CHAPTER FOUR

The Russians at the Vistula

SOVIET WARLORD

LONG BEFORE Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Joseph Stalin had created within its borders the greatest edifice of repression, mass murder and human suffering the world has ever seen. Hitler possessed greater democratic legitimacy in Germany through the ballot box than did Stalin in the Soviet Union. “Is there still a Tsar?” Winston Churchill’s father, half a century dead, demanded in one of his son’s dreams. “Yes. But he is not a Romanoff,” his son answered. “He is much more powerful, and much more despotic.” Stalin was now sixty-five, visibly worn by the strain of more than three years of war. Yet he retained a prodigious capacity for work. His charm never lost its capacity to inspire terror in the hearts of all who knew how many of those whom “Koba” professed to love he had killed. “Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife,” Stalin observed laconically to Poskrebyshev, his long-serving chef de cabinet, when the wretched man’s spouse was dispatched for execution in 1939. Poskrebyshev remained at his post until 1952.

If Stalin did not embark upon a systematic Holocaust, his anti-semitism was almost as profound as that of Hitler. He shared his German counterpart’s sexual prurience, together with an energy in the hours of darkness which seemed wholly appropriate to the nature of his toils. This son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, his face deeply marked by smallpox, had never been a soldier, yet affected military garb from 1941 onwards, to reflect his role as Russia’s supreme warlord. Portraits of Suvurov and Kutuzov, the nation’s great military heroes, were accorded prominent places in his study. Zhukov, however, observed in retirement: “Stalin always somehow remained a civilian.” Like Hitler and in contrast to Churchill, he never visited the fighting fronts—or at any rate never put himself within range of gunfire—not least because he was frightened of flying. He did, however, devote thirty minutes each evening to watching newsreels from the battlefields. “He was of small stature,” wrote Milovan Djilas, “and disproportioned, his trunk too short, his arms too long. His face was pale and rough, ruddy around the cheekbones, his teeth black and irregular, his moustache and hair thin. An admirable head, though, like that of a mountain man, with lively and impish avid yellow eyes . . . One felt the intent, constant activity of the mind.”

Stalin, self-educated, had read obsessively all his life. In the 1930s he and his circle shared an implausible enthusiasm for Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, as an exposition of the corruption of capitalism. Now, there was no circle, for Stalin had murdered them all. He stood alone, served only by lackeys: Beria—“our Himmler” as Stalin introduced him—Zhanadov, Voroshilov, Molotov and a handful of others. In contrast to Hitler, Stalin never excelled as a public performer. He broadcast only with reluctance, at moments of crisis. His genius lay in judgement of men, committee management, mastery of the dark recesses of power. He displayed a compulsion to liquidate perceived threats to his authority which was more draconian than that of Germany’s Führer. If the German generals’ attempt to overthrow Hitler in 1944 was feeble, no man ever dared to raise a hand against Stalin. All those who might have done so were dead. Hitler crippled his own war effort by maintaining in power such old Nazi loyalists as Göring, even when their incompetence was plain. Stalin never indulged in sentiment. Those who failed, and suffered mere dismissal, considered themselves fortunate. Most were shot.

In the eyes of the democracies, before 1939 the Soviet Union’s only merit was that it did not practise external aggression in regions of interest to them. Hitler became the enemy of the Western powers not because of what he did within the frontiers of Germany—even to the Jews—but because he sought world dominance. The democracies indulged Stalin, by contrast, because the victims of his tyranny, far more numerous than those of Hitler, were his own people. That perception changed with the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, and Stalin’s annexation of eastern Poland and invasion of Finland. As war beckoned in 1941, Stalin embraced a new prototype. “Our benefactor thinks that we have been too sentimental,” wrote Boris Pasternak bitterly. “Peter the Great is no longer an appropriate model. The new passion, openly confessed, is for Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina [tsarist enforcers], and cruelty. This is the subject for new operas, plays and films.” Beyond hundreds of thousands of Russians and inhabitants of the republics whom he killed as state enemies, Stalin’s policies had driven millions more to starvation and even cannibalism. He had gone far towards stripping from the Russian people their heritage of impulsive passion and artistic genius, replacing it with an ice-age universe in which even absolute obedience offered no warranty of survival. Stalin had contrived the destruction of human trust in a society now ruled by terror, manic suspicion and arbitrary injustice. He himself liked to tell a story of Beria, most terrible of secret policemen. Stalin loses a favourite pipe. A few days later, Beria calls to inquire whether it has been recovered. “Yes,” replies Stalin, “I found it under the sofa.” “Impossible!” says Beria. “Three people have already confessed to this crime!”

The German invasion provoked the deportation of entire Soviet subject populations, such as the Chechens and Crimean Tartars, more than two million people whose loyalty to Moscow was deemed suspect. They died in the hundreds of thousands. Stalin’s conduct of his own dominions, in which he had already presided over at least ten million deaths, perhaps twenty million, commanded the respect, even envy, of Hitler. The Georgian shared his German counterpart’s appetite for self-pity in adversity. He was a much cleverer man, however, especially in one vital respect. War made Hitler a fantasist and Stalin a realist.

It is unlikely that any other Soviet leader could have wrung from his own people the sacrifices necessary to defeat the Nazis. “Who but us could have taken on the Germans?” mused a Soviet soldier, Konstantin Mamerdov. Who indeed? Victory demanded the commitment of a tyranny as ruthless as that of Germany, and ultimately more effective militarily and industrially. But for Stalin’s massive pre-war programme to industrialize the Soviet Union, heedless of the cost in millions of peasant lives, it is unlikely that his nation could have manufactured the weapons to resist Hitler in 1941. Once at war, Stalin “was oblivious of the fundamental principle of the military art, that the objective should be gained at minimal cost in human life,” observes one of his modern Russian biographers, General Dmitry Volkogonov. “He believed that both victories and defeats inevitably reaped a bitter harvest . . . It seemed to Stalin quite unnecessary to make the attainment of strategic objectives dependent on the scale of losses.”

The most important “if” of the Second World War is to consider the consequences had Germany not invaded the Soviet Union. The Battle of Britain notwithstanding, Churchill’s island could have been conquered had Hitler’s ambitions not been overwhelmingly fixed upon the creation of an eastern empire. The three years of attrition which followed, before the Western allies invaded France, demanded a price from the Russian people which the democracies were quite incapable of paying. It seems wrong to take for granted the Soviet Union’s passionate resistance to Hitler. It remains extraordinary that its people, who had suffered so terribly from Stalin’s rule, nonetheless rallied to the standard of Mother Russia under his leadership, in a fashion that determined the course of history.

To grasp the nature of the war against Germany, a crude rule of thumb is useful. Every mile of front on which the Americans and British fought, every German soldier deployed in the west, was multiplied three- or four-fold in the east. The disparity in casualties both suffered and inflicted during the last year of the war, when the Western allies were fighting in north-west Europe, was even greater. Eisenhower’s armies suffered some 700,000 casualties—killed, wounded and taken prisoner—between D-Day and the end; the Russians suffered well over two million during the same period. Between June 1941 and December 1944, Germany lost 2.4 million battlefield dead on the Eastern Front, against 202,000 men killed fighting the Americans and British in North Africa, Italy and north-west Europe together. The conflict between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht dwarfed the western campaign in scale, intensity and savagery.

Most Russian civilians spent the war years on the brink of starvation, working a sixty-six-hour week with one rest-day a month, receiving half the rations of Germans. Only vegetables grown in sixteen million urban gardens saved many people from death. In the course of the war, some 29.5 million Soviet citizens were drafted for service of one kind or another. By the autumn of 1944, more than 11.4 million men and women were serving in Stalin’s forces, 6.7 million of these with the active army. All statistics are unreliable, but the best available suggest that Soviet forces suffered total losses of 8.7 million killed, together with twenty-two million sick and wounded. These casualties were, of course, additional to at least eighteen million Soviet civilians who died.

It is important to qualify Soviet casualty figures. They fail to differentiate between those who were killed by the Nazis and those who died or were allowed to die at Moscow’s hands. Stalin’s agents continued killing and imprisoning “saboteurs” and “enemies of the state” in the hundreds of thousands. A quarter of all deportees in Siberian labour camps died of starvation in 1942—some 352,000 of them. Beria recorded the deaths of 114,481 in 1944, the year of victories. Around 157,000 men were shot for alleged desertion, cowardice or other military crimes in 1941–42 alone. Official Soviet rationing policy reflected indifference to the deaths from hunger of many weak and elderly people, since these were incapable of working or fighting. Throughout the territories now occupied by the Red Army the NKVD, Stalin’s all-powerful secret police and enforcing militia, was rounding up German civilians and PoWs in vast numbers, and dispatching them for labour service in the Soviet Union. Beria reported to Stalin in November 1944, for instance, that 97,484 German men between the ages of seventeen and forty-five and women between eighteen and thirty were being shipped to the Ukrainian mines from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Some of these could replace the German slaves who were dying in Soviet hands—6,017 during the first ten days of November alone, as Beria also recorded.

Stalin dominated Russia’s war more absolutely than Hitler controlled Germany’s. The Nazi empire was fatally weakened by the rivalry, self-indulgence, strategic folly and administrative incompetence of its leaders. In the Soviet Union, there was only one fount of power, from whom there was no escape or appeal. Ismay, Churchill’s personal Chief of Staff, recoiled from the cringing subservience of Russia’s generals when he first visited the Kremlin in 1941. “It was nauseating,” he wrote, “to see brave men reduced to such abject servility.” The Soviet Union’s defeats in 1941–42 were chiefly attributable to Stalin’s own blunders. In the years that followed, however, in striking contrast to Hitler, the master of Russia learned lessons. Without surrendering any fraction of his power over the state, he delegated the conduct of battles to able commanders, and reaped the rewards. He displayed an intellect and mastery of detail which impressed even foreign visitors who were repelled by his insane cruelty. He showed himself the most successful warlord of the Second World War, contriving means and pursuing ends with a single-mindedness unimaginable in the democracies. Terror was a more fundamental instrument of Russia’s war-making than of Germany’s. Even Stalin’s most celebrated marshals were never free from its spectre.

In the late summer of 1944, Soviet armies stood on the Vistula after accomplishing their most spectacular victories of the war. Yet, in the eyes of the West, admiration for Russia’s military achievement was overshadowed by horror prompted by events in Poland, to which Stalin responded with indifference, or worse.

WARSAW’S AGONY

ON 1 AUGUST, on the orders of its commander, General Tadeusz Bor Komorowski, the Polish Resistance launched an uprising designed to wrest control of their nation’s capital from the Germans before the Russians arrived. At 1700 that day, “Hour Vee,” the red and white banner of Poland was hoisted above the Prudential building, Warsaw’s highest. The Poles signalled en clair to London: “The struggle [for the capital] has begun.” Among the first of many suicidally courageous actions, ninety-eight men of the “Stag” battalion sought to storm one German position armed only with revolvers. Just seven survived. Only one in seven of the 37,600 insurgents possessed weapons of any kind; 2,500 died on 1 August alone; 35,000 civilians were killed in the Vola suburb in the first week.

The “London Poles,” whose underground forces were known as the Resistance Army Krajowa, were goaded to act by nationalist fervour and by a radio broadcast on 29 July from Stalin’s communists, the “Lublin Poles.” This called for a people’s rising against the Nazis, and asserted that Russian help was at hand. Bor Komorowski believed that if the “London Poles” failed to mobilize, they would forfeit any claim to govern their own country. His intention was not to assist the approaching Russians and Lublin Poles, but to pre-empt their hegemony. He expected the Red Army to reach Warsaw within forty-eight hours, though he believed that his forces might maintain their struggle for five or six days if necessary. In the most spectacular and indeed reckless fashion, the Polish commander wanted it both ways: the success of his revolt hinged upon receiving Russian military support, while its explicit objective was to deny the Soviet Union political authority over his country.

The British Chiefs of Staff, recognizing their own inability to provide assistance, declined to offer the Poles any directive or guidance about their actions one way or the other. This, too, was extraordinarily irresponsible. Three months earlier the British Joint Intelligence Committee had concluded that, if the Poles carried out their long-planned uprising, it was doomed to failure in the absence of close co-operation with the Russians, which was unlikely to be forthcoming. It seems lamentable that, after making such an appreciation, the British failed to exert all possible pressure upon the Poles to abandon their fantasies. The Red Army made no move westward in support of the Rising. The scene was set for a tragedy.

On 31 July, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin had informed Tokyo that the Germans would not seek to hold Warsaw to the last. Withdrawal was indeed the Wehrmacht’s intention in the face of an envelopment by the Red Army; when this later came, Warsaw was scarcely defended. In August, however, confronted instead by domestic insurgency, the Nazis’ loathing and contempt for the Poles provoked them to exploit an opportunity to diminish the numbers of these troublesome people, and to reassert German authority. Military desirability and political inclination marched together. The Germans assumed that the Rising was orchestrated with the Soviets, and would soon be followed by a Russian link-up with the Resistance in Warsaw, which should be thwarted. Even in the last months of his empire, Hitler’s zeal in fulfilment of ideological doctrine never flagged. His business with the Jews was almost complete. The Nazis’ eagerness for innocent blood increased, rather than diminished, as their grasp upon power grew more precarious. German commanders, notably Heinrich Himmler, somehow scraped together forces to suppress the Rising. The Germans addressed their task with absolute ruthlessness. During the sixty-three days that followed, some 10,000 Resistance fighters died, along with 250,000 civilians—a quarter of Warsaw’s population—many of these people massacred in cold blood.

Cossacks, paratroopers and SS units were thrown into the battle. They employed flamethrowers, siege mortars, gas, explosive-carrying robots and systematic flooding of the Poles’ underground refuges. Much of Warsaw was reduced to rubble by bombardment. The surviving inhabitants were driven out into the countryside or shipped to concentration camps. The men of the SS, and especially the Dirlewanger Brigade, surpassed even their record in Russia of pillage, rape and mass murder, overlaid with sadism. The wounded were machine-gunned. Prisoners were hurled from the windows of apartment buildings. Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops. On 5 August Hans Frank, the Nazi governor, reported to Berlin: “For the most part, Warsaw is in flames. Burning down the houses is the most reliable means of liquidating the insurgents’ hide-outs.” Hitler awarded Knight’s Crosses to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Oskar Dirlewanger for their roles in recapturing the Polish capital. It is a measure of the savagery of the forces suppressing the Rising that the Nazis themselves shot the commander of the RONA Brigade, a unit of Russians serving in German uniform. Its anarchic brutalities became an embarrassment even to Himmler. The Germans lost 9,000 dead in Warsaw in the first three weeks of the Rising, amid merciless street fighting. “Kamil” Baczynski, one of many Polish poets who flourished in those days, wrote before he was killed on 4 August:

O Lord of the apocalypse! Lord of the World’s End!

  Put a voice in our mouths, and punishment in our hand.

The horrors of Warsaw highlighted the futility of any attempt by guerrillas to engage regular troops equipped with heavy weapons, artillery and armour. Though the Polish resisters were plentifully supplied with courage, most lacked essential military training. They were armed only with weapons parachuted from Britain, for many of which they possessed only a few magazines of ammunition apiece, together with such small arms and armoured vehicles as they could capture from the Wehrmacht. Lieutenant-General Wladyslaw Anders, commanding the Polish II Corps in Italy, was among those bitterly critical of the Rising. He was privately convinced that it must end in tragedy. He recognized, as others should have done at the outset, that irregular forces could neither defeat the armies of Hitler nor expect aid to do so from the Russians.

The Germans shrewdly grasped these realities. Ninth Army observed that “Army Krajowa considers ourselves and the Russians equally its enemies.” As early as 5 August, Ninth Army’s intelligence department suggested that “many civilians who were enthusiastic about the uprising are now having second thoughts . . . They fear that the city of Warsaw will suffer the same fate as the former Warsaw ghetto . . . They fear German revenge.” The insurgents’ leaders sought to inspire their own people and dispirit the enemy by feeding them upon fantasies: that 300 Soviet tanks were already advancing on Warsaw from the south-east; that Russian aircraft were only awaiting better weather to launch attacks in support of the uprising. Sceptical civilians remarked that the weather was not preventing the Germans from flying.

It has often been suggested that Stalin incited the Rising in order to induce the bitterly anti-communist Army Krajowa to immolate itself. This seems mistaken. The Lublin Poles’ appeals to their countrymen to revolt were of a piece with many other flights of radio propaganda rhetoric. The Soviet high command took them much less seriously than Bor Komorowski. A Western correspondent quizzed the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commanding 1st Belorussian Front opposite Warsaw, about the broadcast. Rokossovsky shrugged: “That was routine stuff.” The Red Army’s logistics were drastically stretched after its summer leap westwards. For the first ten days of August, Rokossovsky’s armies were committed to stemming an energetic German counter-attack east of the Vistula. In the beginning, therefore, Moscow had good military reasons for refusing to make a dash upon the Polish capital. The Russians might also have pointed out that in the west Eisenhower resisted all appeals from the Dutch to change Allied military plans and drive north in the winter of 1944, to save occupied Holland from terrible sufferings. The political and military leaders of the U.S. and Britain insisted that the best service they could render to Holland was to maintain their strategy to defeat Germany as swiftly as possible. They refused to allow military operations to be deflected by short-term humanitarian considerations.

It might also be noticed that in Italy the Allied Commander-in-Chief General Sir Harold Alexander encouraged partisans to rise on the widest pos-sible scale in the summer of 1944, when it was believed that liberation of the whole country was imminent. With the coming of winter, and the Allies bogged down in the mountains, the partisans suffered terribly from German counter-measures. In November, Alexander felt obliged to reverse his earlier policy and urge the partisans to abandon open military activity until spring. In some areas upon which German repression fell most heavily, there was deep and lasting bitterness about Allied incitement to premature action, followed by failure to relieve the partisans before the Germans fell upon them. Alexander could plead military necessity for his actions—and inaction. So did Stalin. All the Allies behaved with considerable cynicism in encouraging armed resistance in occupied Europe while possessing no means of preventing inevitable German retribution. The consequences for Warsaw were, however, vastly more terrible than anything which took place in the west.

Stalin, of course, went beyond mere passivity towards the uprising. He informed the Western allies, in response to their appeals for aid to the Poles, that he would not lift a finger to preserve these “criminals” from the consequences of their folly. He refused to provide refuelling facilities in Russian territory for British aircraft attempting arms drops to the insurgents. Late in the Rising, he allowed just one force of American aircraft to land at Poltava after dropping supplies, most of which fell into German hands. “We don’t want British and American planes mucking about here at the moment,” Rokossovsky told Alexander Werth. The RAF lost an aircraft for every ton of supplies dropped to the Poles on the perilous 780-mile trip from Italy. Forty-one Allied planes were destroyed out of 306 dispatched to aid the Warsaw resisters, while the nearest Russians were a mere fifteen miles away.

As we shall see later, when the Red Army occupied Poland its forces launched a ruthless second front against the survivors of Army Krajowa. This struggle continued long after Hitler fell, almost unnoticed by the world, with substantial casualties on both sides. Poland’s destiny, to become a Soviet vassal state, was decided before the first shot of the Rising was fired. One of the German propaganda leaflets launched into the Allied lines in north-west Europe was directed at the Polish Armoured Division: “WHY DIE FOR STALIN?” it demanded; “. . . your soldiers are not dying for democracy or the preservation of the democratic form of government—they are dying for the establishment of Communism and a form of the Stalinist tyranny . . . so that Poland shall be a Soviet state.” From a Polish viewpoint, all this was perfectly true. “Within a very short space of time,” a modern Russian historian writes, “the Poles were translated from Russia’s enemies to its allies, and then once more into its enemies.”

It is unlikely that the full facts about Stalin’s actions in the autumn of 1944 will ever be known. Even the most distinguished Western historian of Poland, Norman Davies, writing in 2003 with access to considerable Soviet documentation, concludes that many aspects of Russian behaviour remain conjectural. There were real tensions between Moscow and its lackeys, the communist Lublin Poles, who seem to have shared the assumption of Bor Komorowski’s men that the Red Army would move swiftly to liberate Warsaw. Soviet policy wavered through August and September. In the early stages of the Rising, Moscow seemed merely sceptical and indifferent about its outcome. In late August, however, Stalin went much further, making a considered decision to allow the Germans to eliminate the Army Krajowa in Warsaw. He shifted troops from the Vistula Front to the Baltic and the Balkans, even while the Army Krajowa was in the midst of its agony a few miles westward. To confuse matters further, he allowed Soviet forces to make some trifling gestures of support for the beleaguered Poles, to appease the Western allies. But, while Rokossovsky busied himself establishing bridgeheads on the western bank of the Vistula to secure start lines for further advances, the Red Army made no substantial moves to enter the Polish capital. “The Soviet government do not wish to associate themselves directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw,” the Soviet deputy commissar for foreign affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, told Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador in Moscow, on 18 August.

The story is rendered still uglier by the behaviour of some of those in the West. The socialist intelligentsia was still much enamoured of the Soviet Union. British media comment on the Rising was slight and massively ill informed. Some writers remained for weeks extravagantly sympathetic to Soviet passivity. The left-wing New Statesman dismissed the Polish resisters as “Macchiavellian dilettanti.” The Times observed indulgently: “It is not difficult to understand Russian unwillingness to supply arms to people who are opposed to friendly relations with Russia.” George Orwell, almost alone among his kind, denounced Russian behaviour towards Poland passionately and publicly, in a noble flight of prose in Tribune: “the ‘Lublin regime’ is not a victory for socialism . . . It is the reduction of Poland to a vassal state . . . Woe to those in a vassal state who want to maintain their independent views and policies . . . If they happen to lead a heroic rising that embarrasses the protégés of the great ‘Protecting’ powers, they will be stigmatised as ‘criminals’ . . . Please do not ask us to show enthusiasm for such policies.” Orwell castigated his compatriots who refused to consider whether a given Russian action was or was not defensible. Instead, they simply said to each other: “ ‘This is Russian policy; how can we make it appear right? . . . The Russians are powerful in Eastern Europe, we are not; therefore we must not oppose them.’ This involves the principle, of its nature alien to Socialism, that you must not protest against an evil which you cannot prevent.”

Far more serious than the behaviour of British communist fellow-travellers, however, was the refusal of President Roosevelt to exert wholehearted pressure on Moscow. The secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, argued that the U.S. should seek to send aid to Warsaw, if remotely feasible. Roosevelt appalled Churchill, however, by the cold-bloodedness of a note drafted by his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, on 5 September: “I am informed by my officers of Military Intelligence that the fighting Poles have departed from Warsaw, and that the Germans are now in full control . . . The problem of relief for the Poles in Warsaw has therefore, unfortunately, been solved by delay and German action.” In reality, of course, while the Poles had been driven out of Warsaw’s Old Town, they were still fighting fiercely in the centre of the capital. But Warsaw was scarcely discussed at the Anglo-American Octagon conference in Quebec in mid-September. The Russians continued to treat the Poles’ lunge for freedom with cold contempt. Rokossovsky likened the Rising to “the clown in the circus who pops up at the wrong moment and only gets wrapped up in the carpet.” The marshal later asserted that, if the Poles had delayed their revolt until his forces had gained the Praga suburb of Warsaw east of the Vistula in September, the liberation of the city might have been achieved. This seems implausible.

Churchill described Soviet behaviour at this period as “strange and sinister.” The prime minister recognized Stalin’s determination to impose Soviet hegemony upon every state liberated by his armies. The Russian leader perceived this as natural justice. He also cherished a bizarre expectation that such a polity would be welcomed by the proletarians of eastern Europe. The absence of such sentiment fuelled his animosity towards the Poles. American attention was fixed upon the military defeat of the Nazis. Washington displayed a remarkable indifference to the political future of the eastern battlefields until it was too late. Roosevelt’s most recent biographer seeks to acquit his hero of the charge of naivety towards the Soviet Union in 1945, pleading the inevitability of Soviet domination. This argument seems unconvincing. Too many of those closest to Roosevelt at this period have testified to their dismay about his behaviour towards Stalin, and about the president’s conviction that he could do business with the Soviets if the British imperialists were circumvented. Yet it is unmistakably true that the Russians already stood on Polish soil, beyond any conceivable reach of Anglo-American forces. Even if the Red Army had hastened forward to relieve Warsaw in August or September, the fate of the insurgents would have been no different. Those who resisted Soviet mastery, as many later attempted to do, would merely have been killed by Russian bullets rather than German ones.

Polish behaviour was characterized from beginning to end by a heroic spirit of self-immolation. Even when the Poles recognized that the Soviets were disinclined to aid them, they rejected Stalin’s demands. The Soviet leader indicated to the Polish prime minister, leader of the London Poles who visited Moscow early in August, that before he could expect anything from the Russians his government must resign; the Soviet seizure of eastern Poland must be recognized; and the London Poles must publicly accept Moscow’s preposterous claim that the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn was the work of the Nazis, not the Soviets. When Bor Komorowski in Warsaw heard of all this, he signalled proudly on 26 August: “Poland has not been fighting the Germans for five years, bearing the greatest losses, just to capitulate to Russia. Our fight against the Germans has shown that . . . we love freedom more than life.” Here, indeed, reality matched rhetoric in the most dreadful fashion.

There was a tragic romance about the mood in Warsaw, even as the city was battered into ruin. The Poles, determined to celebrate the resurrection of their national culture amid catastrophe, staged recitals, concerts, plays in the public buildings within their perimeter. A profusion of pamphlets, newspapers and political treatises was written and published. There was a plan to stage an opera, until the leading players were killed in action. An engaged couple, a lieutenant and a girl courier, asked to be married in the city’s cathedral. One of the two witnesses could not walk, having been wounded by shrapnel. He was carried into the cathedral sacristy for the wedding on the back of his fellow witness. The twenty-three-year-old bride and groom were buried alive by a Stuka strike a few days later.

The Red Army observed the last thrashings of the Rising with detached contempt. “The British and Americans are supplying the Germans, not the insurgents,” reported an officer of 1st Belorussian Front after watching an Allied parachute drop on 30 September. A Soviet agent codenamed Oleg who was sent to make contact with the Rising’s leaders in the last days reported afterwards to Moscow: “The interview was not particularly friendly. I could sense their suspicion and hostility towards me, as a representative of the Red Army.” The Russians had little enough compassion to spare for their own people. Why should they waste it on Poles?

The last shot of the Warsaw battle was fired on 2 October 1944, sixty-seven days after it began. Throughout September, while the Resisters in Warsaw were negotiating with the Germans through the Red Cross for a ceasefire, they rejected capitulation and insisted upon terms, notably the recognition of Poland’s fighters as combatants, entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. In this they achieved some small measure of success. An officer of the Army Krajowa, Major Kazimierz Sztermal, confronted von dem Bach-Zelewski, Nazi high priest at Warsaw’s sacrifice: “You, the nation which gave your Goethe and Schiller to the world, have tried through terror to take the rights of freedom and existence from us.” The German shrugged: “This is war.” So indeed it was, in Hitler’s universe. The survivors—11,668 Polish combatants including 2,000 women, together with countless thousands of civilians—marched out in their columns of misery, to face imprisonment or mere destitution. Some shot themselves rather than accept captivity. After the insurgents had made their last broadcast from their own Radio Lightning, they smashed its transmitter with a sledgehammer. “We have been treated worse than Hitler’s allies in Romania, Italy and Finland,” declared the Polish Home Council of Ministers in its final statement on 3 October. “[Our] Rising is going under at a time when our armies abroad are helping to liberate France, Belgium and Holland . . . may the God of Justice pronounce a verdict on the terrible wrong, which the Polish nation has encountered, and may He punish the perpetrators.”

The Germans claimed to have lost 17,000 dead. The Rising was the ultimate heroic folly of the European Resistance movement nurtured by Churchill since 1940. For all the succour which Resistance gave to the soul of occupied Europe both during and after the Second World War, except in Yugoslavia its military achievements were negligible, and purchased at a grim price in blood. The Allied Chiefs of Staff would have done well to recall an observation of Wellington, derived from his experience of guerrilla warfare in the Iberian peninsula 140 years earlier: “I always had a horror of revolutionizing any country . . . I always said, if they rise of themselves, well and good, but do not stir them up; it is a fearful responsibility.”

There is just a grain of truth in Stalin’s self-serving remark: “These people [the Home Army] have exploited the good faith of the inhabitants of Warsaw, throwing many almost unarmed people against the German guns, tanks, and aircraft. A situation has arisen in which each new day serves, not the Poles . . . but the Hitlerites who are inhumanly shooting down the inhabitants of Warsaw.” The Warsaw Rising was of a piece with the Polish people’s long history of acts of passion, courage, misjudgement, succeeded by repression at the hands of forces beyond their power to resist. When Rokossovsky’s forces at last seized the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, the NKVD began rounding up the fighters of Army Krajowa with the same ruthlessness as the Germans. “Nazi and Soviet repressions were proceeding simultaneously in one and the same city,” observes Norman Davies. For the Western allies, the conduct of the war was overwhelmingly a military matter. For the Soviet Union, it never ceased to be also a political one.

“WE WERE DIFFERENT PEOPLE IN 1944”

MILOVAN DJILAS met a Soviet soldier on a road in Yugoslavia one day in October 1944. The Russian was driving a horse-drawn cart loaded with sacks, pots and bedspreads. He hailed the Yugoslav partisan and asked: “Is this the road to Berlin?” This was the only destination the man recognized, or had thought of since Stalingrad. The soldiers of the Red Army had seen too much destruction and misery in their own country to be shocked by what they found in eastern Europe. For days after Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko crossed the Polish border in August 1944 with troops of 1st Belorussian Front, he did not see a single civilian. All had fled, save those too old to move. There were only burning buildings, and abandoned German vehicles and equipment. A few Russians recognized that something especially shocking had happened. “We knew that Warsaw was once the most beautiful capital in Europe,” said Alexandr Markov, a twenty-one-year-old Soviet bomber pilot. “Now, when we flew over it we saw huge palls of smoke, and even from the air we could smell burned flesh. My spine crawled, to see so much beauty transformed into ruins . . . all those golden bell towers gone.” Yelena Kogan, serving as an interpreter with the NKVD, said long afterwards: “I felt terrible about what happened in Warsaw. I still don’t know the truth about what happened politically.” Yet few Russians harboured love or sympathy for Poles. Stalin had been shooting them in tens of thousands since the Purges of the late 1930s. His people regarded them with no greater pity after the horrors of the Rising than before. A Soviet girl soldier wrote to a friend about the Poles: “When you look at them, you feel such anger, such hatred. They’re having fun, loving and living. And you are fighting to liberate them! They just laugh at us Russians. Bastards!”

The mood within the Red Army in the autumn of 1944 was incomparably different from that of earlier years. Many American and British soldiers had seen little or no action before D-Day. Most Soviet soldiers, by contrast, had fought without interruption or leave since June 1941. They were weary, but now they were also exultant. “It never looked easy on our front,” said Corporal Anna Nikyunas, a veteran of the siege of Leningrad, “but in 1944 there was a totally different feeling: we knew that we would win.” “It was a great thing to fight during this time when at last we were on top,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov: “It was a wonderful life in reconnaissance in the last months of the war—lots of loot, vodka, brandy, girls everywhere. We wanted to get to Germany, to be there for the end.” Corporal Anatoly Osminov of 32nd Tank Army said: “It was good to be out of Russia, and fighting on enemy soil.”

“We were different people in 1944,” observed Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko. “We had enough weapons. Our officers had learned how to plan operations. We knew our business.” Yet he added: “We never thought about the end of the war. The only thing to do was to get through the tasks of one day at a time.” Given the speed of the Russians’ huge advances, many men had no idea where they were, or even what country they were in. “Sometimes somebody would ask: ‘Where are we, by the way?’ ” said Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko, a staff officer with 2nd Ukrainian Front. “The answer would be: ‘Oh, Poland maybe.’ It was only when we reached a big city that the place name meant anything. Once, in Rumania, a division was ordered to advance on some town, and mistook another of similar name for its objective. There was an inquiry. People were shot for less.” The Red Army was no longer much troubled by the Luftwaffe, cause of such grief in earlier years. It took time for men who had known the earlier campaigns, in which advances were measured in metres, to adjust to the vast movements of 1944. “We were so used to living in the earth,” said Nikolai Timoshenko. “We felt positively disorientated out of trenches. It seemed an entirely different war.”

Stalin’s armies had progressed far in skills and equipment since the desperate days of 1941 and 1942. In attack, Russian commanders displayed much better understanding than their American counterparts of the importance of concentration—focusing a massive weight of men and armour on their main axis of advance. Soviet generals persisted with assaults after losses that would have caused any Anglo-American operation to be broken off. Even after receiving substantial shipments of American radio equipment, the Soviet armies were handicapped by poor communications. Higher commands were sometimes uncertain of what whole divisions were doing, and this remained a weakness until the end, deplored in a host of Red Army internal reports.

These were soldiers drawn from a society in which extreme harshness, the capacity both to endure and to inflict pain, had been inbred for centuries, and refined to the highest degree under Stalin. Shortly before Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s tank unit crossed the border from Russia into Poland, as they halted in a village just vacated by the Germans, a woman came out of a house and presented his crew with a cake. “I’ve been waiting four years to do this,” she said. Kudryashov’s orderly Semyon came from a village fifteen miles away. He begged leave to go home and see how his family had fared. Inevitably, this was refused. Semyon sulked, in an emotional mood. When he encountered a woman in the village who was said to have slept with German soldiers, he shot her. Asked to explain himself, he said: “I suddenly thought: maybe my wife also has been sleeping with German soldiers.” Kudryashov reported the incident to his brigade commander, who said simply: “I quite understand.” This small lapse of propriety was forgotten.

The war in the east was characterized by colossal cruelties. By 1944, these had become institutionalized on both sides of the front. Hitler and Stalin nurtured in their respective peoples a systemic inhumanity which found full play upon the battlefield. German soldiers had been conditioned for a decade to regard Slavic people as sub-humans. It was not only the SS who killed Russians of all ages and both sexes with casual indifference.

“Here in the east,” wrote Colonel-General Hermann Hoth of the German Seventeenth Army in an order to his men, “spiritually unbridgeable conceptions are fighting each other: German sense of honour and race; and a soldierly tradition of many centuries, against an Asiatic mode of thinking and primitive instincts, whipped up by a small number of mostly Jewish intellectuals.” The American historian Omer Bartov writes: “Increasingly during the last two years of the war, [German] troops at the front came to see themselves as the missionaries of the entire German nation, indeed of Western civilization as a whole. Rational evaluation and clear perception of events were replaced by intense terror from and rage against a faceless, monstrous enemy.” Neither Germans nor Russians readily offered quarter, save when prisoners were required for intelligence purposes, or more slaves were needed for their respective mines and factories. At Dr. Nikolai Senkevich’s field hospital, a group of captured Germans refused to answer questions from their interrogators: “We simply took them 100 metres off, and they were shot.” Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko said: “The rule of war is that you go into battle, you see the enemy, and that enemy is not a human being. Putting your hands up isn’t going to save you.” Only a minority of Germans who attempted to surrender reached PoW camps. “We killed prisoners just like that,” said Captain Vasily Krylov, snapping his fingers. “If soldiers were told to escort them to the rear, more often than not they were ‘shot while trying to escape’.” Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov: “There was no serious control over the treatment of prisoners. If they were sent back to regimental headquarters, they were usually shot on the way.” Vitold Kubashevsky hated shooting prisoners, and found himself striving to avoid any eye contact with the doomed men, but like everyone else he fired when he was told to do so—which was invariably the case with Waffen SS captives.

It is interesting that such an attitude reflected the vision of Russia’s greatest novelist a century earlier. Leo Tolstoy argued that the taking of prisoners maintained a sham of humanity amid the reality that war “is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game . . . If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for.”

The history of German barbarity within the Soviet Union since 1941 was familiar to every Russian soldier. Many had experienced its manifestations at first hand. Russians were repelled by Germans’ pretensions to represent a superior civilization. “They are completely shameless,” a Russian war correspondent, Alexei Surkov, observed with disgust. “They strip naked in front of women to wash. They mount women like stallions. They fart at table when they eat. Do they behave in this way at home?” Stalin’s soldiers were encouraged to keep “ledgers of revenge,” recording German atrocities, and to match these with notes about their personal contributions to levelling the account. Political officers held “Revenge Meetings,” fostering the same spirit.

The draconian retribution that fell upon those who flinched or failed was an important force in sustaining Russian will. Russians have always prided themselves upon the extravagance of their own emotions and behaviour. Nikolai Lvov, the nineteenth-century poet–engineer, applauded his people’s spontaneity:

In foreign lands all goes to a plan

Words are weighed, steps measured.

But among us Russians there is fiery life,

Our speech is thunder and sparks fly.

The Red Army often displayed courage and determination far beyond anything that could have been asked of American or British troops. Yet its achievements on the battlefield seem all the more remarkable given its manic indiscipline. Even the relentless efforts of firing squads proved unable to deter excesses that often became suicidal. Huge injections of alcohol alone rendered service in the eastern war endurable to many of those who took part. Yet institutionalized alcoholism could be deadly to men in possession of weapons. Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov’s orderly started a drunken fight following an argument about—of all things—which tank possessed the thickest armour. A pilot shot him dead. In a cellar in the Hungarian town of Tokay, Kudryashov saw the bodies of three soldiers who had drowned. After piercing a vast vat of wine with tommy-gun fire, they drank themselves insensible, then lay collapsed upon the floor until a torrent submerged them. Recklessness with vehicles was a source of many Russian casualties. “Brake or die,” proclaimed a Red Army sign posted on many roads in Yugoslavia, but scores of Russian truck drivers cheerfully ignored it—and died. Vladimir Gormin once saw three successive Dodges in a column surge over the same precipice. Such behaviour seems of a piece with Orlando Figes’s description of the historic Russian experience: “long periods of humility and patience interspersed with bouts of joyous freedom and violent release.”

A German doctor, Hans von Lehndorff, painted a vivid word portrait of the more primitive soldiers of the Red Army, when he observed them as a prisoner. “They are utterly insensitive to noise,” he wrote.

Some of them stand the whole day in the garages, working all the available motor-horns. The radio blares without a stop in their quarters, until far into the night. Lighting circuits are installed at top speed, and where there is glass left in the windows, holes are shot in the panes so that the wires can be led through. One is repeatedly astonished at the rapidity with which they hit on the simplest way of attaining their purpose; the immediate moment is all that exists for them; everything must serve it, no matter whether what they ruin in the process is something they will be in dire need of the next minute. One is perpetually dumbfounded by their total lack of any relationship to things which, to us, are a part of life itself. One ends by giving up thinking of them as creatures of one’s own kind, and gradually assumes the attitude of lion-tamer . . . To show fear is to fare worst of all with them, it provokes them visibly to attack. Audacity, on the other hand, can get one a surprisingly long way. The most hopeless pol-icy of all is to try and make them like you . . . The Russians have no use for such arts; they use people of that sort for their own purposes and openly despise them . . . It never occurs to them to look upon us as anything resembling themselves, and our claims on their humanity find hardly any echo in them. The fact that they drive cars, fire rifles, listen to the radio, and are trained to many other of our tricks, still creates no living bridge from man to man.

Some writers have sought to argue that by 1944 the Red soldier was man for man a match for his counterpart of the Wehrmacht. The truth seems more complicated. At the highest level, Soviet generalship was much more imaginative than that of the Western armies. Zhukov was the outstanding Allied commander of the Second World War, more effective than his Anglo-American counterparts, master of the grand envelopment. Several other Soviet marshals—Vasilevsky, Konev, Chernyakhovsky, Rokossovsky—displayed the highest gifts.

On the ground, the Russians excelled at night fighting and patrolling. Every German soldier who moved from the Eastern Front to the west remarked upon the dramatic change he experienced, that he could move freely during the hours of darkness, when the Americans, especially, were content to leave the front in peace. The Russians harassed the enemy relentlessly. Night patrols sometimes slit the throats of German sentries and left the mutilated bodies to provide food for thought among their surviving comrades. Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov, a Soviet reconnaissance officer, derived pride and pleasure from his hours watching the German lines through his periscope, observing the enemy eating, sleeping, washing, defecating. “I always felt that I knew the Germans better than most men, because I had spent so much time so close to them.” The Germans respected Russian exploitation of well-camouflaged massed anti-tank guns in defence. Lacking any counterpart for the hand-held bazooka, PIAT or faust, Soviet infantry would drag anti-tank guns into attacks immediately behind their spearheads.

The Russians’ command of artillery was superb, though it relied for effect upon weight rather than accuracy of fire. Their principal weapons, including the T-34 and Stalin tanks, together with their 1944–45 aircraft, were as good as or better than anything the Western allies possessed. They had developed one weapon unique to themselves, the Katyusha, which the Germans greatly feared. A battery of the rockets deployed on trucks could deliver in seconds a barrage of 192 projectiles, each weighing 120 pounds, which carpeted a front 400 yards wide, to a depth of 300 yards. Katyushas could be effective up to four miles, but they were dangerous to the firer as well as to the enemy, especially if he was careless with fusing. The rockets were not remotely as accurate as the German Nebelwerfer multiple mortar. Katyushas not infrequently savaged their own infantry if a launch rail became bent or a stabilizing fin fell off. Lieutenant Alexandr Vostrukhin took the precaution of crawling under his tank whenever outgoing rockets were flying overhead, “just in case.” But their moral effect on the enemy was devastating. Just as British and American airmen would chalk rude messages on their bombs, so Russian crews scrawled on their rockets: “This is for my mother and sister.” When Lieutenant Valentin Krulik first saw massed Katyushas in action, he was awed by “this incredible wall of fire, which the batteries kept up for most of the day.” The batteries were seldom employed casually. They were almost always used to support a big attack or a desperate defence.

Yet, if the Red Army at last possessed hitting power and command skills as great as those of any combatant, its infantry and armoured assaults relied upon the sacrifice of lives rather than upon tactical ingenuity or even common prudence. To this day, Russian casualty figures are a source of perverse pride to many veterans. “Of course the Red Army was reckless with the lives of our men,” said Vladimir Gormin of 3rd Ukrainian Front. “Nobody knew how many died, and who cared, anyway? It was typical that there was always some grand operation on the great revolutionary holidays—1 May, 7 November, 23 February. Men died, simply so that a few generals could collect another medal.” By contrast with the Western armies, the Soviets adopted a cavalier attitude to the threat of encirclement. “The Shock Armies pushed on regardless of what was happening on their flanks,” said a Russian officer. “They got cut off by the Germans, sometimes for weeks, sometimes running out of fuel, food, ammunition. But they were expected to break out again.”

Lieutenant Tony Saurma, who fought the Red Army as a Tiger troop commander with the famous Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadier Division from 1942 to the end, admired the stoicism of the Russian soldier. His unit often fought opposite the Soviet “Red Flag” Guards Division. Each side collected the other’s cap badges. But Saurma qualified his respect by saying: “The Russians didn’t think much. They were usually being driven by their officers.” The Germans feared the Soviet Stalin tank, but thought little of Soviet tank gunnery. In battle, Saurma sought to keep moving constantly. “It’s much harder to hit a running hare,” he told his own tank commanders. Like every German soldier, he was awed by the spectacle of the Red Army in attack. T-34s would approach six, twelve abreast. The Germans would knock out four or five, but there were always more. “You couldn’t believe the way they kept coming—their infantry simply charging our tanks, running and shouting, even when the bodies were piled up in front of our positions. Sometimes our infantry seemed paralysed by the spectacle. One thought: ‘How can we ever stop such people?’ ” Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a Wehrmacht officer who became a post-war Bundeswehr general, said: “The Russians were not good soldiers. But they had very good generals, and they had mass.”

The Nazis acknowledged an unwilling but profound respect for the Russians as adversaries which they never extended to the Americans and British. Deriding the Western allies’ lack of spirit, Hitler said at one of his military conferences: “The Russian—that pig—has managed it. If someone starts to whine among us, I can only say: take the Russian in his situation in Leningrad.” General Heinz Guderian, the Army Chief of Staff, agreed that the Russians were “brilliantly” led. Hitler marvelled: “The way they have survived this crisis [Leningrad]!” Göring interjected: “They let a million die of starvation.” Guderian said: “They lead very energetically, very quickly, and very decisively. It is a lot.” Stalin returned the respect of his adversary, once describing Hitler to Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins as “a very able man.”

The fastidiousness of the Americans and British about the lives of their men was admirable in humanitarian terms, and reflected the fact that the Western allies possessed strategic choices about where and when to confront the Germans. Delaying D-Day until June 1944 represented a prudent, even self-indulgent decision, of a kind that was denied to the Russians. They were forced to maintain an unbroken struggle from June 1941 to the end, because their armies were continuously in the presence of the enemy. It was necessary for somebody, somewhere, to pay a heavy price to break down the mass of the Wehrmacht. Who can imagine the democracies, in any circumstances, bearing a loss akin to that of the 900,000 citizens of Leningrad who starved to death to sustain its defence? Even if Britain had been invaded, the inhabitants of its cities would have chosen surrender rather than eat each other. American and British leaders and generals required a degree of consent from their soldiers and their peoples. It would be wrong to underrate the degree of consent even in Stalin’s Russia, the real patriotic passion that impelled most of its people to resist the Germans. In decisive contrast to the Russians’ military collapse before the 1917 Revolution, the national spirit of the Red Army grew with every day of war. But it would be foolish also to deny the compulsion which underpinned the Soviet war effort, reinforced by draconian and usually mortal sanctions against those who faltered.

In the autumn of 1944, Stalin’s armies faced the Germans on fronts totalling almost 2,000 miles—though now shortening fast—and embracing the soil of eight foreign countries. For both sides, it was a stupendous undertaking to maintain supplies of men, food, weapons and ammunition to the millions doing the fighting. In 1944, the Soviet supply system delivered the equivalent of 1,164,000 railway wagon-loads of supplies to the fronts, of which ammunition alone accounted for 118,000. Stalin’s armed forces consumed four million tons of fuel in 1944. Russia’s factories in the last year of war produced almost 30,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, together with 40,000 aircraft. The Red Army had travelled an immeasurable distance since June 1941, from the days when men were expected to arm themselves by seizing the rifles of the dead on the battlefield, Soviet airmen fought in biplanes and there were no tank radios. Private Vitold Kubashevsky of 3rd Belorussian Front remembered fighting through the campaigns of 1942 wearing lapti—boots made for his unit by local peasants out of birch-bark—and patched or washed clothing stripped from dead or wounded men.

American supplies made a critical contribution. It was often suggested in Washington and London that the Soviets were ungrateful. Stalin might have given the contemptuous response he once gave to Zinoviev, who made the same charge: “Gratitude? Gratitude is a dog’s disease!” Russians observed that America’s contribution to the war cost mere money. Russia was paying for her victories with blood, torrents of blood. Woven into the entire Soviet vision of the Second World War from 1941 to the present day, transcending any issue of mere ideology or propaganda, has been the conviction that the Western allies were content to wage war against the Nazis at their leisure, husbanding the lives of their peoples with bourgeois parsimony. Churchill observed, with justice, that Britain entered the war in 1939 as a matter of principle, and fought alone for almost two years, while Russia was content to play vulture on the carcasses of Hitler’s kills until Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It was impossible to dispute, however, that Stalin’s people were overwhelmingly responsible for destroying Hitler’s armies.

The remains of Germany’s Army Group Centre now stood on the Vistula less than 400 miles from Berlin. Marshals Rokossovsky and Zhukov held several bridgeheads westwards across the river, which repeated German counter-attacks had failed to dislodge. On the great Polish plain, the River Oder was the only major natural obstacle which remained between Stalin’s armies and Hitler’s capital. Yet the price of the Russians’ huge summer advances was that months of labour became necessary, to rearm and resupply Stalin’s armies before they could strike anew. Their difficulties in the autumn of 1944 mirrored those of the Americans and British on a larger scale and over much greater distances. The Russians customarily required three months after a big offensive on a given front before they were ready to hurl themselves forward once more. From Poland southwards to the Czech border, between September and the turn of the year there were no significant advances. Men on both sides dug, patrolled, rested as best they could, and harassed each other’s positions. Germans and Soviets alike recognized that this was a mere respite before a new and even more terrible battle.

Yet, even while the central front lay quiescent through the autumn months, bitter fighting continued in the Baltic states. The German Army Group North still possessed some powerful formations and commanders. Nine hundred thousand Soviet troops together with 1,328 tanks and self-propelled guns were deployed on a battlefront that sometimes extended to 750 miles. Advancing Soviet forces which broke through a German line repeatedly found the enemy retreating to new prepared positions a few miles back. The Wehrmacht’s appetite for counter-attack seldom faltered. Between 14 September and 24 November 1944, Stalin’s three Baltic Fronts suffered 103,946, 73,735 and 55,488 casualties respectively. The Leningrad Front added a further 28,776. The Germans were pushed back into Baltic enclaves at Courland and Memel, but the Russians failed to achieve the absolute destruction of the enemy’s forces which they had sought. Any rational commander would have pulled back German forces from the Baltic states to East Prussia and Poland, to provide desperately needed reinforcements for the defence of the German homeland. But Hitler, obsessive in his rejection of retreat, insisted that he must maintain a foothold on the Baltic coastline, as a testing centre for the new generation of U-boats. Through October and November, the Wehrmacht did so at dreadful cost.

Every Russian with a spark of honesty acknowledged respect for the enemy’s fighting power. “I was not surprised the Germans fought to the end,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky. “They did what we would have done. They were the only fighters in Europe who deserved our respect.” “They were wonderful soldiers,” said Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko, a Cossack. “The Hungarians, Rumanians, were nothing to the Germans. The German nation has a marvellous discipline, and they were very well trained. Russian history has always been entwined with that of Germany. Russians are good soldiers, but our culture is different. We had to teach ourselves how to fight—our training was poor. When we advanced, we often found ourselves outrunning our supplies. The Germans were better organized.” Yet none of this diminished his hatred for Hitler’s nation. “A soldier who hates the enemy is a good soldier,” said Timoshenko. Most of his schoolfriends were killed in the years of war—the rollcall of death was endless. Many of his old schoolteachers were slaughtered by the Germans during their occupation of his home district around Kuban. Like a host of Soviet soldiers, he entered the last phase of the war with the sense of a long, bloody score to pay off.

Through the autumn of 1944, the Soviets made dramatic advances in southern Europe. While the Western allies were closing up to the German frontier, in the east throughout September the 1st and 4th Ukrainian Fronts drove west, deep into Hungary, “a land so flat that you could have played golf on it,” as Lieutenant Valentin Krulik of Sixth Guards Tank Army observed laconically. Bitter fighting persisted through November and December, with the Germans in Budapest encircled and cut off by the end of the year. Most of the Hungarian population fled before the Red Army. One report to Stalin at the end of November described how when Soviet forces entered Kethemet, a town once occupied by 87,000 people, only 7,000 remained. The NKVD claimed that Hungarians fired on Soviet troops when they were obliged to withdraw during a local German counter-attack: “a Hungarian fascist shot a Soviet lieutenant with a hunting rifle.”

Such allegations were, of course, employed to justify savage retribution when Soviet forces secured an area. And as news of the Red Army’s ruthlessness spread, so the great migration before the Soviet advance increased in scale and desperation. “[Russian] soldiers’ conduct in this enemy country was influenced by the press, and by [political officers’] talks invoking hatred, and calling for revenge and retribution,” wrote Gabriel Temkin, an interpreter with 78th Rifle Division of Twenty-seventh Army. “The simplest way to avenge was to prevail over the enemy’s women, to satisfy a sexual need, while simultaneously retaliating for actual or perceived wrongs.”

While the qualitative superiority of the German Army to its opponents should be acknowledged by every student of the Second World War, it would be mistaken to imagine the Wehrmacht fighting with skill and imagination on all occasions. The gun in Tony Saurma’s Tiger of the Grossdeutschland once jammed in action, because his loader was drunk. Especially in the last months of the war, many German after-action reports contain cries of anguish about command follies and poor performance by untrained soldiers with inadequate support. A characteristic account from Kampfgruppe Oelmer, about an action at Tapiostentmarton on 11 November 1944, paints a sorry picture of incompetence. Oelmer violently protested orders from 13th Panzer Division to conduct a night attack with his Tiger battalion:

1. The wood was heavily occupied by the enemy . . . it was not possible, even in daylight, to push through it with Tigers without very strong infantry close support. 2. The terrain was very marshy, and it was impossible to leave the roads, especially at night. 3. Tigers on roads cannot even traverse their guns because of the trees, and if one tank was knocked out, it would become impossible for others to pass it. 4. Tigers cannot drive around at night five kilometres in front of our own main battle line on ground impassable for armour. 5. Last night’s forced march reduced the unit’s strength to six fully operational tanks, and one conditionally operational.

Despite heavy rain and pitch-black conditions, 13th Panzer insisted that the attack should go ahead. One Tiger soon threw a track, and two others became bogged down. A Russian anti-tank gun disposed of another, killing its crew. The remainder were soon immobilized by the terrain. “Working with this division was extremely disagreeable,” observed the German tank commander angrily. “Absolutely no attention was paid to the tactical principles for employing Tigers. When a vehicle carrying forward supplies broke down and a request was made for the loan of another for a few hours, the division’s senior staff officer refused, saying: ‘it’s your problem to get your own fuel forward! I’m not here to lug fuel for you!’ ” In the east as in the west, therefore, immense frustrations and setbacks dogged the operations of the German Army in the last year of the war. Not every German commander was a von Manstein, not every soldier a young Waffen SS fanatic. Yet the achievement of the Wehrmacht in resisting the Red Army against overwhelming odds, and amid such follies as that described above, remained remarkable.

The Russians swiftly secured Bulgaria and began to move into Yugoslavia. Major Dmitry Kalafati, a thirty-year-old graduate student from the Ukraine who became a distinguished scientist after the war, was ordered to take four artillery regiments to provide support for infantry of the 6th People’s Proletarian Division of Tito’s army. He found this a disturbing experience, since the partisans were prone to decamp to local villages at night, leaving the Russian guns unprotected. Tito’s men were also studiedly vague about where they might encounter the Germans. By the autumn of 1944, Russian ground forces were receiving highly effective tactical air support, but in Yugoslavia Kalafati was constantly frustrated by the refusal of Sixteenth Aviation Army to respond to his coded requests for Stormoviks. In desperation he sent a plain-language signal, “Fuck you—where are the planes?,” which at last produced Soviet dive-bombers.

Just as the British failed to cut off the retreat of the German Fifteenth Army through Holland, so in the east the German Army Groups E and F retreated north and west from the Balkans, escaping entrapment by the Russians sweeping through Rumania. Once again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated its skill in postponing the inevitable. Although the Warsaw Rising is well known in the West, much less familiar is the Slovak revolt in the autumn of 1944. It began in eastern Slovakia in late August. Local partisans—who were, unlike those of Warsaw, overwhelmingly loyal to Moscow—perceived their Soviet liberators close at hand beyond the Carpathians. When the Slovaks rebelled against their German occupiers, the Russians marched to their aid. Soviet troops pushed west with the support of Moscow-trained Czech troops. But the Germans concentrated two SS and five Wehrmacht divisions to resist the Soviet advance, and they were successful. “Because of the mountainous terrain, we would not use tanks and cavalry effectively, so could not exploit our successes,” Konev wrote to Zhukov on 27 September. “Our infantry was also untrained in mountain warfare. We advanced so slowly that the enemy had time to move troops to threatened sectors.” Konev reported that most of his infantry divisions were reduced to barely 3,000 men apiece, and his tank corps to an average of sixty tanks, most of which suffered constant mechanical breakdown in the mountains. Shortages of ammunition and fuel made it impossible to use artillery effectively. Between 8 September and 28 October, Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front in the East Carpathians alone lost an average of 1,216 casualties a day, giving a total of 62,014. Then the Germans turned on the Slovaks. The notorious Dirlewanger and Kaminski Brigades, fresh from their triumphs in Warsaw, were deployed in eastern Slovakia. They wreaked a terrible vengeance upon all who failed to flee into the mountains. Although the Germans had suffered defeat, substantial forces were able to escape westwards from the battlefield.

Within a matter of months, Stalin’s political hegemony had supplanted that of Hitler across vast tracts of territory. With great difficulty and in defiance of fierce American criticism, Churchill was able to save Greece from communist domination, chiefly because British forces were able to land there from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in eastern Europe, however, a grim pattern was emerging. The Western allies, and above all the Americans, still perceived the war overwhelmingly as a military event. For Stalin, it was always a political one. The days were over when Moscow confined its ambitions to dominance of its own republics. Russia’s reward for victory was to be an empire of buffer-states, which would ensure that never again was the nation vulnerable to direct aggression. Stalin scarcely troubled to disguise from Russia’s allies his determination that political settlements determined by Soviet wishes would be imposed upon territories liberated by Soviet arms. He argued, not unreasonably by his own logic, that the Western allies likewise pleased themselves about the governance of every nation their own armies liberated. “This war is not as in the past,” Stalin told Milovan Djilas. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

As the Americans and British advanced across western Europe, although some disorder persisted behind their front, there was no armed resistance to their administration. They were presiding over a genuine process of liberation. Across millions of square miles of Soviet-occupied territory, however, desperate fighting persisted for months. Far behind the front, whole Soviet divisions were deployed to clear up the armed flotsam of many nations, men who knew that they possessed no hope of survival if they fell into Russian hands. In addition to German stragglers, there were Ukrainians and representatives of Soviet minorities of every hue who had been rash enough to throw in their lot with the Nazis. Forming bands sometimes hundreds strong, they sallied from their eyries in forests and mountains to attack Soviet supply dumps and villages, in search of food or vengeance. “For some reason,” Beria reported to Stalin on 25 November 1944, “there are a great many people who call themselves partisans, operating in groups of several hundreds, dressed in the ragged uniforms of several armies, or of Ukrainian police. They rob, rape women and shave their heads and otherwise provoke trouble in cunning ways. They make swift, sudden thrusts, using the forests for cover and infiltrating men into our positions to provoke unrest. They harry our forces, cut off units and establish road blocks. They know their areas very well.”

The Soviet archives are filled with NKVD reports of partisan activity, both real and fictional. It will never be possible to determine how many of those hunted down and killed were indeed traitors to the Soviet cause or mere hapless innocents. Beria, the NKVD’s overlord, was a killer at least as terrible as Himmler or Heydrich, and more effective than either. While generals measured their triumphs in the miles that their armies advanced, Beria reported his achievements to Stalin in a ghastly game bag of captured and slaughtered state enemies, submitted monthly to the Kremlin. On 31 December, he declared a total of 13,960 Ukrainians, 7,228 Belorussians, 9,688 Moldavians and 45,011 citizens of Leningrad returned to Russia from captured territories, along with similar flotsam from other minority groups. Of these, 38,428 had been sent to their homes; 5,827 conscripted for the armed forces; and 43,693 sent to NKVD camps. Among them 153 “spies and traitors” had already been identified, said Beria.

Alexandr Klein, a Red Army officer captured by the Germans, escaped back to the Russian lines, where he faced an interrogation characteristic of Soviet paranoia:

Suddenly the Major raised himself sharply, and asked, “Can you prove that you are Jewish?”

I smiled, embarrassed, and said that I could—by taking off my trousers.

“And you are saying that the Germans didn’t know you were a Jew?”

“If they had known, believe me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“Ach, you yid mug!” exclaimed the dandy, and kicked me in the lower stomach so hard that I suddenly gasped for breath and fell.

“What are these lies? Tell us, you motherfucker, with what mission were you sent here? Who are you involved with? When did you sell yourself? For how much? How much did you give yourself for, you creature for sale? What is your code name?

Klein was sentenced to death, reprieved, and finally sent for twenty years to one of the worst camps in the Soviet Gulag. Alongside such people as his interrogators were the Western allies seeking to destroy Nazi tyranny.

Stalin issued an order giving high priority to mopping up rear areas behind the Red Army: “All agents, saboteurs and terrorists must be captured, [together with] all those who have served in German police units, as public prosecutors, leaders of local fascist organizations, editors of newspapers and magazines, members of the so-called ‘Russian Liberation Army’ as well as other suspicious elements.” Already 31,089 NKVD troops were operating behind the Soviet front. A further four divisions and four independent regiments—27,900 men plus 1,050 “experienced NKVD specialists”—were sent to reinforce them.

To the very end of the war, German military intelligence continued to dispatch agents behind the Soviet lines. The Germans used Soviet renegades with absolute ruthlessness, parachuting them into Russian-occupied territory in full awareness that their prospects of survival were negligible. Two Armenians in German pay were arrested in the Crimea in July 1944. They were ex-Komsomol members who had been trained by the Germans and dropped into the area with a transmitter. The NKVD used them to play a “radio game” with their German controllers. The prisoners sent some forty signals, announcing the creation of fictitious sabotage groups and demanding more agents and supplies. The Germans swallowed all this, and asked for daily local weather reports. On 23 December, they parachuted another agent into Soviet hands, carrying 427,000 roubles in cash and new radio batteries. Such wretched men, shuttlecocks between such adversaries, could expect mercy from neither.

IN THE WINTER of 1944, Churchill felt isolated in his struggle against Stalin’s ambitions in eastern Europe. After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some historians highlight the notorious slip of paper which the prime minister handed to Stalin in Moscow in October, acknowledging Russia’s hegemony in large parts of its conquests. The Soviet dictator casually ticked the note. This exchange represented, say Churchill’s critics, an unworthy and indeed unprincipled acquiescence, which belies his claims as a crusader for east European freedom. Even those Americans who recognized the malevolence of Soviet intentions, such as Harriman, recoiled from Churchill’s apparent willingness to concede much of eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence. The United States deplored the very concept of spheres of influence, whether Russian or British. Its government argued that it was committed to the rights of all peoples everywhere to self-determination.

Yet Churchill perceived himself reluctantly to be accepting some faits accomplis, in order to throw everything into the struggle to save Poland and Greece from Stalin’s maw. Several leading members of the U.S. administration were by now thoroughly alarmed by Soviet behaviour. Their views counted for little, however, while the ailing Roosevelt nursed his delusions that he could forge an equable relationship with Stalin. The minds of Allied generals, even including Churchill’s closest military partner, Sir Alan Brooke, were fixed solely upon the defeat of Germany and Japan. They were thinking little about the shape of post-war Europe, and, indeed, why should soldiers have been expected to do so? Britain’s prime minister, with such assistance as the Foreign Office could give, continued to strive vainly to thwart Stalin’s ambitions, while publicly asserting British support for the Soviet alliance. In particular, in the autumn of 1944 Churchill went further in risking Stalin’s wrath than at any period of the war, to fight for Poland.

After the defeat of their Rising, the plight of the Poles was dreadful indeed. Since Stalin had seized eastern Poland in 1939, his minions had laboured to eliminate potential resistance to communist domination. It is now known that the 4,000 Poles whose bodies were found by the Nazis at Katyn in 1943 represented only a sample of at least 26,000 Polish officers murdered by Beria’s NKVD. A single Soviet executioner achieved an unspeakable record, by killing 7,000 men personally, with a German Walther pistol. To this day, mass graves of Stalin’s victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As the Soviet armies advanced into the country in 1944, the NKVD followed in their wake, killing Polish resisters who had survived the struggle for Warsaw. Russia waged war upon the Army Krajowa long after the last German had been driven from Polish soil. Moscow’s policy was implacable. For all Churchill’s passionate pleadings for the nation for whose freedom Britain had gone to war, he received no glint of comfort from Moscow, its determination fortified by confidence in Washington’s acquiescence. Stalin liked Roosevelt personally, while disliking Churchill. The Soviet leader acknowledged after the war, however, that his attitudes were formed by the fact that the American president would humour his purposes, while the British prime minister would not. And nothing could alter the reality that Soviet troops stood upon Polish soil, while the American and British armies were immeasurably remote.

FEAR, LOVE AND THE PARTY

THEY WERE A strange mixture, the soldiers of the Red Army, the largest fighting force the world had ever seen, deployed from the Baltic to the Balkans. There were great masses of illiterate peasants from the Soviet republics, who performed the worst of the Red Army’s brutalities, and from whom neither human thought processes nor tactical skills were demanded. In the better formations and technical arms, by contrast, many officers and some soldiers were educated, sensitive men and women, cultured within the limits permitted to Stalin’s Russia. It was a paradox, that while the Red Army was capable of terrible brutalities, many of its soldiers were deeply puritanical. Captain Vasily Krylov, twenty-two, had only once kissed a girl in his life before he went to the war, though he made up for lost time when he encountered Red Army nurses. Twenty-one-year-old Major Yury Ryakhovsky professed himself shocked to discover pornographic pictures in a German bunker. When he was wounded and in hospital, he formed a warm friendship with Klava, his nurse. They sometimes sang songs together, but never went to bed. “I was a very sensitive, innocent young man.” Like so many of his generation of educated Russians, Ryakhovsky read voraciously—never whodunits or romances, but Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin and endless poetry. Vasily Krylov carried a volume of Shakespeare in his pack beside his lucky teddy bear. Half the Red Army had read Anna Akhmatova’s patriotic poem “Courage,” published in 1942:

We know what lies in balance at this moment,

And what is happening right now,

The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks,

And courage will not desert us.

We’re not frightened by the hail of lead,

We’re not bitter without a roof overhead –

And we will preserve you, Russian speech,

Mighty Russian word!

We will transmit you to our grandchildren

Free and pure and rescued from captivity

    Forever!

The men of the Red Army were drawn from every corner of the millions of square miles of the Soviet Union. A T-34 commander, Anatoly Osminov, was an eighteen-year-old Muscovite. His driver, Boris, was a Tartar. Andreyev, the loader, was an Udmurt. Gospodimov, the gunner, was Ukrainian. “Nobody cared about nationalities at that time,” said Osminov, “any more than they cared whether you were an officer, NCO or soldier. We were just all in it together.” The war proved an extraordinary unifying force for a society in which Russian had supplanted French as the chosen language of its rulers barely a century earlier. For many Russians, wartime service offered fractionally greater freedom to think and to speak than they had known in the worst years of Stalin’s Purges. “When war broke out its real dangers and its menace of death were a blessing compared with the inhuman power of the lie,” says one of Pasternak’s characters in Dr. Zhivago. “It broke the spell of the dead letter.” The vitality of the war years remains for many veterans a memory which made its sufferings seem endurable. Yet the poet Akhmatova herself was a suspect person in the eyes of Moscow. Yury Ryakhovsky was shocked to find a fellow officer court-martialled for quoting poetry that was deemed “politically incorrect.”

Sometimes, all the 150 girls of Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko’s signals regiment would gather for an evening to sing folk songs. Long before they finished, tears were coursing down the cheeks of men and women alike. “It is when they sing that we realise most clearly that they come from another world. They form a community then, and include us as hearers, in some immeasurable expanse,” wrote Hans von Lehndorff, observing the Russians as a prisoner. “They are living over there, for the moment at least, and everything here is as unreal to them as some circus they have been led into. When they return home later on, all their experience here will seem to them like a mad dream.”

When they were not in foxholes, men slept under trucks, in the open under blankets, or in ruined houses. When Klimenko thought of wartime billets afterwards, his most vivid memory was of the shattered glass that crackled underfoot every yard of the road between Moscow and Berlin, in a world in which few windows survived a battle. They lived chiefly off bread, cabbage soup, canned meat, milk powder and the legendary “100 grams”—the official daily issue of vodka which fuelled the Red Army from 1941 to 1945. They rolled their own cigarettes using scraps of newspaper. Many men suffered from boils caused by the poor diet. There were frequent outbreaks of disease, especially typhoid—even an artillery general died of it. Colds and ’flu were endemic, as indeed they were in all the armies, as soldiers perforce lived a semi-animal existence for months on end, denied the shelter of heated buildings, and laying their heads each night on sodden or frozen earth. Among the Russians, poor hygiene contributed significantly to the prevalence of disease, when men could seldom bathe or change clothes. Their rations were prepared and cooked in conditions of unbridled squalor.

Despite all that has been said above about the Soviet capacity for sacrifice, it would be wrong to suppose that all Russian soldiers were fired by suicidal courage or that they never ran away. Vitold Kubashevsky remarked that his bowels and those of many of his colleagues customarily collapsed before an attack, while their officer was prone to uncontrollable attacks of hiccups. One night in Yugoslavia, German officers watching on a hill observed Soviet troops occupying a town below. They ordered their Cossack unit to mount. Then the long line of horsemen charged, shouting and firing flare pistols as they scrambled down the slope. The Russians ran, throwing away their weapons as they went. This was among the last instances in the history of warfare of modern infantry succumbing to a cavalry charge. Even in the last months of the war, “tank panic” could sometimes cause entire Soviet regiments to turn and fly. “If you saw the turret of a Tiger traverse towards you and stop, you bailed out fast,” said Corporal Anatoly Osminov, commander of a T-34. The complaints of Soviet officers about the quality of young replacements reaching them in 1944–45 exactly mirrored those of their American, British and German counterparts: “One has to work and work at these men,” lamented Captain Oleg Samokhvalov. “They know absolutely nothing about fighting, military discipline, real soldiers’ spirit. Most of them having been hanging about for the past three years, hiding either from the Germans or to avoid being drafted.”

The only man in Gabriel Temkin’s division to become a Hero of the Soviet Union received his award for staying to engage German armour with anti-tank grenades after every soldier around him had run. Anatoly Osminov freely admitted that in his own early battles he often soiled his trousers, as did many men in all the armies. “But you got used to it, in the same way you got used to killing people. I started off thinking: ‘How can I kill a human being?’ But then, of course, I learned to understand that it was simply a matter of killing to save oneself from being killed.” During his first battle, Osminov found himself turning white-haired at the age of seventeen, amid the relentless clatter of small-arms fire and shrapnel on his tank’s hull. “I expected us to catch fire at any minute.” Anti-tank gun officer Vladimir Gormin never forgot seeing a German standing up in his tank turret roaring with laughter at the spectacle of Russian troops running for their lives during the retreat across the Don back in 1942. But, little by little, Gormin himself learned to master fear. “My corporal often saved me—he was a veteran of three encirclements and he would crouch beside me muttering, ‘Let them get closer, let them get closer,’ as the Germans came on. I learned to keep control of myself even when I was shaking all over.”

It was never possible for a Russian soldier to report sick with trench foot or battle fatigue, as was commonplace in the west, but there were other means of escaping combat. A Soviet reconnaissance officer, Lieutenant Pavel Nikiforov, said: “If you got the wrong sort of guys in your unit, they were quite capable of shooting you in the back on your first patrol, and running off to the Germans.” By 1944, the army was receiving many young replacements born in 1926, who were poorly trained. “Some of them were very scared—they took time to get used to the business.” Even in the years of victory, some Soviet soldiers found their plight in Stalin’s armies so intolerable that they preferred to accept the mortal risk of deserting.

By 1944, while the Red Army was vastly better supplied with the essentials of war than it had been in the desperate days of 1941 and 1942, there were still few indulgences. Soviet tanks were superb war machines, but made scant compromise with human comfort. “The T-34 was not a luxury apartment,” observed Vasily Kudryashov, who commanded one. While German and Western tanks ran on petrol, those of the Soviets used diesel, which emitted black exhaust smoke that could be a deadly betrayer on the battlefield. Soviet armoured crews had been greatly hampered in the early years of the war by lack of radio—they could communicate only by hand signals both inside their tanks and between units. By 1944, however, they possessed at least platoon communications. Some T-34s were equipped with the superior 85mm gun in place of the earlier 76mm. Since the Red Army lacked tracked carriers to move infantry on the battlefield, a squad of tommy-gunners rode on every tank hull, to provide close support. Tommy-gunners could be formidably effective, leaping down to engage German infantry at close range. But they were appallingly vulnerable to enemy fire.

The Russians experienced the same problems as the British and Americans when tanks became separated from supporting infantry. Vasily Kudryashov’s T-34 company once found itself alone in the narrow streets of a small town, and suffered badly at the hands of German infantry who closed in, throwing grenades and Molotov cocktails. Kudryashov was pulled out of his blazing tank by his crew, and escaped. He was lucky. The top hatches of T-34s often jammed in a crisis. Most of his company was destroyed.

Russian tank crews usually fought “closed down,” with their hatches shut, which meant that those within the turret could see little of the battlefield. There were long, incomprehensible halts, the men dozing in their cramped seats, listening to the hiss of static from the radio until they were abruptly ordered to move again. Even experienced Russian tankers found their steel monsters claustrophobic. Ventilation was poor, and crews choked amid the lingering fumes when they had been firing their main armament continuously.

While American and German soldiers were given special leave as a reward for battlefield achievements, in Stalin’s armies cash was offered as an incentive. An anti-tank gun crew received 2,000 roubles for every German tank it destroyed—500 to the gun commander, 500 to the gunlayer and 200 apiece for the rest. Much more useful, a crew which smashed a tank that did not burn were entitled to loot its contents. Lieutenant Vladimir Gormin and his men were thrilled to find a German Mark IV full of cognac and chocolate “and all sorts of other things we didn’t have.” They marvelled to see the leather-covered crew seats, and stripped them to make boots.

In an army in which fear played so large a part, many officers were reluctant to accept orders by telephone. They demanded written instructions, which could be preserved and produced if matters went awry. “Orders were never a matter for discussion,” said Lieutenant Alexandr Sergeev. Even when German artillery was registering on Captain Vasily Krylov’s Katyusha battery, it was unthinkable for him to shift position without a direct order. Individual initiative was discouraged. Savage penalties were introduced to stop drivers abandoning their vehicles under air attack, an almost universal practice in all the armies. When Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko was recovering from shrapnel wounds in hospital a visiting marshal, Vasilevsky, gave him a cigarette. The young lieutenant was much too frightened of his commander to smoke it.

Except in the extremities of battle, all units assembled at least once a month for Communist Party gatherings, to be harangued by their commissars about current events. Political officers inspired the same mixed feeling as chaplains in the Western armies—some were very good, and notably brave; others were hated and despised for their hypocrisy, inciting men to do their duty to the motherland while themselves remaining at the safest possible distance from the front. Every man and woman in a key position, such as the cipher specialists in Gennady Klimenko’s signals unit, was required to be a Party member: “Ninety per cent of people joined the Party because they knew they had no future unless they did,” Klimenko said sardonically. Major Yury Ryakhovsky was telephoned in his artillery forward observation post on 23 February 1944 by an angry and bewildered divisional commander who demanded: was his regiment in serious trouble, since its batteries were throwing shells over open sights? Ryakhovsky reassured the colonel: the guns were merely firing a feu de joie on their political officer’s orders, to celebrate Red Army Day.

It is remarkable that the Soviet command system functioned as well as it did, given the ideological resistance to truth which was fundamental to the Stalinist system. In war, telling the truth is essential not for moral reasons, but because no commander can direct a battle effectively unless his subordinates tell him what is happening: where they are, what resources they possess, whether they have attained or are likely to attain their objectives. Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history. The mythology of heroic tractor drivers, coal miners who fulfilled monthly production norms in days, collective farms which produced record harvests, was deemed essential to the self-belief of the state. On the battlefield, in some measure this perversion persisted. Propaganda wove tales of heroes who had performed fantastic and wholly fictitious feats against the fascists. Vladimir Gormin was reprimanded for reporting after an action that his anti-tank unit had failed to destroy any German tanks. A new return, citing two panzers destroyed, was duly composed and dispatched to higher command. “The statistics were always ridiculous. It was pretty hard to tell the truth,” said Gormin.

Yet somehow, through a morass of commissar-driven rhetoric and fantasy, Stalin’s armies hacked a path to victory. Most Soviet intelligence reports of the 1944–45 period are notable for their common sense and frankness. In 1941, the Russians sought to interpret the war in ideological terms. Interrogators addressed captured German soldiers about “the need for class solidarity.” Gradually, these delusions fell away. Von Paulus, Hitler’s vanquished commander at Stalingrad, observed acidly to his captors: “You should know that Germany’s workers and peasants are among the most prominent supporters of Hitler.” Though the enemy continued to be described as “the fascists,” hatred became extended to the German nation: “Those who had recently been brothers in class struggle became beasts who could only be killed,” in the words of a Russian historian. A Red Army nurse, Sofia Kuntsevich, wrote: “I had so much hatred stored up. I thought: what are we going to do to these people when we get to Germany? I wanted to see the mothers who had given birth to these monsters. I thought that they would never be able to look us in the eye.”

The Red Army professed that the 125,000 women in its ranks were mere comrades in battle and in suffering. In reality, however, and despite earlier remarks about Russian puritanism, many girl soldiers found themselves employed off-duty as sexual playthings for their officers, “campaign wives.” Some men as well as women resented this practice. “There shouldn’t be any women at war,” said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev of the 374th Rifle Division. “I felt terribly sorry for girls at the front—they couldn’t wash or change their clothes, they were exploited by officers: they had no choice.” “War and women in trenches do not mix well,” wrote Sergeant Gabriel Temkin. “I heard this many times, and I shared this view . . . A young, healthy woman, for months or even a couple of years without a furlough, always surrounded by so many equally young, healthy men did not have to be harassed or abused to become a willing sex partner . . . either because she fell in love, or just to satisfy sexual desire, or to improve her lot, or because she expected to find a husband, or she wanted to get pregnant and be released and go home.” Sergeant Natalia Ivanova once had to summon Thirty-third Army’s chief of operations to rescue her from his deputy, who became both drunk and predatory while giving her dictation. The brigade commander of Gennady Ivanov’s tank unit kept the same mistress from 1943 to 1946, an extremely pretty blonde headquarters telephonist named Katya. The women’s medal Za Boyeuye Zaslugi, “for military services,” was often derisively called Za Polovye Zaslugi, “for sexual services.” Abortions at the front were commonplace, acknowledged Nikolai Senkevich, a Red Army doctor. “Whole trainloads of girls were sent home pregnant,” said Gennady Klimenko contemptuously. “Every senior officer had his girlfriend.” “Hospitals were your best chance of getting lucky,” said Captain Vasily Krylov. His girlfriend, a nurse named Nina, told him quite coolly one day: “I want to get pregnant so I can get sent home.” She got her wish, but he never knew whether he himself was her benefactor.

Corporal Anna Nikyunas had suffered even more than most Russians of her generation. She was orphaned at fourteen in 1937 when her parents, Leningrad workers, were denounced and shot by the NKVD. She first went to the front in 1941 as a nurse. She neither wrote nor received any letters at the front, because she no longer had a family with which to correspond. The nurses carried sub-machine guns as well as medical bags, but found it very hard to grasp the reality of battle. “Tracer bullets looked like sparklers to us at first. They seemed too innocent and pretty to hurt anyone.” Their commanding officer would shout at them furiously under fire: “Get your heads down, girls!” Anna was wounded in the epic Leningrad battle by a shell which killed the girl next to her, and removed the legs from another. She herself was hit by fragments in the neck: “I felt little pain, just the warmth of blood running down my back.” After her recovery, she returned to the front. She, too, had a “field husband”: “He was a very handsome surgeon. He was married, but even after the war he would phone me and say ‘You are still my darling.’ ” For all its horrors, she always remembered the war with deep emotion. “That time was full of life,” she said.

Yet it would be mistaken to exaggerate the sexual role of women soldiers. Many served with cool and courageous professionalism. Women often fulfilled an intensely hazardous role as telephone linesmen, repairing signal links under fire. Vasily Krylov was manning a forward observation post when he lost contact with his battery and thought that a German attack had started. He was running hard for a bunker when he met a girl soldier who asked matter-of-factly: “Where are you going?” “It’s an attack!” he shouted. “The Germans are on the way!” The girl said: “Calm down. There’s no problem.” She set off under fire in pursuit of his telephone line, repaired the break caused by mortaring and cheerfully returned to reassure the troubled captain.

By the autumn of 1944, Sergeant Natalia Ivanova had seen more of war than most men. She was the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Moscow dentist, herself a secretary at the Finance Ministry until she was called to the army in June 1941, and sent to Smolensk at twenty-four hours’ notice. “At first, it all seemed rather romantic,” she said. But before they even arrived at the front the truck carrying herself and other girls, still in civilian clothes and high heels, hit a mine. Several were killed. When she reached army headquarters, still shocked, a colonel told her to go and get some sleep, and pointed to a nearby shed. It proved to be already occupied by corpses. Soon afterwards, she was serving as a typist at Thirty-third Army when she and her section were ordered to attend small-arms practice in the woods. They returned to find the headquarters a blazing shambles following a Luftwaffe raid. The staff was hastily evacuating, with German tanks a mile away. Natalia was roundly cursed by an officer for insisting on running into the wreckage to retrieve her clothes before boarding a cart. “Girls are girls,” she shrugged. During the long retreat that followed, she found herself on a truck with two pilots and all Thirty-third Army’s files when they ran out of petrol. “You go and ask for some,” said the pilots. “Nobody will give it to a man.” She went to a nearby unit, who were tending scores of wounded. The soldiers said they would give her some fuel if she would first help with the casualties. “It was the first time I had dressed a wound,” she said. “My hands were shaking as I tried to deal with the stomach cases.” She ended up walking for hours through a forest, “slightly drunk and very frightened and hungry.” They picked potatoes from the gardens of houses they passed, and eventually escaped successfully, to reach Moscow.

She was reposted to the 222nd Rifle Division where, in her first battle, she and other girls were sent to recover wounded men under fire from German tanks. Because she was very small, the physical difficulties were very great: “It was hard to make oneself crawl out of cover, and then try to lift these big men. I was in shock.” She was awarded the Red Star for her part in that action. One day in 1943, she found herself in the middle of the German Dnieper counter-attack, with the men of their division running for their lives, as the Chief of Staff vainly lashed out at the fleeing soldiers with a fence post to check their flight. She herself swam the river with two other girls and the divisional files. At the far bank, having lost most of their clothes, they loaded their burden on to a wounded horse, which immediately collapsed. German tank fire from across the river killed a girl signaller beside her. At last, she found another horse to carry the files, and rejoined the division’s survivors, who were suitably amazed to see her arrive wearing only a bra and skirt. She was reposted to Thirty-third Army.

In 1944, she fell passionately in love with a gunner officer: “I met hundreds of nice men, but he was the best.” Dmitry Kalafati first caught her attention when, in an idle moment, he told the fortunes of some of the girls with a pack of cards. She told him mischievously that, if he made a wish, it would be granted. He immediately leaned over and kissed her. They began a passionate affair. When the chief of staff heard about it, he said to her: “Well, you must have been the one who made the running, because Dmitry wouldn’t have had the nerve.” In battle or out of it, the couple found time together. She sometimes scrounged a jeep and driver, and followed him to the front. Once, she was forcefully reprimanded by the head of operations, Viktor Grinyushin, when Dmitry was roused in the night at the Hungarian castle where he was billeted, and Natalia was found with him. The couple didn’t care, not least because the head of operations was in a weak position to complain, himself enjoying a passionate affair with another girl soldier named Lida, whom he married in 1945. But senior officers drew the line when Natalia was found to be sending cipher messages to Dmitry at his unit. This, they said not unreasonably, was an abuse of military communications. Natalia and Dmitry Kalafati were married after the war ended.

By September 1944, so desperate was the Red Army’s demand for manpower that 1,030,494 prisoners from the Gulag had been released for military service. Most of these men were, however, mere thieves and minor malefactors. Serious political criminals remained ineligible even for the privilege of dying for their country. Among the most savage manifestations of Soviet ruthlessness were the Red Army’s “penal battalions.” These punishment units rendered all those assigned to them players in a deadly roulette game. A man possessed perhaps one chance in thirty or forty of escaping death. Men were customarily posted to penal battalions as an alternative to execution. “[These units] are intended,” said Zhukov in his order No. 258 of 28 September 1942, “to enable senior officers and political officers to make use of men who are found guilty of cowardice, indiscipline, instability, to compound for their crimes towards the motherland by shedding their blood in the most difficult engagements with the enemy.” They were employed to clear minefields under fire, to probe enemy positions and to spearhead desperate advances in the manner of a “forlorn hope” in the wars of Napoleon.

An officer unfortunate enough to be posted to lead such units was expected to serve with them for only one to three months, each month counting sixfold for pension purposes, in the unlikely event that he survived to enjoy old age. Officers sent to penal battalions because they were themselves being punished were stripped of rank and decorations. Any breach of discipline in these battalions was punished by summary execution. “A soldier who distinguishes himself in action can receive remission of sentence . . . All those released from penal battalions are assumed to have completed their sentences. Any man wounded is automatically deemed to have served his sentence.”

“I once watched a penal battalion go into an attack,” said Major Yury Ryakhovsky with uncomplicated respect. “I have never seen infantry so brave. They were wearing blue tunics and black caps, and boots made from tree bark. They advanced shoulder to shoulder, with a rifle between three men.” The commander of Anatoly Osminov’s T-34 in Thirty-second Tank Army was so desperate to escape combat that he drained the radiator, causing the engine to overheat. Osminov threw the culprit out of the tank at pistol-point. The man ran away, and was later found wounded. The NKVD placed the entire crew under arrest pending trial. Afterwards, the others were acquitted, while their former commander was sent to a penal battalion. He was lucky. Men found guilty of samostrel—self-inflicted wounding—were customarily shot in front of their units like deserters, after digging their own graves. The regiment formed three sides of a square, and the command was given to the firing squad: “For our motherland . . . At the enemy . . . Fire!” Offenders were buried with a sign on their graves declaring “eternal shame on the coward who has betrayed his comrades and his motherland.” Vitold Kubashevsky, a survivor of a penal battalion who witnessed many such executions, found himself quite unmoved by them: “One felt no pity. At the front, all one’s sensibilities were dulled.” Notice of crime and punishment was sent to a man’s former factory or collective farm. The official Soviet view of penal battalions was simple: men were needed to perform military tasks which were likely to result in their deaths. Was it not appropriate that such duties should fall upon those deserving of death?

The image of the Soviet soldier as an unfeeling brute was justified by the immense rabble of Mongols (that is, from Central Asia) and conscripts from the eastern republics who followed the spearheads. But many men in Russian uniform shared the same misgivings about the experiences of battle as their American, British or German counterparts. Gabriel Temkin was appalled to see his friend Grishin torn open by a shell splinter: “I saw him crouching and squeezing his bloodied guts as if trying to push them back into his open belly. Pale and sweating, his lips trembling as bloody foam came from his mouth, he was half-conscious when I bid him farewell. He died on the shaking horse-drawn cart, even before reaching hospital.”

Although the Luftwaffe was a mere shadow of its former self by the winter of 1944, it still produced spasms of devastating activity. Twenty-two-year-old Vasily Kudryashov was conducting a fighting reconnaissance of a river crossing with two platoons of T-34s, tommy-gunners on their hulls, when German aircraft caught them in the open. Kudryashov ordered his crew to jump down and take cover beneath the hull, but he himself was still on the hatch when bomb fragments caught him in the leg and took off his foot. It was the eighth tank he had lost in action since 1942. Official notice was sent to his mother that he had been killed, but mercifully she had never received it when he returned home from hospital six months later. “I went away a boy and came back a man,” he said, “but I also possessed the sadness of a cripple.”

Even a surgeon, Nikolai Senkevich, never entirely reconciled himself to the sight of corpses that had been crushed beneath tank tracks, or of great sheets of white ice strewn with huddled dead. One day during an advance, he was appalled to come upon three abandoned German trucks, piled high with bandaged bodies—obviously wounded men who had died at a dressing station. His own field hospital handled almost 3,000 men in three days during an action in 1944. “It was a question of making very swift decisions about who had a chance of living, and concentrating on them. Some men already had gangrene. They were just left to die.” The Russian doctors were too short of morphine even to end the agony of doomed men. Combat fatigue, Senkevich professed, was unknown to the Red Army, and certainly not officially acknowledged: “I never saw such a case. By that stage of the war, people were feeling quite cheerful.” Yet Sergeant Nikolai Timoshenko described seeing men faint from fear. In the Red Army as in all armies, the real fighting in every battle was done by a small minority of men. Many others did little nor nothing save to attempt to stay alive. By the time it was all over, said Timoshenko drily, “one knew the difference between those who took part in a battle and those who were mere spectators.” Soviet soldiers were as vulnerable to terror and panic as any others. The sanctions for succumbing to it were merely incomparably more severe.

AT THE BEGINNING of November 1944, the Soviets and the Western allies stood almost equidistant from Berlin. Stalin, passionately determined to ensure that the Soviet Union enjoyed its triumph in Hitler’s capital, still harboured some thoughts of launching an early thrust across the Vistula. Zhukov dissuaded him. Soviet offensive operations in Poland were halted, to prepare for the next phase of the great assault on Germany, to be launched at some date between 15 and 20 January 1945.

Stalin’s Stavka, the high command directing Russia’s war, considered three alternative plans. There was a southern axis, through Budapest and Vienna. There was a northern route, through East Prussia, where Soviet forces already heavily outnumbered the Germans. Yet it always seemed inevitable that the Berlin assault would be staged from the centre, by 1st Belorussian Front through Poland. In October 1944, Rokossovsky was supplanted by Zhukov as 1st Belorussian’s commander, and shifted northwards to direct 2nd Belorussian Front against East Prussia. Russian generals vied for primacy at least as eagerly as their Western counterparts. Rokossovsky, a commander of proven ability and with a willingness to delegate unusual among his peers, was furious at being moved to a subordinate role for no better reason than that he was half Polish. Stalin had no intention of allowing any sort of Pole to take Berlin. A lingering taint of the prison cell also hung over the marshal, who had been imprisoned during the 1937 army purges. “I know very well what Beria is capable of,” Rokossovsky once observed bitterly to Zhukov. “I have been in his prisons.” Here was one of the greatest Soviet generals of the war, who had emerged from confinement without his fingernails amid the miasma of suspicion and persecution during the purges just seven years earlier.

On Zhukov’s left flank in Poland stood 1st Ukrainian Front, led by the swaggering, shaven-headed figure of forty-eight-year-old Marshal Ivan Konev. A former tsarist NCO, he was a man of little education, and found it difficult to express himself on paper. It was his fate always to be overshadowed by Zhukov, yet he had proved himself an almost equally effective commander, and enjoyed the additional merit in Stalin’s eyes of being less celebrated by the Red Army. Zhukov had saved Konev from obscurity, or something worse, and secured his rehabilitation after he was summarily dismissed from his command by Stalin in February 1943, as so many able officers were likewise dismissed. Konev is sometimes described as “ruthless.” This adjective seems superfluous in speaking of any Soviet commander. None could hold his rank or perform the tasks demanded of the Red Army without possessing a contempt for life unusual even in the ranks of the Waffen SS. Konev had come within a whisker of execution by Stalin, during the bloody torrent of recrimination that accompanied the 1941 battles for Moscow. There is no biographical evidence to suggest that Stalin’s marshals possessed either cultural refinement or humanitarian scruple, that any was, in truth, much more than a militarily gifted brute.

Zhukov forcefully argued to Stalin, who needed little persuasion, that the principal drive into Germany must be made on Russia’s central front, with its main weight deployed south of Warsaw. This view prevailed. It was obvious, however, that pressure must be maintained in East Prussia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, to ensure that the Germans could not shift forces to Poland from the Baltic area and south-east Europe. The broad principles of future operations were established. Zhukov would strike the main blow south of Warsaw, while Konev on his left sought to envelop the vast industrial areas of Silesia, rather than attack head-on against strong defences. Stalin was anxious to capture Silesia’s mines and factories intact, and emphasized his wishes to Konev. In the north, Chernyakhovsky and Rokossovsky would address East Prussia.

The Germans were defending the west with seventy-four divisions and 1,600 tanks, against an Allied army of eighty-seven vastly stronger divisions and over 6,000 tanks. In the east, the Germans deployed some two million men, 4,000 tanks and 2,000 aircraft. Against these, by January 1945 the Red Army would be able to commit six million troops. Its order of battle boasted 500 rifle divisions—each half the size of its Western counterpart—13,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 100,000 guns and heavy mortars, 15,000 aircraft. In the past, Russian armies had often attacked in the frozen winter months, when the ground and even the rivers could carry tanks. Traditionally, it was in the spring thaws that the Eastern Front became stagnant. But on the Vistula in November the logistical difficulties were immense. Eastern Europe lacked the road and rail network of the west. The Germans had demolished every possible communications link during their summer retreat. Though the Red Army was far better supplied with transport than it had been two or three years earlier, it possessed nothing like the resources of the Americans and British. Many of the new replacements reaching the Russian formations were ill trained. For the best part of three waterlogged and then snowbound months, therefore, while fierce fighting persisted to the north and south, the critical axis of the Eastern Front lay dormant, as Stalin’s armies began the build-up for their decisive blow in the battle for Germany.