The Communist party was ultimately governed by Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Central Committee. Known as the “boss” (khozyain) and the “leader” (vozhd), Stalin headed every institution relevant to the war effort from 1941 on: the State Committee for Defense, the People’s Commissar for Defense, and the Supreme High Command of the Red Army (the Stavka). The party made its influence felt in the military through the Main Political Administration of the Red Workers and Peasants Army (GlavPURKKA). In the war’s first year the administration was led by the former Pravda editor and communist rabble-rouser Lev Mekhlis. In 1942 the Moscow party secretary Alexander Shcherbakov succeeded him. That same year, Shcherbakov became a Politburo candidate member, a promotion that underlined the prominence of his office in the Red Army.
The political administration exerted its power primarily via the commissars. At the highest levels, at the front and in the army, the commissar served on the military council, a cooperative body consisting of commanders, political delegates, and the chief of staff. Stalin’s confidant Nikita Khrushchev served as the commissar for the Stalingrad Front. Along with front commander Yeryomenko, he was the most important figure in the military council. This dual system extended to all levels of the army, though most of the political work took place in the regiments. The system provided for two offices and their respective secretaries, one for the party, the other for the Komsomol, as well as a club for the soldiers and a library, all under the oversight of the regiment’s commissar. In the companies the politruks served as agitators in political discussions with soldiers and were responsible for finding suitable candidates for party membership. In 1942, the political administration installed party cells in the companies as well.134
Military council of the Stalingrad Front, 1942. Left to right: Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, Lieutenant General Alexei Kirichenko, regional party secretary Alexei Chuyanov, and Colonel General Andrei Yeryomenko. Photographer: Oleg Knorring
All Red Army newspapers, from Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda), the official military broadsheet, to division newsletters, were under the control of GlavPURKKA. The Main Political Administration also recruited war correspondents, among them the notable Soviet writers Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman, Konstantin Simonov, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, and Alexei Tolstoy—and pursued a variety of cultural initiatives to raise the morale of Red Army soldiers such as the circulation of army songs and literary works. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, also had a broad presence in the Red Army. In every division, a Special Department (Osoby otdel) of uniformed secret police officers investigated cases of murder, suicide, theft, espionage, and desertion, made arrests, and delivered suspects to military tribunals—tasks that in other armies fell to the military police. The Special Department was also charged with ensuring the political loyalty of soldiers, commanders, and political officers and with reporting signs of counterrevolutionary sentiment. Working together with the military censor, also under the control of the NKVD, and with secret informers, the Special Department prepared weekly reports (sometimes more frequently) about the troops’ “political-moral moods” for Stalin’s desk.135 The men of the Special Department, known as Osobists, were widely feared.136 Every soldier and officer, regardless of rank, faced general political and moral suspicion. In an anonymous letter to Stalin, Mekhlis, and several leading military brass, a commander described the allure of being an Osobist. The letter, written in May 1943, provides insights (some unintended) into the habits of powerful men in the Red Army.
A commander cannot make a decision without an Osobist. Women have been taken away from commanders, and each Osobist has one or two. At each step they threaten Mekhlis, and the commanders now are in quite an unenviable state. Most of them have been defending their motherland, risking life and limb, and are decorated with four to eight orders. Why is it so? Can it be that 1937, 1938 is back?137
Being interviewed by a historian in Stalingrad, Major Anatoly Soldatov, of the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade, described how he nearly shot an Osobist during the capture of General Paulus. The intelligence officer had brashly inserted himself into the action in a bold attempt to claim Stalingrad’s greatest trophy for the NKVD.138
On October 9, 1942, Stalin issued an order that eliminated the system of Red Army commissars and reinstituted single command authority. Many historians have argued that Stalin intended the order to strengthen the status of army officers and weaken the party’s influence on the Red Army.139 It is true that the decision bolstered the authority of commanders—former commissars now served as subordinate “deputies for political affairs”—and that the commissars’ vague mandate (keeping military officers in line) ran the risk of “trammeling” effective troop leadership, as stated explicitly in the order.140 But the reform contained no barbs directed at the party or its presence in the military. Ever since the Red Army’s establishment, the commissar system had come into effect whenever the political climate grew uncertain—during the Civil War, in the period from 1937 to 1940, and then again starting in July 1941. Abolishing the commissars in 1942—the wording of the edict left no doubt—expressed Soviet leaders’ confidence that the army had become stable enough ideologically to obviate external supervisors. Another reason for the reform arose from the constant demand for capable officers. A separate order issued by Stalin the same day mandated special training for eight hundred erstwhile commissars to prepare them as battalion and regimental commanders.141
Several of the Stalingrad interviews made plain that the military commanders now called the shots, with the new political deputies only assisting.142 Others described a harmonious cooperation.143 Yet some political officers continued to call themselves commissars in defiance of the reform, trying, as before, to set the tone in their relations with the military command.144 One outspoken example was Brigade Commissar Vasiliev, who referred to himself by his old rank when he was interviewed in 1943. Vasiliev demanded that commanders be subject to aggressive “ideological education” from the political apparatus, a task he believed had faded into the background because the political apparatus prioritized infantry in the initial phases of the war.
The commander of the 45th Rifle Division, Major General Vasily Sokolov (left), and his political deputy, Colonel Nikolai Glamazda (right).
He cited numerous cases in which he observed political officers fighting in an exemplary manner while the military commanders assigned to them left the troops high and dry. “I have always thought and I still maintain that a commander has to be trained. If a soldier is trained and a commander is not, some things won’t get done and we’ll fall short of the desired results.” Despite the differing perspectives, the degree to which almost every interviewee understood himself as a part of a single unit joined by common interests is striking. Political officers also provided technical training and input on military tactics, just as commanders also looked out for the ideological and moral well-being of their troops.145