In the years after the Civil War the Red Army shrank from 5 million soldiers to 1.5 million. But this did not deter the Soviet government from preparing for a global showdown between capitalist and socialist camps. In Bolshevik fashion, Stalin spoke to an assembly of industrial executives in 1931, pointing out that Soviet Russia was currently lagging “fifty to one hundred years behind” developed nations and exhorting the managers to close the gap by 1941: “We must cover this distance in ten years, or we will be crushed.”99
Like other governments, the Soviet Union made three major investments that enabled it to wage war effectively in the twentieth century. It launched a national industrialization campaign to equip a large army; it prepared its population for impending war; and it created human reserves to feed the industrial cycle of mass production and mass killing. The nationalized economy and the one-party system enabled Soviet leaders to take measures that were more sweeping and more ruthless than those of rival states during the interwar period. Socialist planners approached industrialization like a war. They deployed superproductive “shock workers,” achieved “breakthroughs,” celebrated “triumphs” over nature, and fought against the machinations of “class enemies.” The backbone of this campaign consisted of the Communist party and its youth organization, the Komsomol. The party dispatched armed delegations from an “army of revolutionary warriors,”100 whose job was to force recalcitrant populations in rural areas onto collective farms. This violent expansion of socialism took place at the expense of much of the population, who had to learn to live with rationing and privation—while increasing productivity. In 1940 the government passed laws punishing tardiness at work as severely as desertion. Though the system demanded much from citizens, it also held out a promise. Every worker who took part could become a “builder of socialism,” a part of the system and an actor on the world-historical stage.
Like other states in the interwar period, the Soviet government encouraged citizens to start families in an effort to increase the birth rate, but it also tied these pro-family policies to a comprehensive premilitary education. In 1931 the Komsomol introduced a military sports program in which millions of adolescents learned how to shoot rifles and throw grenades. By 1933, a Komsomol offshoot, the Society for the Assistance to Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Construction, had 10 million men and 3 million women members, who received flight training and practiced parachuting.101 The Soviet new person—an ideal that expressly included women—was strong of will, full of fight, fearless, and optimistic. Even the youngest Soviet citizens were sworn to military discipline and allegiance to the collective as members of the party’s pioneer organization.102Their literary paradigm was another hero from the Civil War: Pavel Korchagin, from Nikolay Ostrovsky’s bestselling novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934). Korchagin was a Komsomol and a soldier who strove to “work on himself” and benefit society even after being severely wounded in battle.
Ever since Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, war had been a real danger for the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1935 the Soviet press portrayed fascist Germany as the main enemy. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—in which Stalin supplied the Republicans with weapons and advisers—received sympathetic coverage, and even found its way into the diaries of village residents.103 The successful play The Final Battle (1931) showcased Soviet citizens’ belief that war was imminent. The final scene shows a group of twenty-seven Red Army soldiers defending the border against an imperialist enemy. In a hail of machine gun fire, all die but one. The injured survivor drags himself to a blackboard, where, just before collapsing, he writes, “162,000,000-27 = 161,999,973.” At that point a man walks out on stage and addresses the audience. Invariably the following exchange would take place. The man would ask, “Who is in the army?” and a few members of the audience would stand up. Then he would ask, “Who is a reservist?” and more would stand up. Finally he would ask, “Who will defend the Soviet Union?” and the entire audience would stand up. “Show’s over,” the man would announce. “To be continued on the front.”104 The avant-garde device—tearing down the barrier between the stage and the audience—sought to activate spectators as militarized participants. “The final battle” were words straight out of “The Internationale,” an anthem familiar to every Soviet child.
War preparations included a massive expansion of the Red Army, but the process was erratic and tense. In 1937 the deputy people’s commissar of defense, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, together with seven other generals, was accused of high treason and espionage and sentenced to death. Stalin’s distrust of Tukhachevsky, a brilliant military strategist but also the son of a noble family and a former lieutenant in the tsarist army, seems to have precipitated the purge. The confessions of the accused, extracted under torture, led to further arrests. By 1939 more than 34,000 officers had been expelled from the Red Army. In the meantime the regime had broadened the original 1925 mandate of the people’s commissar for the purposes of monitoring military commanders deemed politically unreliable.105
The scope of the Red Army purges was probably less than has long been assumed, however.106 It is certainly the case that Nikita Khrushchev exaggerated their extent in order to pin the blame for the devastating defeats in 1941 on his predecessor. In truth, most of the 34,000 officials excluded from the Communist party escaped execution: 11,000 had reentered the party by 1939 after lodging successful appeals; less than half of the remaining 23,000 became caught in the tentacles of the NKVD, but most cases were not political and resulted in minor sanctions. Many of the dismissed officers later sought to prove their loyalty. Guards General Major Nestor Kozin was among the soldiers interviewed in Stalingrad. Like most victims of Stalin’s terror, Kozin sincerely believed that the purges were meant for enemies and a mistake had been made in his case:
Why I was kicked out of the party. The formal reason for the expulsion was that divisional commander Balakiryev turned out to be an enemy of the people, and they accused me of not being vigilant enough. All I said was that the political chief, the deputy, the entire political department, along with the top commanders—all of them party members—missed that he was an enemy of the people. But here I—a platoon commander—was meant to see what kind of man he was. They called it “spreading anti-Soviet rumors.” Long story short—they kicked me out of the party.107
Further in his defense, Kozin explained that he was unable to command his troops during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland because, having been deemed politically unreliable, he had to prove himself first as an instructor (which he did with flying colors). He joined the Great Patriotic War immediately and was awarded the Order of Lenin within several months. In December 1941 he was reaccepted into the party. Most commanders interviewed in Stalingrad were young, part of a group of majors and captains who advanced after their superiors were demoted and went on to have impressive careers.