. 34–41; L. Tayler, ‘Le Parti Communiste Français and the French Resistance in the Second World War’, pp. 53–70; and M. Wheeler, ‘Pariahs to Partisans to Power: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia’, pp. 119–29. See also P. Spriano, Stalin and the European Communists (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 90–126 and M. Adereth, The French Communist Party: A Critical History (1920–1984) (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984), p. 92 ff.

138. W. Gomułka, Izbrannye stat’i i rechi, 1964–1967 (Moscow: Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1968), p. 368; A. Lecœur, Le Parti communiste français et la résistance, août 1939–juin 1941 (Paris: Plon, 1968), pp. 61–2, 78–80.

139. Dimitrov, Diary, entries for 20 and 21 April 1941, pp. 155 and 156, emphasis in original.

140. E. Fisher, ‘Ot narodnogo fronta k obshchenatsional’nomu frontu’, KI 8–9 (1942), pp. 26–30.

141. A.J. Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), chap. 6 explores the communist use of the term ‘insurrection’ to indicate a rising against the occupier and not a seizure of power.

142. J. Tomasevich, The Chetniks: War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); A. Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); B. Petranović, Srbija u drugom svetskom ratu, 1939–1945 (Belgrade: Vojnoizdavački i novinski centar, 1992).

143. C. de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, 3 vols (Paris: Plon, 1954–60), vol. 2, p. 353.

144. KI 8 (1942), docs 3–4, pp. 93–5; doc. 5, pp. 60–3; doc. 7, pp. 57–60; docs 8–9, pp. 70–6; docs 10–11, pp. 70–3; doc. 12, pp. 59–60; KI 9 (1943), doc. 1, pp. 48–51; docs 2–3, pp. 57–61; doc. 4, pp. 49–52.

145. KI 8 (1942), doc. 7, pp. 28–37.

146. Ibid., docs 3–4, p. 98; doc. 6, pp. 59–60.

147. Ibid., doc. 5, pp. 24–30; doc. 6, pp. 42–44. Articles on the ‘German resistance’ ceased to appear after mid-1942.

148. Ibid., doc. 12, pp. 24–4, 63–4; KI 9 (1943), doc. 4, pp. 19–20; J.B. Urban, Moscow and the Italian Communist Party, from Togliatti to Berlinguer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 160–8.

149. KI 8 (1942), docs 3–4, pp. 59–66; docs 10–11, pp. 51–6.

150. KI 9 (1943), doc. 1, pp. 30–3. See also A.J. Rieber, ‘The Crack in the Plaster: Crisis in Romania and the Origins of the Cold War’, Journal of Modern History 76 (March 2004), pp. 62–106.

151. Dimitrov, Diary, entry for 11 May 1943, p. 272.

152. Ibid., entry for 21 May 1943, p. 276.

153. For differing estimates of the dissolution see Armstrong, Politics of Totalitarianism, pp. 155–6, who states that ‘the Soviet rulers had by no means abandoned the aim of expansion through revolution and subversion’; and Fernand Claudín, who believes that ‘the dissolution symbolized the abandonment . . . of any idea of bringing the terrible crisis through which the capitalist system was passing to a revolutionary conclusion’. F. Claudín, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, 2 vols (London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 401 and vol. 1, pp. 15–33 for the full analysis.

154. Dimitrov appeared greatly relieved that the constituent parties unanimously approved the decision to dissolve. Dimitrov, Diary, entries for 4 and 8 June 1943, pp. 278–9. Did he really expect reservations or opposition?

155. KI 9 (1943), docs 5–6, 9, 13, 17–18.

156. A.J. Rieber, ‘Popular Democracy: An Illusion?’, in V. Tismaneanu (ed.), Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), pp. 103–30.

157. Dimitrov, Diary, entries for 5 March 1944, 20 June 1944 and especially 19 November 1944, pp. 304, 322–3 and 342–3. ‘Anglichane i Amerikantsy khotiat vezde sozdat’ reaktionnnye pravitel’stva’, Istochnik 3:4 (1995), pp. 152–8. S. Pons, ‘Stalin, Togliatti, and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe’, Journal of Cold War Studies 3:2 (spring 2001), pp. 3–27; pp. 6–9, and M.M. Narinsky, ‘I.V. Stalin i M. Thorez, 1944–1947. Novye materiali’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 1 (1996), pp. 19–28; p. 19.

158. B. Lazitch, Les Partis communistes d’Europe, 1917–1955 (Paris: Îles d’or, 1956) and N.D. Bogoliubov et al. (eds), Istoriia mezhdunarodnogo rabochego i natsional’no-osvobozhditel’nogo dvizheniia. Uchebnoe posobie, 3 vols (Moscow: Vysshaia partiinaia shkola pri TsK KPSS, 1962–66), vol. 2.

CHAPTER 6: A PYRRHIC VICTORY?

 1. It is estimated that nearly 200,000 death sentences were carried out on the orders of military tribunals and the NKVD. These numbers do not include death sentences imposed by civilian courts or arbitrary shootings by partisan forces. O. Budnitskii, ‘The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42’, Kritika 15:4 (autumn 2014), pp. 747–97; pp. 792–4. In the view of the author, the contributions of the consensualist and the oppositionist schools of interpretation should be supplemented by what he terms the most important factor: the recognition that the goal of Nazi policies was the destruction of the country and the extermination of its inhabitants. Ibid., pp. 795–7.

 2. Harrison, Accounting for War, and G.V. Kirilenko, ‘Ekonomicheskoe protivoborstvo storon’, in Sevost’ianov (ed.), Voina i obshchestvo, vol. 1, pp. 333–59.

 3. Tooze, Wages of Destruction, pp. 611–22.

 4. Harrison, Accounting for War, pp. 157–61. Cf. the statistical analysis of wartime losses broken down into regional, national and civil-military categories in Liudskie poteri SSSR, section 2, ‘Losses of Armed Forces of the USSR’, pp. 71–123, and section 3, ‘Losses of the Civilian Population’, pp. 124–88.

 5. V.B. Konasov and A.V. Tereshchuk, ‘Novyi podkhod k uchetu bezvozvratnykh poter’ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Voprosy istorii 6 (1990), pp. 185–8.

 6. B.V. Sokolov, ‘Sootnoshenii poter’ v liudakh i boevoi tekhnike na sovetsko-germanskom fronte v khode Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Voprosy istorii 9 (1988), pp. 116–26; p. 117, ‘based on official sources’. The figure of death from wounds was exaggerated according to R.A. Stepanov, ‘Nel’zia igrat’ tsiframi’, VIZh 6 (1989), pp. 38–42; p. 39, but he gives no precise figures of his own. The most complete account is G.F. Krivosheev, ‘Poteri Vooruzhenykh sil SSSR’, in Liudskie poteri SSSR, pp. 71–123; pp. 75–6, calculating the permanent military losses at 11,944,100.

 7. T. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Military Budget’, Foreign Affairs 42:3 (April 1964), pp. 487–94; p. 492.

 8. Harrison, Accounting for War, p. 165. His calculations are based on the conventional theory that ‘a postwar demographic deficit should be accompanied by accelerated population growth’. But this did not occur in the Soviet Union. ‘On the contrary, fertility rates (which had been declining in the 1930s) continued to decline and never regained their prewar levels.’ Ibid., p. 165.

 9. E. Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945–1959 (London: Routledge, 1998), chap. 2. The English edition of Zubkova’s Obshchestvo is much enlarged. For a general picture of the depressed standard of living among the kolkhoz peasantry see Arutiunian, Sovetskoe krest’ianstvo.

 10. D. Filtzer, ‘Standard of Living versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia during the Early Years of Post-War Reconstruction’, in J. Fürst (ed.), Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 81–102; p. 83.

 11. Ibid., pp. 82–3.

 12. N. Ganson, The Soviet Famine of 1946–47 in Global and Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 6, 10–11.

 13. S.G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Soviet Famine of 1946–1947, the Weather and Human Agency in Historical Perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies 64:6 (2012), pp. 987–1,005; p. 997.

 14. Zubkova, Russia after the War, pp. 22–3.

 15. J. Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially pp. 15–29. After having demonstrated the specific impact on youth, she concludes: ‘in many ways, and in particular when taking the example of youth allegiance and socialization, the Soviet Union won a pyrrhic victory over fascist Germany – a victory whose multiple ripple effects ultimately destroyed its very foundations’. For the western borderlands see Weiner, Making Sense of War.

 16. For a full account see Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle, pp. 256–82.

 17. Z. Polova, ‘Collaboration and Resistance in Western Ukraine (1941–1947)’, doctoral thesis, Central European University, 2006, pp. 181–215, 239–42, 258. See also A. Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 201 ff.

 18. GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 102, listy 101–10, 116–18.

 19. Ibid., d. 96, listy 306, 310–14; d. 102, listy 290–1. Beria sent fortnightly reports to Stalin on the numbers and types of treasonable activities of those arrested. Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle, pp. 277–9.

 20. O.V. Roman’ko, ‘Krymsko-Tatarskie formirovaniia. Dokumenty tret’ego reikha svidetel’svuiut’, VIZh 3 (1991), pp. 89–95. The documents show small numbers of defectors, hardly justifying the massive deportation.

 21. The main problem facing the Soviet regime in Chechnya was desertion or failure to show up for induction into the army. J. Burds, ‘The Soviet War against “Fifth Columnists”: The Case of Chechnya, 1942–4’, Journal of Contemporary History 42:2 (April 2007), pp. 267–314; p. 292.

 22. GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 64, list 2, pp. 162–7. The episode is analyzed in Bugai and Gonov, Kavkaz, pp. 120–33, 153–73 and Burds, ‘The Soviet War’, pp. 303–7.

 23. L.H. Siegelbaum, ‘The “Flood” of 1945: Regimes and Repertoires of Migration in the Soviet Union at the War’s End’, Social History 42:1 (2017), pp. 52–72, quotation on p. 55.

 24. O.V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, trans. N. Seligman Favorov (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 195–7; S. Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 175–6 and 197–9.

 25. Scholars have used numerous terms to identify the men closest to Stalin during these years, including ‘gang’, ‘inner circle’ and ‘oligarchy’. Each has its own special meaning. I prefer to use the more neutral term ‘inner circle’. This term also implies, correctly, that there were outer circles of individuals at a remove from top positions in the hierarchy. Stalin could call upon them to avoid relying too heavily on those in the inner circle, thus giving him greater freedom of action.

 26. See Iu.N. Zhukov, ‘Bor’ba za vlast’ v rukovodstve SSSR v 1945–1952 godakh’, Voprosy istorii 2 (1995), pp. 1–8.

 27. A.A. Maslov, Captured Soviet Generals: The Fate of Soviet Generals Captured by the Germans, 1941–1945, ed. and trans. D.M. Glantz and H.S. Orenstein (London: Frank Cass, 2001), on the survivors pp. 93–107, and the condemned, pp. 13–51. From 1945 to 1952, 101 generals and admirals were arrested and seventy-six condemned. Ibid., p. 156. See also A.A. Maslov, ‘Forgiven by Stalin: Soviet Generals Who Returned from German Prisons in 1941–45 and Who Were Rehabilitated’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 12:2 (1999), pp. 173–219 for poignant details on individual cases, which varied greatly.

 28. Cf. E.S. Seniavskaia, Frontovoe pokolenie. Istoriko-psikhologicheskie issledovanie (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1995), p. 91; E. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo. Politika i povsednevnost’ 1945–1953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), p. 32.

 29. R. Dale, ‘Rats and Resentment: The Demobilization of the Red Army in Postwar Leningrad, 1945–50’, Journal of Contemporary History 45:1 (January 2010), pp. 113–33; especially pp. 124–33. For the tactics used to defuse possible collective action by veterans see M. Edele, ‘Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945–1955’, Slavic Review 65:1 (spring 2006), pp. 111–37.

 30. I.I. Kuznetsov, ‘Stalin’s Minister V.S. Abakumov 1908–54’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 12:4 (March 1999), pp. 149–65; pp. 152–8, 161, based on a series of articles in VIZh by I.N. Kostenko, October, November and December 1992, May and June 1993 and June 1994.

 31. B.V. Sokolov, Neizvestnyi Zhukov. Portret bez retusha v zerkale epokhi (Moscow: Rodiolaplius, 2000), pp. 515–17 summarizes the alternative versions.

 32. As with other postwar ‘affairs’, as we shall see, much remains obscure. For a summary of Abakumov’s persecution of Zhukov during and after these events see M. Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 179–83.

 33. Stalin’s machinations through the Mingrelian Affair and the Doctors’ Plot to undermine Beria fall outside the scope of this book.

 34. A.P. Kriukovskikh, Vo imia pobedy. Ideologicheskaia rabota Leningradskoi partinoi organizatsii v gody Velikoi Otechesvtennoi voiny (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1988), p. 142.

 35. A.N. Iakovlev (gen. ed.), Stalin i kosmopolitizm, 1945–1953. Dokumenty Agitpropa TsK KPSS, 1945–1953, D.G. Nadzafov and Z.S. Belousova (comps) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2005), doc. 13, pp. 46–8.

 36. D.T. Shepilov, I primknuvshii k nim Shepilov. Pravda o cheloveke, uchenom, voine, politike, ed. T. Tolchanova and M. Lozhnikov (Moscow: Zvonnitsa-Mg, 1998), p. 143.

 37. Iakovlev (gen. ed.), Stalin i kosmopolitizm, docs 38, 43, 51, 100, 102, 108, pp. 110–14, 123–8, 140–1, 232–41, 250–8.

 38. Ibid., docs 3, 16, 18, 28, 42, 128, pp. 26–7, 55, 60–5, 88–92, 121–3, 321–4.

 39. Ibid., doc. 50, p. 139.

 40. D.T. Shepilov, ‘Vospominaniia’, Voprosy istorii 5 (1998), pp. 3–27; pp. 13, 14.

 41. Iakovlev (gen. ed.), Stalin i kosmopolitizm, docs 6, 29 and 258, pp. 31–2, 93–5, 665–6.

 42. Ibid., doc. 244, pp. 617–18.

 43. V. Pechatnov, ‘Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War 1945–1947’, Cold War History 1:2 (January 2001), pp. 1–27; pp. 3–8, and D.G. Nadzhafov, ‘The Beginning of the Cold War between East and West: The Aggravation of Ideological Confrontation’, Cold War History 4:2 (January 2004), pp. 140–74.

 44. Iaroslavsky, Chego trebuet partiia ot kommunistov, pp. 8–9 admitted that wartime conditions gave little opportunity to study the Marxist classics, and insisted that this be rectified. See also C.S. Kaplan, ‘The Impact of World War II on the Party’, in Linz (ed.), The Impact, pp. 157–87; pp. 160–1.

 45. Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, pp. 50–2.

 46. V.V. Denisov et al. (eds), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partinye komitety, 1945–1953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), doc. 56, p. 134 cites the case of the first secretary of Kostroma obkom as an example; for the reforms in the national and autonomous republics, which were clearly a major cause of concern, see ibid., docs 57 and 58, pp. 135–9.

 47. Ibid., docs 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, pp. 25–44.

 48. Ibid., docs 62 and 63, pp. 143–54.

 49. Ibid., pp. 9–10.

 50. C. King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1999), pp. 96–100.

 51. Denisov et al. (eds), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partinye komitety, doc. 26, pp. 84–5.

 52. Ibid., pp. 8–9, and doc. 46, pp. 118–20.

 53. Ibid., pp. 8–10 and G. Mamoulia, ‘The First Cracks in the Imperial Base of the Post-War USSR: Georgia and the South Caucasus, 1946–1956’, 6th Silk Road International Conference: ‘Globalization and Security in Black and Caspian Seas Regions’ (Tbilisi and Batumi, 27–29 May 2011), pp. 63–72.

 54. Denisov et al. (eds), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partinye komitety, pp. 6–7 and doc. 106, p. 199. One example of the extensive reporting of the MGB was the 300 confidential communications of the local MGB agent to Abakumov in the three-year period 1946–49, which contributed to the fabrication of the Leningrad Affair. B.I. Berezhkov, Piterskie prokuratory. Rukovoditeli BChK-MGB, 1918–1954 (Saint Petersburg: Russo-Baltiskii informatsionyi tsentr, 1998), p. 235.

 55. In the period 1948–51, the control commission agencies removed 183,284 party members for such abuses. B. Tromly, ‘The Leningrad Affair and Soviet Patronage Politics, 1949–1950’, Europe-Asia Studies 56:5 (July 2004), pp. 707–29; p. 727, note 86.

 56. T.N. Nikonorova, ‘Konstruiruia roskosh’. Bytovoe prostranstvo Sovetskoi nomenklatury, 1940–1952 gody’, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 43 (2016), pp. 219–42.

 57. T.H. Rigby, ‘Early Provincial Cliques and the Rise of Stalin’, Soviet Studies 33:1 (January 1981), pp. 3–28 is the fundamental work. C.H. Fairbanks Jr, ‘Clientelism and the Roots of the Post-Soviet Disorder’, in R. Suny (ed.), Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, rev. edn (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 341–76 focuses on Georgia but with wide-ranging implications for the development of the Soviet system. The role of clientelism is central to Tromly’s analysis of the Leningrad Affair.

 58. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin, Works, vol. 3, pp. 230–1.

 59. Kaplan, ‘The Impact of World War II on the Party’, pp. 172–5; see especially G.A. Kumanev, Govoriat stalinskie narkovy (Smolensk: Rusich, 2005) for interviews with officials in the 1940s.

 60. M. Lewin, ‘Fin de parti’, in Lewin, Le Siècle soviétique, pp. 174–80.

 61. The Central Committee had first detected the widespread distribution of rewards by the oil, coal and medium machine industries in 1941 on the eve of the war. Denisov et al. (eds), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partinye komitety, note, p. 150.

 62. Ibid., doc. 65, pp. 156–7. In this case, the minister of light industry rewarded the obkom secretary of Udmurtia and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the ASSR with gold watches, hunting rifles, monthly payments and medals. Similar reproaches were levelled at twenty-three party secretaries in Zaporozhe and Vinnytsia in Ukraine, sixteen local secretaries in Armenia, the Altai region, Karaganda and many others. The perpetrators were removed from office. Ibid., docs 66–72, pp. 156–62.

 63. Ibid., docs 73 and 74, pp. 162–3.

 64. V.P. Popov (ed.), Krestianstvo i gosudarstvo (1945–1953) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1992), doc. 1, pp. 21–40. Particularly shocking was the misuse of funds assigned for the construction of houses destroyed under the German occupation. Ibid., p. 26.

 65. Ibid., docs 2, 3, 5, 8 and 9, pp. 41–6, 47–55, 61, 73–4 and 75–83.

 66. Ibid., doc. 7, pp. 68–72.

 67. Ibid., doc. 61, p. 278.

 68. For the view that the application of a socialist realist model to agriculture challenged rational behaviour of the peasantry, see M. Haber, ‘Socialist Realist Science: Continuity of Knowledge about Rural Life in the Soviet Union, 1943–1958’, doctoral thesis, UCLA, 2013, especially pp. 208 ff.

 69. Popov, Krestianstvo i gosudarstvo, docs 57–60, pp. 261–77. As the editor notes, citing Leo Tolstoy’s diary, the idea that the peasantry regarded his landed property as theirs was a well-established tradition during serfdom in imperial Russia: ‘We are yours, but the land is ours.’ Ibid., note, p. 260.

 70. Ibid., doc. 61, p. 78.

 71. Ibid., p. 22 citing archival documents.

 72. Ganson, The Soviet Famine, and Wheatcroft, ‘The Soviet Famine’, pp. 987–1,005 offer correctives to previous work by stressing the overriding importance of weather conditions and refuting the idea of Stalin’s exploitation of the famine as a means of disciplining and punishing the Ukrainian people.

 73. Memo to Stalin, 17 January 1948, in Tomilina et al. (eds), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 1, doc. 20, pp. 216–19 and ‘Report to Conference of Obkom Secretaries and MGB Heads of Oblasts of Lvov’, ibid., pp. 220–8.

 74. A few statistics reveal the depth of the crisis.

Livestock Owned by Kolkhoz Peasantry (per 100 Households)

	1940	1952
Cattle	100	86
of which cows	66	55
Sheep and goats	164	88
Pigs	45	27

Nove, An Economic History, pp. 296–301; statistics from Kommunist 1 (1954).

 75. R.G. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz. Istoriia vlasti, 1945–1991 (Moscow: RAGS, 1998), pp. 21–3; and J. Adamec, ‘Courts of Honour in the Post-War Soviet Union’, Dvacáté století – The Twentieth Century 6:1 (2014), pp. 74–84 which includes a case study of a village court. O.V. Khlevniuk et al. (eds), Politbiuro. TsK VKP(b) i soviet ministrov SSSR, 1945–1963 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), pp. 229–30.

 76. The following figures on annual convictions were compiled by the head of the Legal Section of the Supreme Soviet and sent to A.A. Andreev in the autumn of 1947: 1945 (full year): 5,757; 1946 (first half): 3,322; 1946 (second half): 6,189. Popov, Krestianstvo i gosudarstvo, doc. 2, p. 41.

 77. Livschiz, ‘Pre-Revolutionary in Form’, pp. 552–3, 555.

 78. Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers, 1945, vol. 5, pp. 882–3, 942–3, 945–6, 1,009, 1,015–16, 1,018, 1,026–7, 1,032–3, 1038; L.C. Martel, Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), pp. 202–5, 209–21; B.I. Zhiliaev and V.I. Savchenko (comps), Sovetsko-amerikanskie otnosheniia. 1939–1945. Dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2004), docs 112, 266 and 334, pp. 229, 602–4 and 716–17.

 79. D.G. Gillan and R.H. Myers (eds), Last Chance in Manchuria: The Diary of Chang Kia-ngau (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 71, 85, 153–5, 162–3; N.M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Rieber, ‘The Crack in the Plaster’, pp. 68–9 and 74–5.

 80. G.I. Khanin, ‘The 1950s: The Triumph of the Soviet Economy’, Europe-Asia Studies 55:8 (June 2010), pp. 1,187–211; pp. 1,190–3.

 81. For problems involved in calculating the real defence expenditures in the published state budget for the two decades after the war see Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Military Budget’, pp. 487–94.

 82. Voznesensky, Voennaia ekonomika. The book was immediately translated into English in the Soviet Union (which is unreliable) and in 1948 by the American Council of Learned Societies in the US.

 83. For the argument that this represented an alternative plan B for the Soviet economy that reproduced elements of the New Economic Policy, and that his progressive views contributed to his downfall, see A.A. Danilov and A.V. Pyzhikov, Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy. SSSR v pervye poslevoennye gody (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), pp. 214–20. This view was repeated in the introductory material to a lavish republication of Voznesensky’s Voennaia ekonomika (Moscow: Iz. dom Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 2003) with an introduction by Iu. Iakutin and commentary on his life and work by L. Abalkin, E. Ivanov, V. Ivanchenko and A. Pyzhykov, unfortunately without annotated sources. For a critique see Y. Gorlizki and O.V. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 15 and note 61.

 84. For fresh insights into Voznesensky’s postwar economic policies see G. Cadioli, ‘The Politics of Rehabilitation in the USSR under Khrushchev: The Case of Nikolai Alekseevich Voznesensky’ (forthcoming).

 85. Danilov and Pyzhikov, Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy, pp. 220–4; an appendix to the 2003 edition of Voennaia ekonomika, pp. 378–81, lists the posthumous honours periodically awarded to Voznesensky from his rehabilitation in 1953 to 2003, celebrating him as a major figure in Russian economic development.

 86. Danilov and Pyzhikov, Rozhdenie sverkhderzhavy, p. 238. Beria had been bombarding Stalin with complaints about Voznesensky’s trick of underestimating the targets of those branches of the economy under his control, metallurgy and chemical, while overestimating those run by Beria. Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia, vol. 2, pt 2, p. 64

 87. K. Clark et al. (eds), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, trans. M. Schwartz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), doc. 152, pp. 352–64. Individual writers were labelled former Trotskyites, Social Revolutionaries and Kadets.

 88. Ibid., doc. 154 (8 January 1944), pp. 367–8.

 89. Ibid., doc. 155 (20 July 1944), pp. 369–70.

 90. Ibid., docs 156 (10 February 1944), 157 (2 December 1943), 158 (3 December 1943), 159 (7 August 1944), pp. 374–6.

 91. Ibid., doc. 160 (31 October 1944), pp. 380–91. Even Ehrenburg expressed deep dissatisfaction. ‘True literature is scarcely possible right now; it is all structured in the style of salutes, whereas truth is blood and tears.’ He added that the attacks on writers like Zoshchenko, Selvinsky, Fedin and Chukovsky were examples of ‘administrative tyranny’. Ibid., p. 388.

 92. Ibid., doc. 161 (3 August 1945), pp. 393–8.

 93. Ibid., editor’s comments, p. 398 and Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography, p. 273.

 94. Rieber, ‘Zhdanov in Finland’, pp. 112–13.

 95. Mikoian considered him a drunkard and coward. Mikoian, Tak bylo, p. 562; Molotov thought him to be a good comrade, but not a strong leader, who was confused at the beginning of the siege. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, p. 55.

 96. RGASPI, f. 77, op. 3, d. 39, listy 19, 21, 22. This did not prevent him from adopting the role for himself of a stern and often impatient mentor of the Finnish communists. But he never sought to violate the legal framework of the armistice. This was in line with Stalin’s policy at the time. Rieber, ‘Zhdanov in Finland’, pp. 27–40; Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle, pp. 352–4.

 97. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, p. 322.

 98. Clark et al. (eds), Soviet Culture, doc. XXX, p. 401.

 99. Ibid., doc. 165, pp. 421–4 and doc. 166, p. 424, Stalin to Zhdanov, praising his report as having come out ‘superbly’.

100. Ibid., doc. 164, pp. 407–20. Akhmatova was only dismissed briefly by the head of the Writers’ Union, Nikolai Tikhonov. Ibid., p. 417.

101. ‘I have never been an anti-Soviet person’, wrote Zoshchenko. And while apologizing for some errors, he called the ‘Adventurers of a Monkey’ a children’s story without any ‘Aesopian language or sub-text’. Zoshchenko to Stalin, 27 August 1946, ibid., doc. 167, pp. 425–7.

102. L. Maksimenkov (comp.), Muzyka vmesto sumbura. Kompozitory i muzykanty v strane sovetov, 1917–1991 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2013), Shostakovich to Stalin, 17 May 1946, doc. 199 and editorial note, pp. 245–6. At the same time, Beria submitted to Stalin, at the latter’s request, a proposal for constructing an apartment dwelling for members of the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre. Ibid., doc. 202, pp. 248–9. Shostakovich, Glière, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev and Khachaturian followed up this signal success by writing to Stalin as ‘Moscow composers’, requesting the assignment of a ‘living co-operative’ of sixty-four rooms and over 4,700 square metres for composers living and working in straitened physical conditions. Ibid., doc. 203, pp. 249–50.

103. One hundred and thirty-nine professors were awarded medals and orders and even those who had emigrated – like Rachmaninov – were honoured. Ibid., doc. 205, pp. 251–2.

104. Ibid., doc. 206, p. 252.

105. Having demonstrated their vigilance in the case of the Leningrad writers, Zhdanov and Kuznetsov proceeded to strengthen the position of the Leningraders in the field of art and literature by packing the committee on Stalin Prizes and replacing the popular song composer I.O. Dunaevsky as head of the Leningrad Union of Soviet Composers by Shostakovich. Ibid., doc. 207, p. 253. They also placed their candidate as the incoming head of the department of Marxism-Leninism of the Leningrad Conservatory, a veteran teacher during the war in the Military Engineering School in Leningrad and the author of a thesis on ‘The Problem of Nationality [Narodnost’] in the Russian Musical Aesthetic of the Nineteenth Century’. Ibid., doc. 224, p. 275.

106. Ibid., doc. 210, pp. 256–7.

107. Ibid., doc. 212, pp. 259–60. Three times decorated during the war, in 1946 and 1947 Prokofiev garnered four Stalin Prizes 1st Class (ballet Zolushka; Fifth Symphony and Eighth Piano Sonata; film score for Ivan the Terrible; and sonata for violin and piano) and one Stalin Prize 2nd Class for the piano trio. Ibid., doc. 223, p. 274.

108. Ibid., doc. 223, editorial comment, pp. 274–5.

109. Zhdanov’s review of opera (‘there is no Soviet opera’), ballet, literature, theatre and film followed similar lines, stressing the theme of patriotism. Ibid., doc. 214, pp. 261–2.

110. J. Brent and V.P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003); Shepilov, ‘Vospomianiia’, pp. 3–27; pp. 3–7 and 12–13.

111. E. Vlasova, 1948 god v sovetskoi muzyki. Dokumentirovannoe issledovanie (Moscow: Klassika, 2010), pp. 223–30.

112. Maksimenkov (comp.), Muzyka vmesto sumbura, doc. 225, pp. 276–82. Cf. Shepilov, I primknuvshii k nim Shepilov, pp. 101–2, in which he seeks to absolve himself of criticizing Shostakovich and others.

113. Maksimenkov (comp.), Muzyka vmesto sumbura, pp. 11–12.

114. Ibid., doc. 229, p. 288. All the leading composers were removed from these bodies and representatives of the Belarusian, Latvian, Georgian, Armenian and Uzbek national republics were to be included in the Musical Section of the Stalin Prize Committee.

115. Ibid., doc. 230, pp. 289–90. Myaskovsky came in tears to a noted pianist pedagogue, who later told me, ‘He cried out, “Me! Me! Boris! Writing formalist music!?”’ Discrimination in aesthetic matters was not a strong point of the Central Committee or else something else was at play here.

116. T. Khrennikov, ‘O muzyke i muzykal’noi kritike’, Oktiabr’ 4 (1948), p. 163.

117. Maksimenkov (comp.), Muzyka vmesto sumbura, docs 247, 259 and note, 280, pp. 329–30, 360–1, 391–2, and in general Tomoff, Creative Union.

118. Making only a passing reference to his formalist errors, Muradeli focused his apology on his failure to use Georgian folk music, despite the fact that, as he stated, ‘I grew up in the atmosphere of folk music. My first compositions hardly differed from simple songs of the people. In my later works – Four Georgian Songs, Symphonic Dance and Ten Heroic Songs – I again turned for inspiration to these sources of people’s music.’ Vsesoiuznye s’ezd sovetskikh kompositorov. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Izvestiia, 1948). I have used the complete text in N. Slonimsky (ed.), Music since 1900 (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 1,362–76. Muradeli’s opera was rehabilitated by a Central Committee decree of 28 May 1958 as part of the post-Stalin refutation of ‘the unjust and unfounded’ attacks on Soviet music and musicians. Maksimenkov (comp.), Muzyka vmesto sumbura, doc. 366, pp. 502–3.

119. Ibid., doc. 216, pp. 265–6. This kind of review normally would have destroyed any possibility of travelling to the West.

120. This working style was vividly illustrated by Dmitry Shepilov in his eye-witness account of Stalin’s participation in the selection of the prize bearing his name in all fields of the visual and literary arts. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar: A Memoir of Soviet Politics under Stalin and Khrushchev, ed. S.V. Bittner and trans. A. Austin (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 104–14.

121. K. Tomoff, ‘Uzbek Music’s Separate Path: Interpreting “Anticosmopolitanism” in Stalinist Central Asia, 1949–52’, Russian Review 63:2 (April 2004), pp. 212–40; p. 221 ff.

122. G. Castillo, ‘Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question’, in T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (eds), Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 91–119; pp. 113–14

123. K. Clark, ‘Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War’, Kritika 10:3 (summer 2009), pp. 607–28; see also J. Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999) and V. Grossman, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–1945, ed. and trans. A. Beevor and L. Vinogradova (London: Pimlico, 2005); the majority of the war photographers were Jewish. See D. Shneer, ‘Soviet Jewish Photographers Confront World War II and the Holocaust’, in V.A. Kivelson and J. Neuberger (eds), Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 207–13.

124. Aleksandrov to Malenkov, 15 October 1945, Iakovlev (gen. ed.), Stalin i kosmopolitizm, doc. 5, pp. 29–30.

125. S. Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder, CO: East European Quarterly, 1982), pp. 35 and 39–65.

126. S. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (London: Routledge, 2016), docs 170–2, pp. 423–39. At the same time, high-ranking officials like Shcherbakov and Aleksandrov were criticizing the nationalistic and religio-mystical themes in Soviet Yiddish literature. Ibid., docs 167–8, pp. 414–21.

127. The details of the assassination were relayed by Beria to Malenkov after Stalin’s death. Ibid., doc. 179, pp. 448–50. Redlich’s account of the circumstances leading up to the killing remains the most complete. Ibid., pp. 126–32. He suggests that Stalin was motivated to exact personal vengeance on Mikhoels for having participated in a plot, concocted by Abakumov, to pass information on Stalin’s private life obtained by members of Stalin’s in-laws, the Alliluev family, to US intelligence. Cf. Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team, pp. 203–4 generally accepts this explanation.

128. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, doc. 180, pp. 451–64.

129. Ehrenburg agreed to write, but only as a private individual. Ibid., doc. 168, p. 352.

130. Ibid., pp. 352–60.

131. Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, doc. 181, p. 464. Eynigkayt was closed down at the same time. Simultaneously efforts were under way to break the ties between the Jewish autonomous oblast of Birobidzhan and the American Birobidzhan Committee, which in the postwar years supplied the republic with the equivalent of 6 million rubles in gifts. The Politburo denounced the leadership of the autonomous republic for promoting ‘pro-American and bourgeois nationalist’ tendencies among the population, plans to transform the autonomous into a union republic and a host of other administrative errors; as a result a large number of leading party officials of the republic were removed from office. Denisov et al. (eds), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partinye komitety, doc. 1,009, pp. 208–9.

132. A. Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 146–75; Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team, pp. 202, 203–5, 207–8; J. Rubenstein and V.P. Naumov (eds), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, trans. L.E. Wolfson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 59–60, 226–30. See also Estraikh, ‘Life, Death and Afterlife’.

133. See the strong letter of Molotov to Stalin, 9 April 1948, rejecting the British and American trusteeship proposal as likely to lead to ‘an aggravation of the struggle between Jews and Arabs and in so doing will create a threat to peace and will intensify unrest in the Middle East . . . [and] leave the country in a semi-colonial position’. E. Bentsur, Documents on Israeli-Soviet Relations 1941–1953, (ed.) The Cummings Center for Russian Studies, 2 parts (London: Routledge, 2000), part 1: May 1941–1949, doc. 117, pp. 269–70. Two days later Andrei Gromyko elaborated on the Soviet position in a speech to a special session of the UN General Assembly. Ibid., doc. 119, pp. 277–80. Molotov and Vyshinsky continued to support Israeli objections to Count Bernadotte’s proposals on depriving Israel of the Negev and other restrictions on Israeli freedom of action. Ibid., docs 184–5, pp. 383–6.

134. Ibid., docs 155–7, 159–60, 167, pp. 332–6, 339, 350–2. At Molotov’s reception on the anniversary of the revolution, Meir and the Israeli guests ‘were the centre of attention’; Meir had an emotional conversation with Molotov’s wife in Yiddish. Ibid., doc. 195, pp. 401–2.

135. Ibid., docs 173, pp. 365–6, and Vyshinsky, friendly but evasive on the question of emigration, ibid., doc. 215, pp. 429–30. In January 1949 the Soviet government officially denounced as illegal Israeli attempts to recruit Soviet citizens for emigration. Ibid., doc. 220, p. 438.

136. During the war, 123,822 Jewish soldiers and officers were awarded military medals and titles, and 105 Jews received the very highest distinction, Hero of the Soviet Union, for their bravery and heroism against the German invaders. Several of these were members of the JAFC. J.N. Porter (ed.), Jewish Partisans of the Soviet Union during World War II (Brookline, MA: Cherry Orchard Books, 2021), p. vii.

137. The popular American weekly, Time, had featured Zhdanov on its cover.

138. For these see Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team, chap. 8. See also D. Brandenberger, A. Amosova and N. Pivovarov, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Crimean Party Boss: Nikolai Vasil’evich Solov’ev and the Leningrad Affair’, Europe-Asia Studies 71:6 (July 2019), pp. 951–71; p. 953, who divides the major scholars writing on the Leningrad Affair into three groups, depending on how they perceive Stalin’s role and motivations in the affair. The different perceptions are a good illustration of how obscure and secretive Stalin’s actions were in these latter years of his life.

139. J. Harris, ‘The Origins of the Conflict between Malenkov and Zhdanov: 1939–1941’, Slavic Review 35:2 (June 1976), pp. 287–303 and W.O. McCagg, Stalin Embattled, 1943–1948 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 8–9 and 115–46.

140. Zhukov, ‘Bor’ba za vlast’, pp. 23–40.

141. L.D. Riabev (ed.), Atomnyi proekt SSSR. Dokumenty i materialy, 10 vols (Moscow: Izd. Firma fiziko-matematicheskaia literature RAN, 1998–), vol. 2, bk 1 (1999), pp. 11, 12, 15–18, 20, 23, 27, 48, 83–4, 94, 104, 116, 125. On at least one occasion Voznesensky chaired the committee in Beria’s absence. Ibid., vol. 2, bk 4, p. 72. Voznesensky’s name on the committee masthead appeared for the last time on 18 March 1949 but there is no explanation given in these documents for the reason for his removal. Ibid., vol. 1, bk 1, p. 354.

142. When Stalin re-appointed Malenkov as secretary of the Central Committee their rivalry entered a new phase according to Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, p. 65.

143. ‘Protokol no. 3, zasedaniia Komissii Politbiuro, TsK KPSS. “O tak nazyvaemom leningradsom dele”’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS 2 (1989), pp. 124–37; p. 127. It is not clear whether Stalin made these comments in order to stimulate rivalry among his subordinates.

144. A.N. Iakovlev (ed.), Reabilitatsiia. Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-kh godov (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991), p. 313.

145. A.V. Sushkov and A.E. Bedel’ (eds), ‘“Leningradskoe delo”. K voprosu o kadrovoi politike Smol’nogo v pervye poslevoennye gody’, in Gramota 19 (2018), pp. 60–8; p. 62.

146. Stalin singled out the error of L.I. Mirzoian, the first secretary of the Kazakh party, who had appointed his friends from previous posts in Azerbaijan and the Ural organizations. ‘Materialy fevral’sko–martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b), 1937 goda’, Voprosy istorii 11–12 (1995), pp. 3–26.

147. O. Anikina, ‘Aleksei Gvishiani. Ne nado zhalet’ Kosygina’, Pravda, 19 February 2004; Lewin, Le Siècle soviétique, pp. 129–30 and V.I. Andrianov, Kosygin (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2003), pp. 67–78, 99–108.

148. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, pp. 188–91.

149. Shkiriatov was an active prosecutor of numerous purge cases in the 1930s, including the arrest and execution of Jan Ruzutak, A.P. Smirnov, Bukharin and Rykov. After the war, he compiled the dossier on Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina. K.A. Zalessky, Imperiia Stalina. Biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Veche, 2000); A.Iu. Vaksberg, Tsaritsa dokazatel’stv. Vyshyinskii i ego zhertvy (Moscow: AO, 1992), p. 287.

150. Sushkov and Bedel’, ‘“Leningradskoe delo”’, pp. 61, 63, 64.

151. Ibid., p. 65.

152. Tomilina et al. (eds), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 1, doc. 11, p. 528. Khrushchev recalled a conversation with Zhdanov who expressed regret that the Russian Federation lacked the republican institutions of the other republics, like Ukraine, with their own councils of ministers and central committees. Ibid.

153. For a summary of Stalin’s remarks see D.L. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin, the Leningrad Affair, and the Limits of Postwar Russocentrism’, Russian Review 63:2 (April 2004), pp. 241–55; p. 53 for the quotation. Cf. Tromly, ‘The Leningrad Affair’, pp. 707–29, who acknowledges that accusations of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ did appear in the trials of Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, but discounts their importance. Ibid., p. 722, note 11. For the terse published version see Khlevniuk (ed.), Politbiuro, pp. 66–8.

154. Ibid., p. 65.

155. Cited in M.E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 291.

156. Clark et al. (eds), Soviet Culture, doc. 168, pp. 428–9. This was the prelude to a whole new set of procedures for reprinting works from journals without permission of one of the secretaries of the Central Committee. Ibid., doc. 169, p. 431.

157. Tomilina et al. (eds), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 1, doc. 9, pp. 502 and 506; see also Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, pp. 17–18. In 1956 Khrushchev declared that Beria and Abakumov considered Kuznetsov ‘dangerous’ because Stalin had appointed him as secretary of the Central Committee in charge of appointments to the MGB. Tomilina et al. (eds), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 1, doc. 14, p. 562.

158. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, pp. 12–13 and 16–17.

159. The report is contined in RGASPI, f. 17, op. 118, and is summarized in Sushkov and Bedel’, ‘“Leningradskoe delo”’, pp. 60–8. In Stalin’s treacherous world of betrayals, Shkiriatov occupies a distinctive place. During the war he wrote a long, extraordinarily intimate letter to Zhdanov praising his defence of Leningrad and concluding by sending special greetings to Kuznetsov. Kosheleva, Rogovaia and Khlevniuk (eds), Sovetskoe Voenno-Politicheskoe Rukovodstvo, doc. 171 (27 April 1942), pp. 246–8.

160. Iakovlev (ed.), Reabilitatsiiia, pp. 318–19. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, p. 119.

161. Ibid., p. 319 and V.A. Kutuzov, ‘“Leningradskoe delo”. K voprosu o kolichestve repressirovanykh’, in Peterburgskoe chtenie 98–99. Materialy entsiklopedicheskoi bibliotek ‘Sankt Petersburg-2003’ (Saint Petersburg: Peterburgskii institute pechati, 1999), pp. 378–80.

162. After the death of Stalin all the major figures who had been condemned were rehabilitated, but not all the perpetrators were punished. For example, Shkiriatov was never tried or punished.

163. Iakovlev (ed.), Reabilitatsiia, p. 321.

164. These are examined and criticized in А.А. Amosova and D. Brandenberger, ‘Noveishie podkhody k interpretatsii “Leningradskogo dela” kontsa 1940-kh nachala 1950-kh godov v Rossiiskikh nauchno-populiarnykh izdaniia’, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii 18:7 (2017), pp. 94–112.

165. Denisov et al. (eds), TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partinye komitety, docs 111–13, pp. 222–8. Popov was replaced by Khrushchev, who wrote little about the affair, although he attributed his appointment to Stalin’s desire to balance the influence of Beria and Malenkov. Tomilina et al. (eds), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 1, note 101, p. 641.

166. For more coverage see Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle and Roberts, Stalin’s Wars.

167. The best treatment based on archives now difficult to access remains T.V. Volokitina, Moskva i vostochnaia Evropa. Stanovlenie politicheskikh rezhimov sovetskogo tipa, 1949–1953. Ocherki istorii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008).

EPILOGUE: REMEMBERING THE WAR

 1. D.A. Andreev and G.A. Bordiugov, Prostranstvo pamiati. Velikaia pobeda i vlast’ (Moscow: Airo-XX, 2005), pp. 15–19.

 2. Ibid.

 3. Ibid., pp. 20–51 continues to analyze the celebrations of the war over ten-year periods to demonstrate how the collective memory of Victory Day was ‘expanded’ to serve the changing needs of the leadership.

 4. For Stalin’s role in constructing his Short Biography see D.L. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and Its Construction’, in Davies and Harris (eds), Stalin, pp. 249–270; pp. 264–70.

 5. M. Kangaspuro and J. Lassila, ‘From the Trauma of Stalinism to the Triumph of Stalingrad: the Toponymic Dispute over Volgograd’, in J. Fedor et al. (eds), War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 141–70.

 6. E.A. Wood, ‘Performing Memory: Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of WWII in Russia’, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38:2 (2011), pp. 172–200; pp. 175–7; V. Shlapentokh and V. Bondartsova, ‘Stalin in Russian Ideology and Public Opinion: Caught in a Conflict between Imperial and Liberal Elements’, Russian History 36:2 (2009), pp. 302–25.

 7. V. Putin, ‘The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II’, The National Interest, 18 June 2020; online at https://nationalinterest.org/feature/vladimir-putin-real-lessons-75th-anniversary-world-war-ii-162982 (accessed 25 November 2021).

 8. S.A. Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

 9. See, for example, on the participants from Krasnodar, P. Ternovsky, Oni srazhalis’ za nas (Krasnodar: Vol’naia N.N., 2015); on Eastern Siberia, N.A. Iatmanov (comp.), Pamiatniki pobedy sovetskogo naroda v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine v Respublike Khakasiia (Abakan: Brigantina, 2015); on Tver’, V.M. Vorobev, Geroi Sovetskogo Soiuza na Tversloi zemle: biograficheskie ocherki, 5 vols (Tver’: Sed’maia bukva, 2015); on Vyshnyii, V. Volochek, ‘S veroi v liubov’ i pobedu’ in Iurii Bychkov, Nasha Liubov (Tver’: Irida-pros, 2015); on Kemerova, Kuznetsk Basin, N. Usol’tseva, Oni dyshali vozdukhom voiny (Kemerovo: Kuzbassvuzizdat, 2015). In April 2021 it was widely reported in the Russian press that the local communist party in Bor, Nizhnyi Novgorod Province, had laid the foundation stone for a Stalin Centre Museum.

 10. A. Liebich and O. Myshlovska, ‘Bandera: Memorialization and Commemoration’, Nationalities Papers 42:5 (2014), pp. 750–70; pp. 751, 753 and 763.

 11. S. Plokhy, ‘When Stalin Lost His Head: World War II and Memory Wars in Contemporary Ukraine’, in Fedor et al. (eds), War and Memory, pp. 171–88. In the former Baltic republics, monuments to Stalin were removed without a fight. The main battles were fought over monuments to the Red Army soldiers. See, for example, in Tallinn, Estonia, K. Brüggemann and A. Kasekamp, ‘The Politics of History and the “War of Monuments” in Estonia’, Nationalities Papers 36:3 (2008), pp. 425–48. In Central Asia, by contrast, monuments to veterans served as a symbol of patriotism in the newly constructed national myth. See for example, K.M. Rees, ‘Recasting the Nation: Transforming the Heroes of the Soviet Union into Symbols of Kazakhstani Patriotism’, Nationalities Papers 39:4 (2020), pp. 445–62.

 12. M. Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), D.A. Dyker, ‘Soviet Agriculture since Khrushchev: Decentralisation and Dirigisme’, IDS Bulletin 13:4 (1982), pp. 29–35, and Dyker, The Future of the Soviet Economic Planning System (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985), chaps 2–3.

 13. Graham, Science in Russia, pp. 133–4 on biology, and appendices A and B for a summary of developments in all fields; Holloway states that only work on the atomic bomb saved physics for the fate of biology and enabled the physicists among all scientists to enjoy a modicum of autonomy. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 211 and 362–3.