PART II
CHAPTER 3
Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the German invasion of 1941, came very close initially to destroying the Soviet system and breaking up the great multi-national state that the Russians had built up and ruled over for three centuries. The initial German attack, launched along three broad fronts, smashed through the Soviet frontier defences. In a series of sweeping encirclements, the Wehrmacht took more than 3 million prisoners, of whom over 2 million had died in captivity by February 1942.1 The front-line air force was virtually destroyed with a loss of over 5,000 planes, many having been caught on the ground. The great tank force that rivalled the Germans in numbers was badly mauled; 10,000 tanks were destroyed in three weeks. Soviet artillery and gun crews sustained equally heavy losses. Most of the ammunition dumps crowded into the frontier areas were overrun or blown up. For a brief period, there was a shortage of ammunition that chillingly recalled the dark days of 1914–15. The railway network was heavily damaged, especially in the period October–November 1941, when twenty-five lines were bombed simultaneously, creating a crisis of supply.2 The army suffered enormously from the disorganization of the rear.3
Stalin’s initial reaction to the German invasion was hesitant and disbelieving. He questioned the first reports in the early morning of 22 June; wasn’t it a provocation? However, discussions of his subsequent behaviour have become as controversial as the debates over the ‘preventative war’ thesis. The much-cited version of his shock and virtual nervous breakdown relies on dubious sources, most prominently Khrushchev’s self-serving memoirs. When the war broke out, why didn’t Stalin immediately deliver an appeal to the Soviet people instead of leaving the task to Molotov and delaying his own radio broadcast for twelve days? According to Khrushchev, ‘He was totally paralyzed and could not collect his thoughts . . . he was in a state of shock.’ But Khrushchev was not in Moscow at the time and had to rely on the second-hand testimony of Beria and Malenkov.4 Moreover, Khrushchev himself was not immune to panic and shock in the initial days of the war. On 9 July, while serving as the political commissar for the southwestern front, he issued orders to carry out a scorched-earth programme including the destruction of all machinery in factories and reserves of grain and other goods that could not be evacuated by the Red Army in a zone 100–150 kilometres from the front. The following day, Stalin countermanded this order, asserting that it failed to account for the situation at the front and ‘threatens to demoralize the rear and create in the army and population a mood of retreat rather than a decision to repulse the enemy’. Stalin’s instructions were to evacuate agricultural machinery, cattle and grain; to destroy the rest except for fowl, small animals and other products necessary to sustain the population. He further ordered that factories and electrical stations were not to be blown up, but to have their key functioning parts removed. All of this in a zone 70 kilometres from the front.5
In a film for television made in 1992, General D.A. Volkogonov, who had access to the Presidential Archive for his post-Soviet study of Stalin, presented a different version. He insisted that Stalin did not collapse in the early days of the German invasion but only a week later on 28 June, after he received news of the fall of Minsk. Then he retired to his dacha and cut himself off from everyone. He only recovered when members of the Politburo visited him and insisted he take command. Volkogonov too appears to have relied on an unnamed member of the Politburo for his interpretation. Who was this source?6 Certainly not Molotov, who remembered these days differently, insisting that Stalin was biding his time, waiting for the situation to clarify so that his public response would be the appropriate one. ‘It is not possible to describe him as distraught [rasterialsia], upset, yes but he didn’t show it.’7 Nor was it Kaganovich, who was even more forceful. ‘They say he received nobody. Lies! He received us . . . [he] gave assignments to each of us.’8 To be sure, Molotov and Kaganovich were two of the most loyal Stalinists. But there is additional evidence to suggest that their versions may be closer to the truth.
In 1990 researchers uncovered an appointments book maintained by the duty secretaries of visitors to Stalin’s office in the Kremlin. For 22 June, the day of the German attacks, he met twenty-nine times with members of the Politburo and Central Committee and military commanders, from 5:45 in the morning to 4:45 in the afternoon. The following day he met with them thirteen times, from 3:20 to 6:25 in the morning, and again from 6:45 in the afternoon to 1:25 in the morning. A similar pattern shows up for 24 June until 28 June.9 He found time to issue twenty different decrees and orders. He created several emergency organs including the General Headquarters of the Supreme Command (Stavka) and the Soviet Information Bureau (see below, pp. 113–14 and p. 168).10 Nor did he neglect to keep in touch with key figures at the front. A few hours after the Nazi attack, Stalin called Ponomarenko, the secretary of the Belarusian party, and gave him instructions on the need to act ‘boldly, decisively, taking the initiative without waiting for orders to come from above’.11 Called to the Kremlin at 7:00 a.m. on 22 June, Georgi Dimitrov found Stalin with a group of associates: ‘Striking calmness, resoluteness, confidence of Stalin and all the others.’ The decision was made to have Molotov broadcast over the radio and his speech was being edited. Stalin gave orders to evacuate all diplomatic representatives. The Comintern was ‘not to take any overt action . . . the issue of socialist revolution is not to be raised. The Sov[iet] people are waging a patriotic war against fascism’.12 If all these key decisions were made as Dimitrov described them, then what is left of the story of Stalin’s collapse?
The most probable source for Volkogonov’s version was the longtime Politburo member Anastas Mikoian, who later wrote that when Stalin was informed of the invasion he simply did not know what to say to the people: ‘Let Molotov speak’, he declared.13 In a more spectacular revelation, Mikoian declared in his memoirs that when Stalin faltered after the fall of Minsk the initiative passed briefly to a small number of his lieutenants. The situation was rapidly deteriorating, especially on the Belarusian front where communications with the centre had been cut. Stalin flew into a rage, rebuking Zhukov, who was reduced to tears. A few days later, Mikoian’s account continues, an informal meeting of Politburo members called by Molotov debated the need to create a supreme organ – the State Defence Committee (GOKO) – to concentrate all the powers of the state. They agreed that only Stalin had the prestige to head it, but Molotov worried about Stalin’s depressed state. The young economist Nikolai Voznesensky made the startling proposal that if Stalin continued to hesitate then Molotov should take over; ‘we will follow you’, he said. The rest disregarded him. When they confronted Stalin in his dacha he appeared to be taken aback; Mikoian was convinced he was afraid they had come to arrest him. Stalin seemed surprised they offered him the leadership.14 Beria insisted that five men be appointed to the GOKO, Stalin as head, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and himself. Stalin suggested adding Mikoian and Voznesensky, but Beria argued that they were needed in the commissariats and Gosplan. Voznesensky and Beria then got into a heated discussion. It turned out that Beria and the others had already agreed on the membership among themselves. Mikoian intervened: let the five be members of the GOKO. He would do what he did best by assuming authority over supplying the front with food, fuel and clothing as a plenipotentiary of the GOKO. Voznesensky proposed taking responsibility for the production of weapons and military equipment. Tank production was assigned to Molotov and aircraft to Malenkov. Characteristically, Beria was to take charge of maintaining domestic order and combating desertion, which it must be presumed was already perceived as potentially a major problem.15 As described by Mikoian, the bizarre bargaining had no precedent. In the view of the memoirist, the re-affirmation of Stalin’s leadership appeared to have fully restored his spirits. Three days later he broadcast his famous appeal to the Soviet population.
In the meantime, there had been no general call to arms except for Molotov’s radio broadcast of 22 June. The purported resolutions of the Central Committee and Sovnarkom on 23 June mentioned in early Soviet historical accounts of the period have turned out to be inventions. The directive of 29 June from the same organs, which was compared to the public appeal of Lenin’s government in February 1918 to defend the revolution against the Whites in the civil war, was in fact a secret document which applied only to the front-line units.16 As a result, there were delays in transmitting orders, a serious lack of detailed information from the fronts and disarray among the leaders that cost the army and civilian population terrible losses in the first two weeks.
Few measures can better convey the sense of desperation than the release of 600,000 people from the labour camps, of whom 174,000 were immediately inducted into the army.17 Among them were tens of thousands of Polish citizens who had been deported as prisoners of war in 1939 to widely scattered camps in inhospitable climes. They were released under the terms of the Sikorski–Maisky agreement of July 1941 by which the Polish government in exile was recognized by Moscow. Over the next few months, Polish delegates, also released from captivity, scoured the country for survivors who would serve as the core of a Polish army under General Władysław Anders, which was allowed to leave the Soviet Union through Iran and later to join the British forces fighting in Italy. But Poles who had lived in those parts of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine that had been incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 were not allowed to join, but had to serve as labourers in war work.18 In Nazi-occupied Poland (the General Government), a Polish underground army was also forming, but it had no relations with Soviet forces until the tragic days of 1944.
In the early days of the war, Stalin turned with fury against the Volga German population. He had received unreliable reports from the Southern Front Command of sniping at retreating Red Army units. He ordered Beria to ‘boot them out’ of their autonomous republic. Within two months, from 438,000 to 446,000 Volga Germans had been piled into railway wagons and sent to Siberia. Meanwhile, 8,000 Soviet Germans had flocked to the militia and fought in the legendary defence of the Brest Fortress.19 The Volga Germans had been living in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great and had never shown any signs of disloyalty. Their villages were among the most prosperous and productive in the country. Over the next few months, Soviet citizens of German nationality were rounded up throughout the country. In September Beria reported that his agents had arrested 141,249 anti-Soviet and doubtful Germans living in the Krasnodar and Ordzhonikidze krai, the Tula oblast, and the Kabardino-Balkarian and North Ossetian autonomous republics. More arrests and deportations took place in the Azerbaijan and Georgian republics. Several thousand were picked up in Moscow and Leningrad as well.20 The sweeps had taken on a racial character similar to the deportation of Germans and Jews near the front undertaken by the tsarist government in 1914. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the western borderlands, real resistance to the Soviet occupation broke out immediately.
SHOCK, PANIC AND DEMORALIZATION
Despite the purges in the Baltic republics directed by the Soviet government in 1940–41 against the leadership of right-wing nationalist parties, large numbers of the rank and file survived in the underground. In June 1941 they emerged to attack the retreating Red Army, launch pogroms against the Jewish population, and attempt to establish or re-establish national independence. In Estonia the NKVD reported the activities of 60,000 members of the semi-military organization Kaitseliit, formed originally in 1918, and now armed with 40,000 Japanese rifles and twenty-two batteries of artillery.21 The Soviet command of the northwestern front reported two days after the German attack that ‘diversionary groups’ led by ‘bourgeois nationalists’ in the Baltic republics were ‘rupturing lines of communication’ and ‘sowing panic among the local population’. In Lithuania, a major anti-communist revolt broke out. Lasting eight days and involving from 100,000 to 125,000 men, including at least half of the Lithuanian army units incorporated into the Red Army, the rebellion took over the capital of Kaunas before the German arrival and set up a provisional government.22 The revolt touched off smaller and less well-organized insurrections in Latvia, leading to a premature seizure of Riga before the Germans arrived. In Estonia, the first secretary of the party, Karl Säre, defected to the Germans and betrayed the whereabouts of several partisan units. Meanwhile, the Germans, having brushed aside the provisional government of Lithuania and other independent groups in Estonia and Latvia, established direct military rule with the assistance of a small number of fascists and attempted to create ‘self-defence’ detachments, especially in Lithuania, to fight the Soviet partisans.
Counter-measures proved feeble and quickly petered out. Over the signatures of the central committees of the three Baltic republics an appeal was issued in June for volunteers for regular additional army units. Presumably the order and the organizational work were directed by GOKO and the Defence Commissariat. In any case, two Estonian, one Latvian and one Lithuanian rifle division were formed in Soviet territory and sent into combat. The NKVD, with some assistance from the much-weakened party cadres and Komsomol, attempted to organize resistance against the ‘diversionists’ and German forces, but these efforts proved much less successful. Scattered, poorly armed, ignored, and occasionally betrayed by the local population, they suffered heavy losses. Most were destroyed within six months.23 By the end of 1943, there were only about 1,800 Soviet partisans in the region, scattered in seventy-four small groups.24
In Belarus, there was evidence of the same pattern of hasty, panic-stricken retreats and the breakdown of local authority. A week after the German invasion, the party organization in the Gomel region notified Stalin of the demoralized behaviour of the army command; the departure of commanders from the front with the excuse of supervising the evacuation of families; mass desertion from units spreading panic among the population in the rear areas; the arrest and disarming by punishment battalions of 200 men who fled the airfield without having seen the enemy; and the lack of critical information by the command on the number and armament of units that had disintegrated, sowing confusion in the organization of defence and threatening a collapse in the Gomel region and endangering the flank of the Kiev front. A district secretary of Pinsk province recorded an equally desperate situation: individual units fighting without any co-ordination, unlike an organized army; the whereabouts of the commander of the Fourth Army unknown; key points on the railway lines not protected; individual units, lacking commanders, not knowing what to do and piling into their vehicles and retreating to the east; individual aircraft sent off without a destination and being called back. In Pinsk the panic affected the operation of local arms and supply depots, leaving many of the mobilized without arms; everywhere there were demands for immediate and co-ordinated action.25 Confused and contradictory reports streamed in on the reaction of the local population.26
The Belarus anti-communist emigration provided leadership for the civil administration of the population and helped to recruit local police battalions (Schutzmannschaften) of 20,000 men, which later became the nucleus for the Belarusian Home Guard (Heimwehr). There is abundant evidence that the local population participated in denunciation of the Jews and offered no objection to their expropriation and humiliation. The collaboration of the Belarusian auxiliary police and local administration facilitated the escalation of the murderous policies of the German occupation authorities. Without their assistance, for example, it would not have been possible to organize so swiftly the ghettoization of the Jewish population of Belarus. As the evidence of mass killings became known, however, there was a growing sense of revulsion among the local population.27
In Ukraine, several nationalist groups rode in the baggage trains of the Wehrmacht. The Ukrainian Central Committee was the most consistently collaborationist. Formed in the former Polish districts of western Galicia under German occupation, it promoted cultural activities to break the monopoly of Polish culture while quietly laying the political groundwork for a future Ukrainian state. After June 1941 the Germans allowed it to spread its activities into occupied eastern Galicia. The metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, preached an anti-communist line that appealed to disaffected elements in the rural population.28 His letters both to Hitler and the Vatican expressed his fervent support for the German army. In his letter of 23 September 1941, congratulating Hitler on the taking of Kiev, he wrote: ‘The business of liquidating and extirpating Bolshevism, which you as the Führer of the great German Reich have taken upon yourself as the goal in this campaign, has earned your Excellency the gratitude of the entire Christian world.’ Similar sentiments were repeated on 14 January 1942.29
Panic spread rapidly into the interior provinces, most seriously of all in Moscow in October 1941, when Politburo member Aleksandr Shcherbakov admitted that the party agitators were preoccupied with evacuation work and had failed to counter the rumours of the leadership deserting: ‘in several cases there was disorganization, the cadres of organizers lost their heads’.30
In Ukraine, the party secretary Nikita Khrushchev reported to Stalin that the local party and soviet organizations located in the front-line areas had reacted passively to the German attack, independent of the military command. In the face of the advancing enemy, they had abandoned their duties and evacuated prematurely, leading to demoralization of the rear at critical moments. To bring the situation under control, he proposed a series of measures which would subordinate the party and soviet organization within a zone up to 300 kilometres behind the front to the Military Council of the Southwestern Command of the Red Army for specialized duties relating to the conduct of the war.31 In Odessa oblast, the panic-stricken party leadership ordered a mass evacuation, leaving thousands of acres of grain fields unharvested despite the fact that the front was hundreds of kilometres away. Some party leaders were accused of seizing kolkhoz and sovkhoz funds and fleeing on trucks into the interior. Those workers in trade and banking enterprises who did not get passes to leave their posts plundered offices and stores and fled to Mariupol.32
The psychological impact of the Stalinist policies and propaganda in the immediate prewar period had a devastating effect on the officer corps and rank and file of the soldiers, contributing to the mass surrenders and widespread panic among the civilian population.33 The emphasis in propaganda on the high level of military preparedness and the impressive figures on investment in military hardware and the formation of the largest army in Europe gave the impression of invincibility, reinforced by the belief, mainly cherished by the youth, that Stalin had eliminated all the internal enemies of the regime and was master of the international situation. Although the pact with Germany was not popular, it led to an expansion of the frontier zone and seemed to presage a breathing space. The purge of the army command had removed a significant proportion of the senior officer corps, but it had also deeply affected the morale of the survivors. Marshal Zhukov later reminisced on the decline in discipline, and rising numbers of absence without leave up to the point of desertions.34 The fear of taking the initiative without orders from the centre was proven to be widespread following the initial German attack. The emphasis on the military doctrine emphasizing offensive operations that had been strongly promoted did not prepare the army for the shock of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Propaganda had worked too well in drawing a picture of success; in fact it was a recipe for disaster.
The magnitude of the Soviet recovery from these dark days to victory may best be illustrated by a comparison with the experience of Stalin’s wartime allies who had also suffered initial defeats. The Americans were driven out of the Central Pacific by the Japanese and the British forced off the continent by the Germans. But neither had been invaded. Britain had suffered heavily from aerial bombing, but except for a few weeks in 1940 had not faced the imminent prospect of losing the war. The USA and Britain were able to maintain high levels of defense spending without impoverishing their populations. Rationing was introduced in both, but there was no hunger in the countryside. All this contrasted sharply from the Soviet experience. The Soviet Union also bore the brunt of the fighting on land for three years, not only against Germany but also against armies of Hitler’s European allies like Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and units from France and Spain which did not engage either the USA or Britain.35 After the defensive victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army seized the initiative at Kursk, the largest tank battle in history. The great Soviet offensive from June to August 1944, code named Bagration, was timed as Stalin promised to correspond to the Allied cross-channel invasion. This operation inflicted a mortal wound on the Wehrmacht, destroying Army Group Centre. The Soviet campaign against Japan in Manchuria may well have contributed as much to ending the war in Asia as the two atomic bombs, by destroying the million-man Kwantung Army, although this view has not been adequately explored. Only Nationalist China suffered as great a loss of territory and population and industrial potential as the Soviet Union. For the first four years of the Sino-Japanese War, Stalin had supplied the Nationalist government with arms and pilots, ending the arrangement only on 22 June 1941, when he mobilized the entire resources of the country for the defense against Barbarossa.36 Nationalist China never recovered from the conflict and sunk into civil war. The recovery of the Red Army was all the more startling because it was unexpected, not only by the Germans but also by many military experts in the West who predicted an early Soviet collapse. The war had also shifted the image of the Soviet Union throughout the world. Soviet propaganda had much less to do with the transformation than the fighting spirit of the Red Army and the human drama of the Russian people, as they were invariably called in the West. In Britain the Ministry of Information took an active part in promoting Anglo-Russian friendship. In the USA the Russian War Relief was the largest of its kind. Time magazine selected Stalin as ‘Man of the Year’ in 1942. Frank Capra’s award-winning documentary Battle for Russia, which rationalized the Russian defeats in 1941 and 1942 as strategic withdrawals, was endorsed by Generals George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. Stalin approved and ordered the printing and distribution of 100,000 copies. American ambassador to Moscow from 1936 to 1938, Joseph P. Davies wrote a largely uncritical appreciation of the Stalinist regime, which was made into a film in 1943. Pipe-smoking ‘Uncle Joe’ became an almost genial figure as portrayed by the cartoonists in the USA. At liberation the majority of the French ranked the Soviet Union as deserving the most credit for the victory over Nazi Germany. In 1944, the Soviet Union re-entered the world community of nations as one of the founding members of the United Nations Organization. That the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as the world’s second greatest military power and the rival of the USA in exercising political influence throughout the globe could hardly be imagined in June 1941.
Once Stalin’s emotional appeal to the country for help had been broadcast on 5 July 1941, he resorted to the methods that had served him best in the internal struggles for power. In the first few months of the war, when whole armies were chewed up while their commanders looked on helplessly, Stalin imposed draconian measures to punish those who failed ‘to stand and die’. A month into the fighting, he ordered the arrest, trial and execution of the commander of the western front, General Dmitry Pavlov, his chief of staff, Vladimir Klimovsky, the chief of communications of the western front, A.T. Grigorev, and the commander of the Fourth Army, A.A. Korobkov, one of the best of the younger generals who had survived the purges. Pavlov and his subordinates were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, and exonerated of any irresponsible or treasonable activities. In fact, Pavlov had warned Stalin of the impending attack. On the eve of the war, he telephoned Stalin requesting – in vain – permission to place his troops on a wartime footing. But Stalin was not about to take the blame for the disasters which followed.
As catastrophe enveloped the Red Army, Stalin dictated a series of punitive measures to stem the rout. Retreat without per mission or surrender even after encirclement was defined as defeatism, panic-mongering and treasonable, and was punishable by death and confiscation of all property. In the heat of battle, with hastily organized defence lines disintegrating in the face of panzer attacks, it was impossible to verify denunciations coming from the police organs. By the end of 1941 fourteen generals and numerous other high-ranking officers had been arrested. The records are not clear as to their fate.37
From the outbreak of war, the NKVD swung into action. The security organs issued a flood of orders to carry out operations against parachutists, diversionists, spies, deserters and bandits and instructions to secure important installations.38 No doubt the reports on the mixed reception of citizens in the Moscow region to Stalin’s speech encouraged the police organs to redouble their efforts.39 Beria instructed the Moscow city and district units of the Frontier Forces to ‘uncover the counter-revolutionary underground’.40 The police organs carried out a draconic policy of arrests that included the families of traitors even if they were ignorant of the involvement of their kin in what was subsequently denounced as a brutal violation of legality.41 It would appear there was no breakdown in their communication network. In the first year of the war, the Frontier Forces operating in the rear swept up 700,000 suspects. From the third day of the war, they mounted guard in the rear of the Red Army, arresting deserters, clearing the roads of refugees and assisting in the evacuation. At the same time, Beria sought to broaden the scope of their activities. In the first few months of the war, the political organs of the Frontier Forces were mobilized to conduct propaganda in the national republics of the South Caucasus. The Central Committee of the party responded to requests to increase the firepower of the Frontier Forces by supplying them with tanks, artillery and automatic weapons. Their value was further recognized by orders increasing their numbers by 22,000 men.42 In Ukraine NKVD units and Frontier Forces played a key role in repressing the nationalist bands after territory had been liberated by the advancing Red Army. In 1943 the chief of the Political Administration of the Frontier Forces ordered the district commanders to strengthen the offensive against ‘ideological diversionists’. These forces took over all propaganda and agitation in the newly liberated territories. The army officers were considered too inexperienced to do the job correctly; ‘the needs of defending the frontiers involved complicated political tasks’.43 They were the most active Soviet protagonists in what had become a veritable civil war.44
The fear and awe inspired by Stalin (and the police) runs like a thread through the memoirs of those who came into his presence during the war. But there was a limit to the effectiveness of coercion in mobilizing the energies of the population. Stalin faced two apparently contradictory tasks: first to impose from above a strict, even ruthless, mobilization of the population; and second to stimulate from below a genuine emotional response to accept the sacrifices needed to win the war.
One of the earliest measures to mobilize the population in a literal sense was to organize a massive evacuation from the urban centres in the zones of military action. The apparent aim was to deprive the enemy of a labour force and to preserve the cadres of skilled workers and the creative and scientific intelligentsia necessary to fight a long war. The first railway convoys left Riga, Tallinn, Minsk and Kiev at the end of August. By February 1942 10.4 million people had been evacuated to the rear by rail and another 2 million by water transport. During the ‘wild flight’ of the army in the summer of 1942, 8 million more were evacuated. The problems of housing, providing medical assistance and feeding this dislocated mass of people had no precedent in world history. The burden fell on the local population of the unoccupied territory.45
More structural changes were introduced in order to mobilize a population that was already psychologically and physically drained by the ordeals of collectivization, forced industrialization and massive repression. A drastic change was required to transform the prewar mentality of the leading social strata and to reorder the administrative structure of the country. The crucial task which overshadowed and subsumed all the rest was to revive the shattered alliance between the party and groups within the intelligentsia. In the 1930s, Stalin and his closest associates had turned against both the civilian and military specialists who had laid the foundations for the modern industrial power of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s natural inclination to over-centralize and bureaucratize political and economic life, married to his morbid suspicions and lust for personal power, had seriously undermined the vital balance in the ruling elite between the ideological-organizational elements in the party and the creative and innovative elements in the technical and literary intelligentsia. During the war, he was able to repair enough of the damage that he himself had imposed on that relationship while at the same time retaining his real monopoly of power in order to ride out the crisis.
In the course of the ‘great recovery’, a super-centralized government reorganized, with the powerful assistance of the intelligentsia, the centres of industrial production, re-equipped the Red Army and air force, revitalized and broadened a moribund ideology and inspired a revival of the international communist movement. Yet stunning as the recovery was in comparison with the dark days of 1941, it did not resolve the fundamental paradox of power that lay at the heart of the Stalinist system.
THE COMMAND ECONOMY
There were three keys to the economic recovery of the Soviet command economy after the invasion. The first was the super-centralization of the war effort in the hands of a few leaders; the second was the revival of an alliance with the scientific and technical intelligentsia; the third was a series of improvisations, which were in certain sectors – like agriculture – a relaxation of the centralized state controls of the prewar period. The efforts of the streamlined central organs were concentrated on solving critical problems that had fatally undermined the tsarist monarchy in its greatest test during the First World War, namely: breakdown in transportation; shortage of arms and munitions; and inadequate supplies of food, fuel and raw materials. Their effectiveness can only be fully appreciated by recalling two salient characteristics of the Stalinist system as they evolved in the thirties. The first was the long lead of the Soviet Union over the other belligerents in preparing for modern war. The second was the shallow roots of state institutions and the absence of factions – though not of personal rivalries – within the party. The exact timing of the German invasion might have taken Stalin by surprise, but the inevitability of war had long been recognized as a fact of life in the Soviet Union. Ever since the second five-year plan, the country had been engaged in creating a powerful military infrastructure in the armed forces and the defence industries. This survived the purges of individuals, massive and costly as these were with respect to the qualitative performance of the army and defence industry on the eve of the conflict. The factories, research institutes, level of tactical training and above all cadres of skilled workers, however, had escaped unscathed.
The second feature, Stalin’s personal dictatorship, had eliminated not only all forms of political opposition, but had also destroyed the basis for any potential resistance to his reordering of the state system. There were few if any bureaucratic traditions, customs or entrenched ways of thinking in a world of institutional constraints left to delay or block his radical changes and super-centralization. Stalin did not have to deal with powerful party satraps or institutional survivals of the old regime, as did Hitler. Nor did he have to bargain and compromise like Churchill and Roosevelt. The Soviet political order had such a short history and had been rendered so malleable in his hands that he could literally reshape it to meet the urgent needs of the moment. That was not true of any other modern society in the mid-twentieth century.46
The top leaders of the wartime institutions outside the army rarely met as a body. Stalin reserved for himself all the major decisions in the economic as in the military and diplomatic sphere. As his deputy, Molotov remained his faithful instrument in shaping foreign policy. Voroshilov, who had forfeited any ‘operational’ confidence, was kept close, presumably for moral support. Malenkov and Beria were only candidate members of the Politburo, but had proven their mettle in the purges and would not shrink from the most extreme measures. Malenkov carried out Stalin’s orders in the apparatus; he had absolutely no competence in military matters, as shown by his ineffective appearances on the Stalingrad front. Beria increased his authority, moving from ‘cleansing’ the rear areas of diversionists and organizing the deportation of unreliable elements among the nationalities, to operating the forced-labour camps and running the camps for German and later Soviet POWs – the latter those who had been caught in German encirclements and had fought their way out, only to be arrested as traitors. His authority in the defence sector was also increased when Stalin put him in charge of developing an atomic bomb. Mikoian and Kaganovich, added subsequently, were wholly involved in transportation and production problems. Other members of the Politburo were assigned to specialized tasks outside the centre. Zhdanov and Khrushchev as members of the Military Council shouldered responsibilities for liaison with the army on the northwestern and southwestern fronts. Andreev was occupied with supplying the front with food. All of them reported personally to Stalin and took no major initiatives without his explicit orders.47
Of all the top wartime leaders, only Voznesensky had formal economic training and extensive experience at the levels of planning and operational aspects of the economy.48 A member of the younger generation of Soviet leaders, he owed his meteoric rise to his skill in interpreting and refining the broad lines of Stalin’s views on Marxist economics and industrial development. A protégé of Andrei Zhdanov, who appointed him in 1935 to take charge of the Leningrad Economic Planning Commission, he had already made his mark as an analyst of the Soviet economic system in party journals. He adhered closely to Stalin’s views against Bukharin and further demonstrated his loyalty by reversing his own view to follow Stalin’s sudden shift on the role of money and trade at fixed prices in a socialist economy. As an economic planner in Leningrad he set an example for his staff of direct involvement in the practical applications of the plan. His success in adjusting planning targets to changing conditions and unforeseen problems brought him to the attention of Stalin at a critical moment in 1937. The economy was undergoing a slow-down; the growing complexities and purges of the economic apparatus and multiplication of administrative sub-sections threatened the stability of the system. Voznesensky’s appointment as deputy and then full director of Gosplan was part of Stalin’s decision to recruit a new generation of leaders including Aleksei Kosygin, Dmitry Ustinov, Mikhail Suslov and Dmitry Shepilov, who were to distinguish themselves during the war and go on to dominate Soviet politics for forty years. In implementing the general goals set forth in a new Gosplan statute issued shortly after his appointment, Voznesensky introduced the same measures that had gained him respect in Leningrad. In order to ensure the smooth operation of the plan, he instituted frequent checks, oversight and information flows including a network of Gosplan agents bypassing other local institutions to report directly to the centre. The aim as always with Voznesensky was to achieve a ‘balance of the national economy’ within the law-governed structure of the plan. Voznesensky had been elected to the Central Committee in 1939 and delivered the main economic report to the Eighteenth Party Congress, when he was also made a candidate member of the Politburo. Temporarily relieved of his responsibilities as chairman of Gosplan, he remained a central figure in wartime economic planning.
A recently published collection of documents gives a clearer picture of Stalin’s governing style as he exercised his enormous power through a revised organizational structure and decision-making process. The creation of the State Defence Committee (GOKO), while proposed by members of his inner circle, fitted perfectly his style of governing in a crisis situation. Initially made up of Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria, its composition would change over time.49 GOKO was modelled in certain respects on the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defence created during the civil war. It was an ad hoc organization with no fixed rules superimposed on the rest of the Soviet system. There was no special administrative machinery to implement its decisions. Instead, Stalin resorted to the use of plenipotentiaries – much in the style of Peter the Great – as a way of exercising direct control and cutting through cumbersome bureaucratic procedures.50 The method enabled him to focus great power on a particular situation while keeping responsibility fixed on specific individuals. GOKO became part of a three-cornered system together with the Politburo and the newly formed Commission of the Bureau of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) on Current Affairs, also changing their personnel during the war. There was no clear set of rules governing their interaction or the specific duties of the political leaders, which frequently overlapped. The need for quick decisions meant that decrees were often terse rather than being burdened with excessive detail.51
The loose administrative arrangements and personal, interventionist style of Stalin were well suited to deal with the series of crises that threatened to overwhelm the system. The breakdown in normal lines of command and information, the terrible losses of equipment and production capacity demanded emergency measures. Governing had become the equivalent of fighting fires. GOKO moved from one emergency to another, pouring resources first into weapons production then into transport.
The enormous centralization of power in Stalin’s hands meant a further atrophying of the party organs.52 The Central Committee ceased to function. Most of its members were scattered far and wide, some at the front, others in the partisan movement. Even those who remained in the centre were preoccupied with tasks that gave them no time to spare. Nor did Stalin care to consult such a large collective body. Two plenums were supposed to meet in 1941. But the October meeting was postponed and the committee was never summoned again.53 Even the Politburo no longer gathered as a group, except insofar as five of its fourteen members were associated with the GOKO. The Orgburo (Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee) met a similar fate. It lost most of its functions to the secretariat, which reached out into every nook and cranny of the bureaucracy. Most of the decrees bore its imprint and its members occupied key posts in the ad hoc agencies. Although the Central Committee as a collective body withered away, its staff grew rapidly in size and strength. The Administration of Cadres proliferated into forty sections with responsibility for placing people at all ranks in every branch of the national economy, health, education, science and the press. At its head was Malenkov, who also served as a secretary of the Central Committee and member of GOKO, thus gathering enormous administrative authority into his hands.54 His political alliance with Beria created a concentration of power second only to Stalin. But Stalin checked the police penetration of the top military command. Even after the conclusion of hostilities, when Beria concocted a dossier accusing Zhukov of plotting against Stalin during the war, the ageing leader rebuked him: ‘No, I will not give you Zhukov to arrest. I do not believe in all that. I know him well. I knew him for four years of war better than myself.’55 Beria was more successful in undermining Voznesensky, as shall be seen below (p. 257).
The unwieldy Sovnarkom apparatus suffered an eclipse, but its bureau spawned numerous commissions, meeting frequently and issuing a stream of orders mainly concerning economic problems. Voznesensky and Molotov shared the duty of presiding officer.56 Individual commissariats gained enormous power. The decree of 1 July 1941, ‘On Broadening the Rights of People’s Commissars in Wartime Conditions’, allowed individual commissariats to reallocate resources assigned to approved projects and reorganize their finances to facilitate investment in new crash projects. At the same time a decree on economic mobilization ordered the regrouping of the workforce around clusters of projects in the Volga, Ural and Western Siberia regions and suspended all long-term projects that were not directly connected with the war effort. Capital construction was reduced by 300 per cent; the number of projects included in the third five-year plan was radically cut from 5,700 to 614.57
Gosplan was reorganized in order to streamline its functions, shorten the chain of command, increase controls over orders and expand the mobilization of resources. Reflecting reverses in the field, new plans in the third and fourth quarters of 1941 drastically reordered priorities. Special emphasis was placed on energy resources, especially the opening of new mines to replace the loss of over half the coal production of the country to the enemy. But the reign of emergency measures could no longer continue without leading to breakdowns in the basic industries. If nothing else, it was necessary to co-ordinate and regulate the mass of orders coming from on high. The changes that were introduced over the first year and a half were, in a sense, an intensification of peacetime methods. Over the previous twenty years, right up to the outbreak of the war, radical changes continued to be introduced in the productive process, repeatedly creating imbalances that always had to be corrected; there were certain fortresses even Bolsheviks could not storm. Stalin and his associates had to turn once again to the specialists, in this case the professional economists and planners, who alone could reintroduce some kind of rough economic equilibrium.58
The key figure in the re-emergence of the planners was Voznesensky. Gosplan chief for three years before the war, he was reappointed in 1942 to that post, where he served until 1949. Appointed to GOKO he sought to introduce a greater degree of rationalization in the war effort. The first sign of his new influence was the creation of the Operations Bureau of GOKO at the end of 1942. The role of Gosplan in basic industries such as steel, energy and transport was crucial to the recovery of productive levels. It drew up reconstruction plans for the restoration of recaptured areas in January 1943, beginning with the Donbas and besieged Leningrad. Gosplan steadily expanded its control over the allocation of resources. Voznesensky rapidly acquired an authoritative position in economic decisions second only to Stalin.59
However, Voznesensky’s youth, his sudden rise to prominence and his access to Stalin aroused jealousy among the small band of Stalin’s intimates. Beria, the master weaver of conspiracies, uncovered Voznesensky’s weakness, his predilection for schematic planning. As production levels fell in the early months of the war, Voznesensky’s frequent redrafts of monthly and quarterly plans projected increases. When Beria brought the discrepancies to Stalin’s attention, the general secretary was outraged. Although Voznesensky was not replaced, he lost some of his influence and control over several branches of industry which Beria and others distributed among themselves.60
In the construction industry, the key figure was Semeon Ginzburg, who had been placed in charge of a new Commissariat of Construction in 1939. All major construction projects were concentrated under his authority, and each trust and enterprise was headed by an experienced specialist. He developed what he called a wholly new type of organization within the commissariat, the Construction Assembly Section, self-contained and highly mobile units that could be thrown into one major project after another to bring them to rapid completion. About 100 of these innovative organizations were fielded with over 400,000 construction specialists and workers. Other innovations in organization of design and drafting shops and bringing the research institutes into direct and close relations with the production units significantly speeded up the process of moving from research to development.61
The mass production of weapons and introduction of advanced models was made possible in part by the administrative centralization and specialization of weapons procurement that was already well under way before the outbreak of war. The Commissariat of Armaments and Military Supplies had been split off from the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Changes in the organization of Soviet defence industry and training of specialists were aimed at raising the quality of production. On the eve of the war, Stalin, after some hesitation, came down on the side of the new commissariat against the protests of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade in allocating 200 million gold rubles for the purchase of special lathes and other equipment from abroad for the production of artillery barrels. It took several years in some cases to prepare the orders; much of the equipment only arrived as part of Lend-Lease in 1944, but in time to make a significant contribution to wartime production. For example, all artillery and machine-gun factories were placed in special categories of enterprises and granted extensive privileges that attracted the best workers and technicians and sharply reduced labour turnover. Stalin held conferences with the directors and party chiefs of defence plants to improve efficiency. Various specialized instructional techniques and courses were devised to improve skills. The reorganization of the state labour reserve provided more flexibility in pulling talent into defence industries. A special effort was undertaken to recruit women for high-quality precision work. Specialists who had been arrested before the war were plucked out of the camps and restored to leading administrative positions. One case was Vannikov. Beria succeeded in persuading Stalin to release his former classmate and friend, who been arrested by Ezhov, and to appoint him commissar of munitions. Thanks to the general improvement in the quality of defence workers, the conversion, evacuation and reconstruction of key factories proceeded much more smoothly than might otherwise have been the case.62
The shift of economic resources into the defence industry on the eve of the war facilitated the tremendous production increases in the plants beyond the reach of the enemy in the early months of the fighting. In the last three years of the third five-year plan, defence production rose 39 per cent, as compared to a general rise of only 13 per cent for all industry. During the war, the expansion of arms production by the Commissariat of Armaments to full capacity was virtually completed by the end of 1942, demonstrating how extensive the prewar planning had been. A new commissariat, created solely for the production of mortars and mines, carried out the conversion to defence of textile and other factories with the same production profile.63 The role of Lend-Lease in Soviet wartime planning and production was critical in certain areas. In the early bargaining over deliveries Mikoian set priorities in light of special needs for raw materials and communication equipment as well as massive numbers of trucks and jeeps. These items helped to free the Soviet planners to concentrate on arms production.64
Super centralization that combined both emergency measures and elements of planning managed to check the disastrous slide of the Soviet wartime economy. Within six months it had begun to carry out the evacuation, conversion and new construction that enabled the country to increase substantially the production of all types of weapons during the period of defeat and retreat. Stalin personally directed the evacuation of industry from Leningrad, giving specific details on the relocation of factories producing tanks.65 The evacuation of existing industrial plants to the east saved from 1,200 to 1,700 enterprises. This heroic improvisation has acquired legendary proportions, although its real economic significance has been questioned. Organized by the Evacuation Council headed first briefly by Kaganovich and then by Nikolai Shvernik, its achievements were accompanied by appalling losses and confusion. The most successful operations were carried out by Aleksei Kosygin in Leningrad. Left behind in the occupied areas were almost 32,000 other enterprises, representing almost 80 per cent of the region’s industrial production. But in military terms, the contribution of the evacuated plants was vital. They constituted the bulk of the defence industries; the tank and aircraft plants were especially significant.66 Tanks produced by reassembled plants from Leningrad and Kharkov were already rolling into combat by the time the crucial battle for Moscow reached its critical phase in December 1941.
Conversion and the construction of new plants were relatively simpler matters. The prewar contingency plans were rapidly put into effect. Giant tractor factories of the second five-year plan like that at Chelyabinsk that had been designed with conversion to tank production in mind made the changeover smoothly. Typewriter factories shifted to the production of automatic rifles and ammunition, bicycle factories made flamethrowers, and various die-stamping plants converted to manufacturing parts for grenades. There were undeniably delays and unexpected problems here too. The construction of new plants was not anticipated, but within less than a year over 850 new enterprises – including many for basic industries like mines, blast furnaces and electric stations – were completed. By the autumn of 1942, Soviet factories were producing, in comparison with the prewar period, four times the number of rifles, six times the number of artillery pieces, eight times the number of tanks and ten times the number of mortars. This accelerating tempo continued relentlessly to the beginning of 1945. By the end of the war the Soviet Union had far out-produced Germany and Great Britain in tanks, aircraft and self-propelled guns.67
This achievement resulted from a conscious policy of concentrating on a reduced repertoire of standardized weapons. In contrast to Nazi Germany, Soviet arms production avoided expensive and risky experiments with new technologies, forgoing the production of such items as heavy bombers and complex naval vessels. For example, the Red Army already possessed at the beginning of the war the T-34 tank, which was superior to the German panzers. Its production continued unchanged and in large numbers. Meanwhile, in 1943 and 1944 the Germans introduced superior models in the Panther and Tiger but they could not produce them in adequate numbers or quickly enough to overcome the massive quantitative edge of Soviet tanks.68
In other sectors of the economic infrastructure, the heroes were army officers and nameless technical personnel on whom the burden of improvisation fell. Nowhere was this more vividly demonstrated than in the field of communications, particularly the railway network. Recognizing that transportation was ‘the twin brother of the army’, in Voroshilov’s phrase, the leadership had thoroughly modernized and reorganized the railway system in the 1930s. But the purges had seriously disrupted the administration, and there remained strategic gaps in the western network. Reflecting the strategic plans to give primacy to offensive operations, too little attention had been given to constructing lateral north–south lines in the central provinces and too great a percentage of strategic lines remained concentrated in the exposed western provinces. The rapidity of the German advance deprived the defenders of lines carrying 40 per cent of the prewar traffic.69 The losses in locomotives and rolling stock were staggering and could not quickly be replaced, since most of the factories producing them also fell into enemy hands.
By February 1942 the situation on the railway was so critical that Stalin decided to militarize the entire transportation system. He appointed General Aleksandr Khrulev as commissar of transportation, who brought in his own team of officers. They converted the railway network to exclusively military needs and integrated it into the rest of the transportation system. When Khrulev took over, the northern railway from Moscow to Arkhangel’sk was virtually paralyzed. Almost 3,000 railway wagons stood idle, deprived of locomotives.70 Having reintroduced by herculean efforts some semblance of order in the rear areas, the new chiefs were overwhelmed once again by the German summer offensive which broke all communications between the centre and the oil of the Caucasus. An entirely new supply route across the Caspian Sea, to a major distribution point at Orenburg, and then throughout Central Asia had to be improvised. In order to construct spur lines to facilitate the transport of oil drums it was necessary to tear up a little-used existing line between Kokand and Namangan in order to lay down track between Krasnovodsk and Iletsk. Faced by a shortage of merchant ships on the Caspian, the teams of specialists from the commissariat experimented with floating drums towed by barges. The smaller Caspian ports were hastily enlarged to handle the new freight. But the long-range problems needed time to resolve.
In the first year and a half of war, only eight locomotives were built to replace the 3,900 that had been destroyed. In the early stages of the fighting, over 150,000 freight wagons had been destroyed and yet not a single replacement was produced in 1942. The GOKO ordered the creation of new factories but their construction required several years. In the meantime, improvisation was the order of the day. Railway men experimented with varieties of fuels that helped avert a fuel crisis in the early years of war. Machinists organized their own flying columns of repair teams equipped with their own locomotives, like the famous Chelyabinsk Depot Group. Dispatchers played a key role in developing ingenious new ways of regulating traffic; Soviet personnel showed themselves to be superior to the Germans in overcoming problems caused by bottlenecks, shortages and destruction of equipment. To replace the 100,000 railway workers drafted into the armed forces new cadres were rapidly trained. Women plugged most of the gaps among the unskilled. In certain areas like electro-mechanics, they soon constituted a majority of the workers.71 A crash programme of construction balanced the loss of the main north–south trunk lines. The Kazan–Stalingrad line was completed just in time to play a crucial role in supplying Soviet forces on the Middle Volga in the winter of 1942–43. Overall, approximately 9,000 kilometres of new rails were laid down in the USSR during the war. The figure includes many short strategic spurs, but also a number of important trunk lines, particularly in the Urals, Western Siberia and Central Asia. The average annual tempo of construction during the war exceeded that of any of the prewar five-year plans. It was no wonder that despite the greater destruction of railway in the Second World War, the period of postwar recovery was much shorter than after the First World War.72
|
Table 1. Commodity Output in Key Industries in the USSR, 1941–45+ (in billions of rubles)73 |
||||||||
|
1941a |
1941b |
1942a |
1942b |
1943a |
1943b |
1944 |
1945+ |
|
|
Electricity |
27.4 |
19.3 |
14.1 |
15.0 |
29.1 |
32.3 |
39.2 |
43.3 |
|
Coal |
91.9 |
59.5 |
35.7 |
39.8 |
75.5 |
93.1 |
121.5 |
149.0 |
|
Oil |
17.3 |
15.7 |
11.7 |
10.3 |
22.2 |
18.0 |
18.3 |
19.4 |
|
Iron |
9.0 |
4.8 |
2.3 |
2.5 |
4.8 |
5.6 |
7.3 |
8.8 |
|
Steel |
11.4 |
6.5 |
4.0 |
4.1 |
8.1 |
8.5 |
10.9 |
12.3 |
|
Rolled ferrous metal |
8.2 |
4.4 |
2.6 |
2.8 |
5.4 |
5.7 |
7.3 |
8.5 |
|
Iron ore |
16.6 |
8.1 |
4.6 |
5.1 |
9.7 |
23.3 |
||
|
(a and b refer to first and second half of the year) |
||||||||
Despite the achievements of central planning, improvisation and heroic sacrifices, the Soviet economy recovered only in a relative way. Production was adequate to supply the armed forces with their needs, but in most sectors prewar levels were not reached until the war was over. The low point came in the first half of 1942, when it also appeared as though the military front would crack. After the annus terribilis, a slow recovery began to take hold.
AN ECONOMY OF SCARCITY: FOOD
The impact of the war on the agricultural sector was disastrous and left permanent scars on the countryside. Hunger and starvation were the lot of millions of Soviet citizens. When the army and war industries took 6 million men from the collective farms, not enough women and children and older people could be found to fill the gap. The tremendous decline in mechanical work, draught animals and human labour caused a precipitous fall in the amount of cultivated land and the gross value of the harvest which was, at the end of the war, less than half the 1940 figure – yet that was an improvement over 1943.
It was something of a miracle that the Soviet Union was able to feed its army and civilian population in the face of frightful losses in livestock, a severe drop in productivity and a massive decline in mechanical and human labour on the collective farms. Two of the most striking figures are the decline in grain production from 95.5 million tons in 1940 to 29.7 and 29.4 million tons in 1942 and 1943 respectively, with a partial recovery to 49.1 and 47.2 million in 1944 and 1945 respectively; and the decline in meat production from 7.5 million tons in 1940 to 3.4 million tons in 1942.74 Sugar beet cultivation dropped from over 1.1 million hectares in 1940 to 266,000 in 1943.75
The rapidity of the German advance forced the evacuation not only of industry but also of the great livestock herds of the western provinces. With no preparation, tens of thousands of cattle, goats, horses and pigs were driven east, often strafed by enemy planes. It was the most poignant and unsung heroic exploit of the war. In the first phase only 13 per cent of the herds in the occupied areas were brought out safely. Government requisitions and sale to the army further depleted their numbers, so that by 1942 only 3 per cent of the original herds survived in the non-occupied areas. During the second phase the terrible evacuation in the southern Ukraine at the height of the summer of 1942 subjected the herds of these areas to great losses from heat, thirst and heavy slaughtering. Only about 30 per cent of the horned cattle and horses, and practically no pigs at all, made it to winter quarters.76 The following year a massive re-evacuation of replenished herds into the liberated areas was better planned, with veterinary assistance provided along well-supplied tracts. One cattle drive of 120,000 had covered 350 kilometres between West Kazakhstan and Stalingrad. Losses were comparatively small.
By mid-1942, 40 per cent of the tractors in the country had been lost. Agricultural equipment proved more difficult to evacuate than the herds. Almost all tractor plants were converted to producing tanks and the production of tractors was only started up again in 1943. Production was up to 7,700 by 1945, though this was less than a third of the planned target.
The concentration on the production of weapons and military hardware could not have been achieved without a drastic shift in resource allocation away from the production and distribution of food. To be sure, the armed forces could not be deprived of the calorific intake necessary to produce the high levels of energy required in combat. This did not mean that all the troops were supplied with an adequate diet all the time. Still, the front-line troops took first priority, then the rear echelons. The civilian population was placed under great pressure to provide food for the army. They were left largely to fend for themselves.
The introduction of rationing had the psychological effect of equalizing the burdens of war. But it discriminated among different types of work that contributed to the war effort, and rations were used as rewards.77 The main sources of food supply for the civilian population were a variety of private food markets. Excluded from rationing, deprived of the most productive age groups of the male labour force, lacking replacements for worn-out equipment, and faced with increasing obligatory deliveries to the state, the collective farms were forced to fall back on their own resources. The government permitted a rapid expansion of the private plots on both kolkhozes and sovkhozes in order to avoid large-scale hunger in the countryside. The peasants fed themselves from these plots and supplied substantial food to the urban population. Even under highly disadvantageous conditions, the free market provided 40 per cent of the butter and potatoes, a third of the meat and a quarter of the milk and vegetables for the urban population. The party vigorously encouraged private gardening in and around cities. In 1942 almost a third of city dwellers had their own garden or participated in a collective garden. The war also gave an impetus to the expansion of subsidiary farms attached to industrial enterprises as an important source of food for the urban population.78 All of these improvisations demonstrated that the government was incapable of fighting the war and feeding its own population.79
The kolkhoz system never recovered from the wartime damage. The prewar process of narrowing the gulf between the workers and peasants slowed down. The size of the private plots was sharply cut back; the improvised market mechanisms were closed down. Despite the government’s massive increase in investment in the agricultural sector in the postwar five-year plans, the kolkhoz population never returned to its prewar levels. Only some of the demobilized soldiers and evacuees came back to the villages. The decline was greatest in the territories occupied by the enemy. The losses were greatest among kolkhoz directors.80
MILITARY RECOVERY
The recovery of the Red Army from its initial disastrous defeats in 1941 and again in 1942 depended not only on a steady supply of weapons and munitions but also upon a radical reorganization of the command structure. The key to success here, as elsewhere in the war effort, was Stalin’s readiness to re-establish the supremacy of the professional specialists over the praktiki. At the top of the command hierarchy he acted swiftly to form a centralized military counterpart of GOKO. A newly created organ under the title General Headquarters of the Supreme Command (Stavka) became the strategic planning and operational centre for the duration of the war. Yet the functional distinction between GOKO and the Stavka was often blurred. According to Zhukov, who became a member of both, they had overlapping jurisdiction and personnel. Stalin’s style was to consult individuals and small groups, not institutions, and it was difficult to tell which hat the generals were wearing when he consulted them. In any case Stalin would not permit any protocol to be kept. All the documentation of the Stavka activities has to be drawn from memoirs.81
The name and form of the Stavka was borrowed from the pre-revolutionary army and symbolized to many the restoration of the army to a position of equality with the party and police in the institutional structure of the Soviet system. The Stavka drew its technical support from the General Staff, ‘the brains of the army’ in Marshal Shaposhnikov’s ringing phrase. The Staff provided information, organized the supply and movement of troops, and kept in close touch with the fronts in order to intervene at a moment’s notice in the development of operations.82
Stalin’s relationships with the Stavka and General Staff evolved throughout the war as he came to rely on the advice of the professional soldiers. Up to September 1942, Stalin placed too little reliance on the work of the General Staff, which cost the army dearly. But even after that he never surrendered his arbitrary power to the demands of routine. Instead, he fashioned the military bureaucracy to fit his style of governing. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, he assumed the title of supreme commander. He made certain that no major decision was taken without his approval and that he was kept fully informed at all times of the situation at the front.
Stalin experimented with the structure and function of the Stavka in order to strike the right balance between military efficiency and his personal control. Initially, the Stavka was composed of a dozen or so senior commanders. But this arrangement soon proved to be unwieldy. The numbers were pared down. The Stavka did not function as a permanently sitting board. Members had their own assignments and responsibilities. They were often on the move, mainly to the fronts. Even after the military situation stabilized, Stalin did not like his deputy supreme commanders, Zhukov and Vasilevsky, ‘sitting too long’ in Moscow. In the thirty months that Vasilevsky was a member of Stavka he could not recall a single occasion when the body met as whole. Thus it could not act as a group; Stalin as the supreme commander was the hub that held its individual members together. Stalin never was a slave to fixed rules. The ad hoc selection of advisers from a small, specialized pool of talent enabled him to observe, test and ultimately come to trust his immediate circle of subordinates (insofar as he ever trusted any group of men). Stalin never took a major decision without an elaborate series of consultations beginning with members of Stavka. He called them together in small groups, sometimes only by twos or threes. Then he would widen the circle of consultation, taking the preliminary decisions to the GOKO or the Politburo for further discussion. There was real give and take at all levels, and not everyone agreed with Stalin’s proposals. In GOKO, for example, Voznesensky and Stalin had sharp exchanges over the ability of the defence industries to meet the ever-growing needs of the front.83
The rapid advance of the Nazi forces in the early days of the war threatened to plunge into chaos the entire strategic rear of the Red Army. In the thirties, the General Staff was responsible for general supervision of stockpiling and supplying the combat fronts. But the shock of war overwhelmed the Staff. Zhukov had to admit at the beginning of July that he himself no longer knew what the needs of the troops were. Relying on the experience of the First World War and the civil war, General Khrulev of the Staff took the initiative of proposing a plan for organizing the supply of the army. On Zhukov’s strong recommendation, Stalin approved the decree of 1 August 1941 that created the Main Administration of the Rear of the Red Army, which brought under centralized authority a number of agencies including the Quartermaster Corps, the Administration of Military Communications, the Highway Administration, and the Military-Medical and Veterinarian administrations. Khrulev, the deputy commissar of defence, was named the chief of the rear areas of the Red Army. Under his command the new agency established strict controls over the supply of virtually all necessities for the army: military equipment, food, transport, fuel, medical supplies and hospitals. Close working relations were established with the commissariats. Mikoian personally selected and dispatched teams of specialists from various branches of the central economic apparatus. At the beginning, emergency measures and improvisation carried the day. The chief of the rear areas sent his own plenipotentiaries to uncork bottlenecks; in the absence of supply roads, horse-drawn vehicles and even camels and reindeer were pressed into service in the north and in Central Asia. Gradually, a more systematic hierarchical organization replaced the plenipotentiaries and expansion of the railways took up much of the burden of transportation. In addition to his other duties, Khrulev also became commissar of transportation.
One of the chief concerns of the new agency was to supply the troops with decent hot food. Often improvisation again played an unexpected role. On the Volkhov front, encircled Russian troops were supplied with air drops of pelmeni (dumplings) on the initiative of a battalion cook whose recommendation reached Mikoian. But the centre had, as usual, to intervene on a large scale in critical moments. In 1943 a breakdown in the supply of food on the Kalinin front prompted the GOKO and the Commissariat of Defence to issue a stern warning against commanders who skimped on food in order to increase shipments of shells, promising stern punishments for those who failed to provide adequate rations for troops.84 Once again super-centralization, combined with a greater freedom to improvise and experiment at the local level, worked effectively to solve most of the problems and stabilize the rear areas within a year after the initial attack. Whenever a military or civilian specialist showed extraordinary talents Stalin rewarded him by piling more responsibility on his shoulders. Only the strongest were able to bear the strain.
Stalin kept his generals in line by a combination of intimidation, fear and charm; he also won their respect by his phenomenal memory, grasp of details and iron will. Stalin was far more brutal than Hitler in punishing commanders for defeats in the field. The disgrace of Marshal Grigory Kulik was only the most notorious case. Following the loss of much of the Crimea along with the town of Kerch in early 1942, Beria cooked up one of his conspiracies and denounced Kulik for defeatism. Kulik attempted to defend himself, but was brought to trial and forced to confess to having acted contrary to orders. He was stripped of his medals and his marshal’s baton, excluded from the Central Committee, removed as deputy commissar of defence and demoted to major-general. The rest of his life was an ordeal. Demoted again at the end of the war, excluded from the party and arrested in 1947 for anti-Soviet activities, he was finally shot in 1950.85 His example hung like a sword of Damocles over the field commanders. Stalin was a stickler for formal reports from Stavka members sent on missions to the front. Woe to the man whose report was tardy or slipshod. He would find himself mercilessly reproached by Stalin, even threatened with dismissal. Even Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Nikolai Vatutin, Stalin’s favourites, felt the sting of his rage.
Gradually, however, Stalin’s trust in the Soviet generals increased, as Oleg Khlevniuk has demonstrated, a tribute to the enormously expanding role of the army fighting the war. The ‘memory of repression’ that lingered from the prewar purges gave way to greater stability in the officer corps, milder penalties for mistakes and setbacks, and greater rewards for achievements in the field. As a result, the top command gained greater confidence in their actions and proposals for change in the military culture. The abolition of political commissars was a visible sign of the growing trust, although surveillance by the secret police continued. This did not mean that Stalin relaxed his hold over strategic decision-making or his concern about the postwar role of the army.86
Stalin pushed his generals to the very limit of their endurance and sometimes beyond, insisting on greater speed, more audacity, sparing no one, working eighteen hours a day. As a military thinker, he was as in all things a bundle of contradictions. Zhukov, in the most recent revision of his memoirs, asserted that Stalin was at home in strategic questions from the beginning of the war; in operational matters it took him longer to master the fundamentals. At the beginning of the war, he displayed a frank ignorance of the most elementary operational problems such as the two-pronged attack. He felt comfortable with such matters only after the battle of Kursk in mid-1943. Throughout the war, he briefed himself with the help of junior officers of the General Staff, calling them in one after another, so that he was normally well prepared when he met with the commanders of the fronts. Occasionally he would, like Hitler, memorize a situational problem in great detail in order to catch out the professional soldiers, but his knowledge was more systematic than that of the Führer.87 His chief commanders were impressed by his analytical keenness during meetings of the Stavka, GOKO or Politburo, his unhurried manner, attentiveness, rapid response to questions, and ability to summarize a discussion and arrive at a concise and penetrating conclusion. He personally knew all 100 front commanders and the leading figures in the Commissariat of Defence. Early in the war, he began to show himself to be well informed on the general situation on all fronts, the disposition of forces and reserves available. Khrushchev’s accusation at the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin often planned operations on a globe has been completely refuted by the testimony of those like Vasilevsky and Sergei Shtemenko who worked with him every day. Quite to the contrary, the General Staff in its daily briefing of Stalin made use of extremely detailed maps of 1:200,000 scale, and had to be prepared for the supreme commander’s pointed questioning and demand for the most precise information. In the early months of defeat and retreat, Stalin was often explosive and inconsistent. As the war progressed, he became calmer and more restrained, less certain of his absolute correctness, more willing to tolerate dissent on military matters.88 Yet his military knowledge even at the end of the war was insufficient, according to Zhukov, and did not reach the level of a professional military man. Moreover, he became increasingly jealous, feeling that the great victories should be associated with his name.89
Stalin’s skills as a military administrator also improved under the pressure of war. As in operational fields Stalin profited from his mistakes while Hitler compounded his. When the war broke out, Stalin divided the front into three commands under his old cronies, Budenny, Voroshilov and Timoshenko. Only Timoshenko displayed any effectiveness as a commander by holding up the German attack for three crucial weeks.90 Stalin gradually removed all of them from positions of command. He relied more and more on Shaposhnikov, then Zhukov and later Vasilevsky as his closest advisers. Shaposhnikov was the only senior officer of the Imperial Russian Army who survived in Stalin’s entourage. Stalin held him in high esteem and treated him with a mixture of politeness and deference that was unique. Shaposhnikov was undeniably a talented military thinker, but he probably owed his survival and Stalin’s trust to the fact that he had come down on Stalin’s side in the debate over the responsibility for the defeat of Poland in 1920. In any case, it was probably Shaposhnikov more than anyone else who was able with his combination of tact, erudition and quiet persistence to begin to teach Stalin the art of modern warfare.91
Zhukov too was politically reliable, having served under Budenny’s and Stalin’s command in the First Cavalry Army during the civil war and Polish campaign. But he was also an admirer of Tukhachevsky and Uborevich, the fallen marshals, the former ‘for his erudition and profound analytical mind’, the latter for his operational and tactical skill.92 Zhukov learned from both. He was a man of enormous military ability and had already displayed his mastery of modern armoured warfare in his stunning victory over the Japanese Kwantung Army at Khalkin Gol. Vasilevsky had also been trained in the tsarist army tradition and served as a junior officer in the First World War. In the twenties, he had studied at the feet of Shaposhnikov and became his favourite student. It took time for their influence to have the desired effect. In the meantime, Stalin staggered from error to error. The mass surrenders of troops who had been encircled in the first battles and the ineffectiveness of his top commanders aroused all Stalin’s morbidly suspicious instincts. He reached out for political solutions. In July 1941 he reintroduced the dual-command structure. Side by side with the professional military men, the party appointed a political commissar who assumed full and equal responsibility for the unit’s conduct in battle. The commissar was authorized to denounce commanders who were ‘unworthy of their rank’ and to ‘wage a relentless struggle against cowards, panic-mongers and deserters’. This was, as John Erickson suggests, ‘the language of the civil war’.93 Stalin never entirely freed himself from this mentality that viewed those who surrendered or fell under German control as internal enemies of the state. By October 1942, the political commissars lost most of their independent position and were subordinated to the military commander.
Stalin learned after the terrible defeats in the summer and autumn of 1941 not to commit his reserves piecemeal. During the defence of Moscow, he doled out his reserves like a miser. Zhukov, writing at the height of the anti-Stalin campaign in the sixties, admitted that ‘Stalin was in Moscow organizing men and material for the destruction of the enemy. He must be given his due . . . he performed an enormous task in organizing the strategic reserves and the material and technical means for the armed struggle. By means of his harsh exactitude he continued to achieve, one can say, the well nigh impossible.’94 But the military defence of Moscow and the counterblow that forced the Germans back for the first time in the Second World War was the product of professional staff work. Stalin gave Zhukov and the General Staff broader latitude in planning the operation than probably at any other time in the war.95
But Stalin had not yet learned all his lessons. He still displayed a lack of realism, bouts of frenzied impatience, impetuousness and a disregard for professional advice that recalled his irrational decisions during forced collectivization and the drive for excessive production norms in the first five-year plan. After the successful defence of Moscow his overweening self-confidence led him to order a general offensive along the entire front, despite opposition from Zhukov, Shaposhnikov and Vasilevsky. When the offensives quickly petered out, he disregarded the repeated warnings of his top commanders that his refusal to order a retirement behind the Dnieper would lead to a disaster at Kiev. The huge encirclement cost the Red Army 300,000 men. Zhukov resigned as chief of staff in disgust.96 Stalin was also a bad forecaster of German intentions. He expected the main blow in 1941 to fall on the southern front, but it came in the centre. He reversed his prediction in 1942, but Hitler changed his strategic objectives. The main attack came in the south while Stalin was waiting for a renewed assault on Moscow.
The creation of Stavka and the appointment of professional officers were not enough to save the Red Army and the country from defeat. It was necessary to create a viable command structure. The most serious consequences of the purges emerged with blinding clarity. It was not simply the liquidation of well-trained officers knowledgeable in modern armoured warfare that contributed to the debacle of 1941 and the errors of 1942; it was the absence of a command group that shared a history of working together, freely exchanging ideas, refining their strategic thinking, planning for contingencies. This was normally the product of years; in 1942 it had to be created in months. Yet it was the very kind of group that in the thirties Stalin had come to fear as the embryo of conspiracy. He was not about to change his thinking during the war, even though defeat was staring him in the face.
Stalin settled on a compromise between his obsessive suspicion of self-contained, specialized working groups entrenched in the power structure and the strategic requirements of modern warfare. But he reached it only after the German offensive in 1942 brought the country once more to the brink of collapse. Stalin’s attempts to conduct a general offensive after his forces had won some local victories in the winter of 1941–42 led to the series of defeats in the south that resembled at times ‘a wild flight’ to the Volga. Stalin was forced to dismiss his personal favourites. Budenny was eased out of the Stavka. Voroshilov, stumbling from one blunder to another, was removed from active operations and provided with work in the rear areas.97 A beneficiary of Stalin’s personal favour, he was among the fortunate. Others who had committed lesser errors were summarily shot. Timoshenko also faded from the scene. The dual command was abolished, and the political commissars were restricted to an advisory role. In August 1942, Stalin appointed Zhukov deputy supreme commander. After Shaposhnikov retired for genuine reasons of ill health, he was succeeded by his pupil Vasilevsky. Stalin gave the two generals plenipotentiary powers and subsequently appointed them first and second deputy commanders.
A professional chain of command was taking shape. In planning the Stalingrad counter-offensive, Stalin placed the generals of the air force and chiefs of artillery and armour under the command of Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Previously, their role had been largely administrative within the Commissariat of Defence. With these appointments military professionals were installed in all points of the chain of command above the operational level. There was to be no more ad hoc consultation on Stalin’s part, first with one and then with another of the members of Stavka. Stalin still set the rules and defined the relationships between himself and his deputies. This was hardly a routinized military bureaucracy. But a regular, hierarchical order came into being in the High Command. Later, Vasilevsky’s first deputy, the erudite, self-effacing and brilliant workhorse General Alexei Antonov succeeded as chief of staff and became Stalin’s invaluable aide. By the end of 1943, the majority of directives issuing from Stavka bore the signatures of Stalin and Antonov, or else Antonov signing for Stalin.98
There was a striking contrast between the responses of Stalin and Hitler to the problem of managing the relationship between political power and the armed forces. As Earl F. Ziemke succinctly puts it, ‘Stalin’s response was rational and self-serving; Hitler’s only self-serving.’99 Like the Stavka the creation of GOKO fused into one structure elements of Stalin’s personal despotic rule and a bureaucratic order. The arrangement survived as long as he thought it necessary. He kept it in place until the end of the war, then dismantled both GOKO and the Supreme Command, replacing them with another system.
The internal organization of the armed forces did not remain static during the war. It changed in response to the demands of modern warfare and the shock of the initial defeats. Caught in the middle of structural changes initiated in 1939, the military leadership found it necessary at first to improvise, at times in desperation. In the first few months, the front-line units of the Red Army disintegrated. One hundred and twenty-four divisions were so badly chewed up that they had to be abolished as operational forces. There were not enough officers with adequate training to staff corps headquarters. All rifle and tank corps had to be temporarily disbanded; inexperienced divisional commanders were overwhelmed with problems in attempting to manoeuvre their units in the highly fluid situation of hasty retreat.
There had been no plans for a strategic withdrawal. Little co-ordination existed above the divisional level. The army commands were obliged to redeploy with smaller tactical units and to supply these with new equipment as it began to arrive. Hastily assembled reserves could not be organized into divisions for lack of officers and communications equipment. They had to be committed often piecemeal as brigades. The People’s Home Guard, little more than an untrained militia at first, often led by zealous but untrained Communist Party volunteers, was also thrown into battle in an effort to gain time.100 Its losses were appalling. But the picture was not uniformly grim. Units fought their way out of encirclements; the skeletal structure of command did not collapse; most of the troops did not surrender until their position was hopeless. More systematic reorganization slowly took hold.
Nevertheless, there was one more military crisis to face in the summer of 1942, when the German army launched a major offensive in Ukraine. The Red Army was driven back to the Volga and a German spearhead reached the Caucasus mountains. Stalin reacted by issuing order no. 227, famous for its hortatory phrase ‘Not one step backwards. Stand or Die’. It is seldom noted that this demand was followed by an order, emulating the example of the German Army, to create blocking or barricade battalions in the rear of the front lines to prevent unauthorized withdrawals. According to Stalin these innovations by the German High Command had a salutary effect in stiffening discipline in the ranks of the Wehrmacht after its failure to take Moscow in December 1941. Stalin’s order also authorized the creation of penal battalions on each front, composed of commanders and commissars who had been found guilty of cowardly or confused actions and assigning them to the most dangerous sectors of the front lines. Finally, he ordered the creation of defensive squads within divisions that displayed signs of wavering.101 The order was never printed but read aloud to all fighting units. Its effect has been variously interpreted and often exaggerated in attributing subsequent victories to fear. Certainly, this was not the case at Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, in 1942, the flow of new weapons from defence plants and fresh reserves made possible the formation of larger and better-equipped units. The reorganized rifle divisions, the tank and motorized corps and finally the tank armies constituted a powerful field force that had the potential, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to penetrate the enemy’s defences and conduct offensive operations on a large scale. The Red Army learned through bitter experience the lessons that the Tukhachevsky command group had preached in the thirties: the necessity of providing a great variety of support and special units including engineer brigades, vastly increased numbers of signal units, ski troops and battalions of road maintenance and railway troops. The functional specialization reflected the increased influence of the professional soldiers. The air force was almost totally reorganized into air armies in order to overcome the weaknesses of a divided command.102
At the level of military operations, a similar process of learning from experience and adjusting to changing circumstances produced a Soviet-style offensive. The strategic ideas of Tukhachevsky were quietly restored, with suitable modifications, to a place of honour. But this took time. The Moscow counter-offensive of December 1941, though largely successful, consisted of improvised attacks by separate units rather than a well-co-ordinated action. The same shortcoming showed up during the winter offensives all along the line. The army command had little or no experience in conducting operations on such a large scale. They lacked the necessary skill, firepower and force levels to mass powerful concentrations at the points of breakthrough. They gradually learned, too, the art of directing offensive operations on several fronts (rather than just one, for which prewar planning had prepared them). They increased the strategic depth of their defences as fresh forces became available to them. But the lessons were costly. And Stalin did not hesitate to rebuke the military leaders publicly and repeatedly for having failed to learn the techniques of modern warfare.103 He, of course, took no responsibility for having eliminated those who had. The commanders had finally learned to lead, he declared on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army on 23 February 1942, ‘having discarded the foolish and harmful linear tactics and having finally adopted the tactics of manoeuvring’. But he was still urging in November 1943 that ‘all Red Army men must perfect their combat skills . . . commanders must acquire mastery in the conduct of battles’. He urged greater obedience, organization and order.104
By mid-1943 the Soviet command began to match its limited operational skill with its growing superiority of mass. It combined the ‘salient thrust’ or ‘cleaving blow’ with the modified encirclement. Following Tukhachevsky’s views incorporated in the 1936 field regulations, it involved a series of deep penetrations along parallel lines that forced the enemy back along a broad front. Its application turned out to be a less sophisticated and more ponderous manoeuvre than the German blitzkrieg in the early months of the war. Only in unusual circumstances could these repeated frontal assaults by an overwhelming mass of infantry and armour be converted into a double envelopment or encirclement, a difficult tactical operation that required speed, precision and considerable experience in manoeuvring. The Stalingrad encirclement was exceptional because of Hitler’s refusal to allow the withdrawal of the German Sixth Army. Later, even when the Soviet superiority reached four, five, or even six to one, mass encirclements were rare.105 Stalin appeared to harbour some deep-seated bias against the manoeuvre, telling Zhukov on one occasion that it was ‘not your business to encircle German forces on our territory’. He insisted that they should simply be driven off Soviet territory so that the spring grain could be planted; it would be possible then to encircle them on their own territory.106
The number and quality of military manpower steadily increased throughout the year. In the first year of the war, the armed forces grew from just under 3 million to 5.5 million. By the end of the war, the figure had doubled again. A more serious problem was training officers to replace the heavy losses from the purges and the first six months of the fighting which reduced officer cadres to 34 per cent of authorized strength. In the first year the need was so great that officer training courses had to be streamlined in order to permit accelerated graduation. In 1942 half a million officers were trained under the new programme. By 1943 the emergency had lifted and the course of studies in all ground forces was lengthened from twelve months to two years.107 But the inadequate prewar training of officers for command positions, the rapid expansion of the army and the wartime losses, more than the prewar purges, created a situation in which ill-prepared replacements were often rushed into combat, quickly sustaining further losses in what Roger R. Reese has called ‘a vicious circle’ that delayed mastery of the art of war.108
By the summer of 1943, the Red Army underwent another major reorganization accompanied by a massive re-equipment. In the words of John Erickson, the ‘Soviet infantryman had become a walking arsenal, equipped as no other for anti-tank fighting’. By this time too Stalin was finally persuaded by the tank men to create the tank armies that had been the dream of Tukhachevsky. Artillery was also reorganized into a separate corps; this reform represented a breakthrough in military organization that recognized the importance of its firepower. There was still the shortage of jeeps and trucks that had hampered every offensive operation, but Lend-Lease was beginning to supply these in large quantities: 183,000 by mid-1943 and 430,000 by 1944.109
The great battle at Kursk in the summer of 1943 was the first real test for the new Red Army that had gradually emerged from the deep shadows of the purges and early defeats. By this time the army had been largely re-equipped and re-staffed; the Stavka and the General Staff had given Stalin ample proof of their professional competence. The Kursk operation was the first example of collective planning, taking into account a discussion of strategic alternatives, a systematic evaluation of intelligence and a complex combination of premeditated defence in depth with a co-ordinated counter-offensive. The professionals in Stavka, the General Staff and the front commanders had to overcome Stalin’s reservations about the ability of the army to sustain the shock of mass tank attacks by the German forces. They repeatedly reassured him that the experience and skills had been acquired to avoid a repetition of 1941 or 1942. Unprecedented in size and scope, the operation provided for a multi-level defence zone of 250–300 kilometres, and the largest concentration of troops and matériel in the war.110
In planning the operation, Stalin entrusted Mikoian as early as March with the organization of the Reserve Front (later called the Steppe Front), a new special operation reserve in the Frunze tradition to back up the planned counter-offensive three months later. Mikoian summoned a team of civilian and military specialists from all branches of supply, ordnance and transport, as well as commanders of units withdrawn from the front for replacements and re-equipment. As planned, the Soviet defence in depth checked the German attacks and launched their powerful counterstroke with devastating results. Numbering about 1.25 million men, supported by 20,000–24,000 artillery pieces, 2,700–3,400 tanks and 3,000–5,000 aircraft and half a million men from the Reserve Front, the Soviet offensive shattered the vaunted German Army Group Centre. German losses were catastrophic.111 The strategic initiative had passed to the Red Army. It never relinquished it. For the Germans it was a greater defeat than Stalingrad.
From Kursk to the end of the war, a rough balance was struck between Stalin and his generals over the conduct of the war. Strategic and operational planning on all levels settled down into a fairly predictable pattern. But Stalin reserved and exercised the right to intervene at any point in order to assert his personal prerogatives as supreme commander. At times he opposed his top-level advisers without making clear why.112 For example, in July 1944 he insisted that the Soviet forces take Lvov (L’viv) before reaching the Vistula, while Zhukov and Konev wanted to reverse the priorities.113 Was Stalin thinking back to that fateful moment in the civil war when the First Cavalry Army under Budenny and his command had pressed their attack on Lvov while Tukhachevsky’s offensive on Warsaw failed at the gates of the city? Or was it merely a political move to strengthen the Soviet claim on Lvov as early as possible? The supreme commander did not share his deepest motivations with his generals.
The last two great strategic operations of the war – the Belarus breakthrough and the final assault on Berlin – were masterpieces of planning and execution on a colossal scale. According to Zhukov, the Belarus operation demonstrated the ability of the Soviet commanders to execute the most difficult of all tactical manoeuvres, the encirclement and destruction of large enemy formations. The commanders had gradually weaned Stalin from his attachment to frontal blows. The battle for Berlin gave further proof of the kind of working relationship that had developed between Stalin and the professionals. Stalin was determined to allow Zhukov’s First Belarus Front to reap the glory of taking the Nazi capital. But the General Staff agreed with Marshal Konev that his First Ukrainian Front should participate in the assault from the south in order to guarantee the most rapid and decisive results. Only Stalin could decide. Hearing out his advisers, Stalin silently crossed out the section of the demarcation line between the two fronts that cut off the First Ukrainian from Berlin. ‘Let the one who is first to break in take Berlin’, he said.114
Stalin’s recognition of the professional soldier took on an elaborate symbolic form during the war. He restored the lustre of an army tarnished by the purges and introduced a series of rituals and rewards to mark acts of individual and collective heroism. The officer corps, as the repository of military tradition, was the main beneficiary. The reforms of 1942 not only abolished dual command, which had offended the pride of the officers, but also restored epaulets and gold braid, creating a ‘cult of the uniform’. New decorations were created for officers only. Even more startling was the restitution of the etiquette of the tsarist army in forms of address and behaviour. The following year a series of new military academies – named the Suvorov Schools after the great eighteenth-century commander – was opened. Their curriculum, discipline and general atmosphere were, according to the military newspaper Krasnaia zvezda, modelled ‘after the manner of the old cadet schools’.115
Following the battle of Kursk, Stalin proposed an elaborate ritual to celebrate every victory. He recalled that in Muscovite Russia victories were marked by the ringing of bells. He suggested that artillery salvos and some kind of illumination should serve the same purpose. The General Staff worked out three categories of salutes to match the significance of each victory: twenty-four salvos by 324 guns, twenty salvos by 224 guns and twelve salvos by 124 guns. The salutes were carried on national radio broadcasts and accompanied by congratulatory orders giving the names of commanders and units. The solemn communiqués listed the liberated cities, adding their pre-revolutionary names where appropriate, honoured the leading commanders and ended with the same refrain: ‘Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the struggle for the freedom of our country. Death to the German invaders!’ As Moscow reverberated to the thunder of the volleys, cascades of fireworks illuminated the sky above. Stalin was consulted on every one of these, and on occasion even edited the text of the broadcasts. He did not easily forgive mistakes. When the consecrated formula was altered Stalin flew into a rage, as in the case of Marshal Konev’s name inadvertently having been omitted in the victory broadcast.116
The awarding of medals, decorations and titles to individuals and units went far beyond pre-revolutionary custom. The number and variety probably exceeded those of any other army in the Second World War. By 1942 the process of making awards had to be speeded up in order to meet the demand by extending the right to commanders of units down to the regimental level. In addition to the older decorations, Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of the Fatherland War 1st and 2nd Class appeared for both officers and men. For officers only the Order of Alexander Nevsky and three classes of the orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov were introduced. This was followed by the creation of the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky for operations in the Ukraine, separate decorations for naval and air force personnel and finally the new Order of Glory and Order of Victory. There were also special medals for the defence of the great cities, and for partisans. Altogether more than 35 million decorations were awarded to men and women in the fighting services. In 1943 collective awards were introduced. Almost 11,000 individual units and formations received one or more of these. The creation of Guards Divisions for units which distinguished themselves in special ways first made their appearance during the defence of Moscow. The designation carried special rewards and privileges for officers and men. Stalin attached great importance to these forms of incentives and rewards. On occasion he would reduce the level of a decoration to one of the General Staff or front commanders in order to demonstrate his reservations or annoyance over an error or an infraction of rules.117 In all of this there was something highly stylized, ritualistic and hierarchical. The formal portraits of the marshals and senior officers bedecked with medals and decorations formed a new pantheon of secular saints to take the place of the old iconostasis. One could judge by the frequency and class of awards the correct place in the general hierarchy. Stalin finally placed himself at the apex of the pyramid by adopting the title of generalissimo. He appeared in a resplendent uniform covered with gold braid and decorations. Yet he wore it only once. It was as though he had made his point to the professionals. He decided to adopt instead the rank of marshal. It was enough to demonstrate that he was still supreme while at the same time equating his military skills with those of the top commanders in the Red Army.
In forging an alliance with the professional soldier, Stalin invented a new, Soviet military tradition. The Red Army of Peasants and Workers of the 1920s with its egalitarian command structure, its international outlook and its civil war traditions gave way to a hierarchical and nationalistic Soviet army whose history began on 22 June 1941. In all other European armies, an essential element in the spirit of the army was regimental loyalty, developed over a long period and extending in many cases back into the eighteenth century. In Russia, these traditions had been destroyed during the revolution and civil war. The famous units and exploits of the civil war were short-lived because Stalin killed off most of its heroes who survived into the late thirties. What he had to do during the Second World War was to create a whole new set of traditions as he went along. The creation of decorations, the designations of guards divisions, the recognition of ‘hero cities’ and the elaborate celebration of victories in the communiqués, all of these had a profound effect on the officer corps and the rank and file, both drawn from the ‘toiling masses’. The upper levels of the officer corps were recruited almost exclusively from families of peasants (Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Vatutin and Shtemenko) or workers (Rodion Rokossovsky and Ivan Bagramian). Trained in pre-revolutionary officers’ schools and Soviet academies, they nevertheless owed Stalin their promotion to the command ranks and they remained loyal to him even in their memoirs. The glorification of the common soldier in Soviet propaganda and through the reward system was a vital if ultimately immeasurable force in binding the villages and factories to the fighting front. Stalin’s political skill in building the new army out of the wreckage of the old for which he too was responsible is one of the strangest paradoxes of his rule. But it was not the only one that surfaced in the process of a military recovery.
The partisan movement represented a large potential for carrying out political as well as military tasks, by maintaining a Soviet presence in the territories under German occupation as well as disrupting German communications and gathering intelligence. It had started up spontaneously among soldiers cut off from their shattered or encircled units, Communist Party and Komsomol members overtaken by the rapid German advance and civilians antagonized by German brutalities, whose numbers increased when the tide of war began to turn; these included a substantial number of Jews. The problem for Stalin was how to control the activities of bodies of armed men and women outside the reach of the Soviet system, living and fighting in a liminal state, which paradoxically appeared to many partisans as personally liberating. Stalin’s appeal in June 1941 for a mass uprising against the enemy was not followed up in practice. According to the most recent and comprehensive study of the movement: ‘actual Soviet policy discounted and even discouraged popular initiative and participation’.118 Moreover, the strategic planning for an eventual war, from Tukhachevsky and Egorov down to the much disputed draft of May 1941, anticipated frontier battles which would then be carried over into an offensive on the enemy’s territory. No provision was made for a fighting retreat with provisions for the operation of partisan units behind the advancing enemy to disrupt communications and carry out diversionist attacks.119
As soon as information about the troops caught behind the front lines reached the regional and central leadership of the party, a sub rosa competition arose over the control of what was to become known as the partisan movement. In a letter to Stalin from a party member attached to a signal company on the northwestern front in August 1941, the situation behind the line of the German advance was vividly described. The writer’s unit lost a third of its complement and was surrounded. Based on five days’ experience behind the front lines, he concluded that there were abundant opportunities to organize partisan units to disrupt the extended German lines of communication and attack small units. But he observed that in the areas they traversed there was no trace of partisan activity. In the forest and swamps, scattered groups were seeking to break out of encirclement and avoid contact with even the smallest enemy units. But ‘they were not psychologically prepared to conduct military operations behind the lines’.120
The first to recognize the potential for organizing resistance behind the lines was Ponomarenko, the secretary of the Belarus Communist Party. In letters and telegrams to Stalin in 1941 and 1942, he praised the resistance of the collective farmers in his region and proposed the creation of a separate administrative organ of the partisan struggle, offering to take command of it. Following up Stalin’s instructions to take the initiative, he urged his party officials to remain behind the lines, there to organize and lead partisan units.121 Not far behind him, Beria portrayed the situation differently in the early months of the war. He exaggerated the role of NKVD units in conducting partisan and diversionary groups behind the German lines on the northwestern front. Clearly he aimed at persuading Stalin to give him authority to take charge in organizing the partisan movement. In this he was successful.122
Ponomarenko’s idea of a special organ to conduct partisan activities encountered resistance from the Main Political Administration of the Red Army, especially its head Lev Mekhlis, who promoted their own plans. Stalin’s decision to reconcile the competitors by appointing Ponomarenko to head a Central Partisan Staff in Moscow with deputies from the organs of the secret police did not end the bureaucratic in-fighting or allay the suspicions of the army and police over the trustworthiness of armed forces outside their immediate control.123
By August 1942 the situation in the western borderlands seemed critical. Ponomarenko reported that the Germans were making every effort to recruit elements of the Soviet population ‘in order to draw the partisans into battle not with the Germans but with the formations of the local population, and to withdraw their own units from battles with the partisans to send to the front’. These formations, of which he listed ten, were bombarded with propaganda displaying slogans like ‘For an Independent Ukraine’, ‘Free Belarus from forced russification’, ‘Independent Latvia’, ‘Crimea for the Tatars’; in the case of the Crimean Tatars, inter-ethnic rivalries were stirred over access to arms and supplies. Ponomarenko urged efforts to counter these groups through propaganda and specially trained personnel.124 On the second anniversary of the war, Ponomarenko could proudly report to Stalin that there were 10,000 partisans in the forests around Bryansk, although there were still problems of command and organization. The number grew rapidly, reaching a total of about 100,000 by the end of the year, but only 60 per cent were armed.125 As the Wehrmacht retreated under the hammer blows of the Red Army, a flood of fence-sitters joined the partisan ranks, bringing their number in Belarus up to 374,000 by the time the region was liberated.126
From the outset, the central authorities had wrestled with the dilemma of how to tame the spontaneous spirit and direct the local activities of the partisans while increasing their efforts to recruit new members and extol the achievements of individual heroes and heroines.127 The great danger, for the central leadership, was that the men and women who had elected their own leaders, decided on their own personnel and set their own missions might not easily be reintegrated into Soviet society as it had existed in the prewar period. Like the members of the intelligentsia whose initiatives had played a crucial role in the economic recovery, many partisans regarded the war as a time of personal freedom and tended to identity the movement as their primary reference group. They were shortly to be disabused of these ideas, though a residual pride in being a partisan lived on in their collective memories.
By authorizing the recruitment of women for combat roles, Stalin tapped into a large reservoir of support for the war effort. But he took the decision only after the disasters of the first year of war meant that many men desperately needed to be replaced. The measure was not carried out without resentment and even resistance on the part of male soldiers, and disappointment and even disillusionment on the part of the women themselves. Prewar Soviet propaganda and education had stressed the special role of strong women in every aspect of society, and had made paramilitary training available for women as well as men, mainly through the Komsomol organizations.128 A few female warriors from the past were widely celebrated. As soon as the war broke out, many young women, especially in the universities, rushed to the recruiting stations. They were assigned mainly to auxiliary roles as nurses and medical assistants, although an undetermined number was accepted into the militias that were hastily formed, thrown into combat without proper training and chewed up in the early weeks of the fighting. There were exceptions. From Stalin’s first authorization of a women’s air regiment to the introduction of women into anti-aircraft units, the orders were issued in secret, presumably to avoid the impression among the Germans that the Soviet armed forces were suffering unsustainable losses.129 There were also contradictions in the policy of mobilizing women. The sniper movement, for example, was launched early, and was highly touted abroad. The training of women snipers was quickly organized on a professional basis. Paradoxically, these skilled killers were lauded as model fighters at the very time when the regime was re-affirming the primary role of women as guardians of the family.130 Women were also celebrated as active participants in the partisan movement, although here too there were serious problems of sexual discrimination and harassment, causing bitter disappointments. On the eve of Stalingrad, Stalin issued a secret order that the partisan movement must be an ‘all-people’s movement’. The partisans drew in increasingly large numbers of women, although they still formed a small minority by the end of the war.131
Ponomarenko again took the lead in advocating women’s active role in the partisan movement. He evoked the patriotic upsurge in the war of 1812 and sanctified the names of martyred heroines like Zoia, executed by the Germans, and others. ‘Without the massive involvement of women in the partisan detachments,’ he wrote, ‘it is impossible to radically expand the movement and make it a genuine all-people’s movement.’ He insisted women could be trained in every combat specialization and declared that these measures be re-enforced by the strictest disciplinary measures against ‘dissolute behaviour’ and ‘incorrect attitudes’ toward women.132 In the postwar years, however, women warriors ‘virtually disappeared from view’.133 As was the case with other groups in the Soviet population who responded to the call to fulfil their patriotic duty even in the face of great sacrifices, women veterans of the war found themselves blocked from expanding their wartime gains as Stalin re-imposed social controls that harked back to the prewar era.
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It would be wrong to attribute the paradoxical character of Stalin’s policies solely to his leadership. His personal rule was, to be sure, a decisive element in shaping the responses of the party and state to underlying structural problems. These persistent factors that confronted Russian policy-makers since Peter the Great were deeply rooted in the country’s geography, economy and society.134 As the state expanded it never reached a natural frontier and by the early eighteenth century its frontiers, the longest in the world, were porous, open to penetration, difficult to defend. Expansion brought large numbers of different ethnic groups into borderlands, without succeeding in integrating them into a Russian identity. As a result, the multicultural society with clusters of well-defined cultural differences on the periphery presented an additional problem for the defence of the country.
Finally, the absence of access to the open sea and the overwhelming agrarian character of the population under climatic conditions that kept the peasantry living at subsistence levels periodically threatened by regional famine conditions, along with transportation problems stemming from large distances and severe weather conditions, created a situation of relative economic backwardness in comparison with Western and Central European societies. Overcoming these problems in preparing the country for war led Stalin to take decisions often based on impulse rather than socialist planning, irrational in their hasty application and costly in human and material terms. As a result, his building of a socialist economy and a modern army, integrating the nationalities and conducting a foreign policy aimed at distancing external enemies from the vulnerable borderlands, was deeply flawed. In order to eke out a victory under these conditions, he was driven to undertake a mobilization of unprecedented scope and to gain through compromise the support of the social elements crucial to success that he had subjected to an equally unprecedented series of controls and punishments in the years leading up to the German invasion.