The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  The USSR was determined to shackle Poland to its wishes. In secret, Stalin and Beria had ordered the murder of nearly 15,000 Polish officers who had been taken captive after the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland in 1939. Subsequently Soviet negotiators had been suspiciously evasive on the question of Poland’s future when, in July 1941, an Anglo-Soviet agreement was signed; and the British government, which faced a dire threat from Hitler, had been in no position to make uncompromising demands in its talks with Stalin. Nor was Stalin any more easily controllable when the USA entered the Second World War in December 1941 after Japan’s air force attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor and Hitler aligned himself with his Japanese partners against the USA. The USSR’s military contribution remained of crucial importance when the Anglo-Soviet-German war in Europe and the Japanese war of conquest were conjoined in a single global war.

  There was an exception to Stalin’s chutzpah. At the end of 1941 he had ordered Beria to ask the Bulgarian ambassador Ivan Stamenov to act as an intermediary in overtures for a separate peace between the USSR and Germany.30 Stalin was willing to forgo his claims to the territory under German occupation in exchange for peace. Stamenov refused the invitation. Stalin would anyway not have regarded such a peace as permanent. Like Hitler, he increasingly believed that the Wehrmacht’s cause was ultimately lost if Leningrad, Moscow and the Volga remained under Soviet control. A ‘breathing space’ on the model of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would have been more advantageous to Stalin in 1941–2 than to Lenin in 1918.

  Naturally Stalin kept this gambit secret from the Western Allies; and through 1942 and 1943, he expressed anger about the slowness of preparations for a second front in the West. Churchill flew to Moscow in August 1942 to explain that the next Allied campaign in the West would be organized not in France or southern Italy but in north Africa. Stalin was not amused. Thereafter a meeting involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin was held in Tehran in November 1943 – the greatest distance Stalin had travelled from Moscow in three decades. Churchill flew again to Moscow in October 1944, and in February 1945 Stalin played host to Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in Crimea. At each of these meetings, he drew attention to the sacrifices being borne by the peoples of the USSR. Not even the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 put an end to his habit of berating the other Allies; for he knew that his complaints about them served the purpose of distracting attention from his designs upon eastern Europe.

  All this notwithstanding, Stalin had been receiving considerable military and foodstuffs assistance from the USA and the United Kingdom to plug the gaps in Soviet production. The German occupation of Ukraine deprived the USSR of its sugar-beet. Furthermore, Stalin’s pre-war agricultural mismanagement had already robbed the country of adequate supplies of meat; and his industrial priorities had not included the development of native equivalents to American jeeps and small trucks. In purely military output, too, misprojections had been made: the shortage of various kinds of explosive was especially damaging.

  From 1942, the Americans shipped sugar and the compressed meat product, Spam, to Russia – and the British naval convoys braved German submarines in the Arctic Ocean to supplement supplies. Jeeps, as well as munitions and machinery, also arrived. The American Lend-Lease Programme supplied goods to the value of about one fifth of the USSR’s gross domestic product during the fighting – truly a substantial contribution.31 Yet Allied governments were not motivated by altruism in dispatching help to Russia: they still counted upon the Red Army to break the backbone of German armed forces on the Eastern front. While the USSR needed its Western allies economically, the military dependence of the USA and the United Kingdom upon Soviet successes at Stalingrad and Kursk was still greater. But foreign aid undoubtedly rectified several defects in Soviet military production and even raised somewhat the level of food consumption.

  There was a predictable reticence about this in the Soviet press. But Stalin and his associates recognized the reality of the situation; and, as a pledge to the Western Allies of his co-operativeness, Stalin dissolved the Comintern in May 1943. Lenin had founded it in 1919 as an instrument of world revolution under tight Russian control. Its liquidation indicated to Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR would cease to subvert the states of her Allies and their associated countries while the struggle against Hitler continued.

  While announcing this to Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin played upon their divergent interests. Since Lenin’s time it had been a nostrum of Soviet political analysis that it was contrary to the USA’s interest to prop up the British Empire. Roosevelt helped Stalin by poking a little fun at Churchill and by turning his charm upon Stalin in the belief that the USSR and USA would better be able to reach a permanent mutual accommodation if the two leaders could become friendlier. But Stalin remained touchy about the fact that he was widely known in the West as Uncle Joe. He was also given to nasty outbursts. Churchill walked out of a session at the Tehran meeting when the Soviet leader proposed the execution of 50,000 German army officers at the end of hostilities. Stalin had to feign that he had not meant the suggestion seriously so that the proceedings might be resumed.

  At any rate, he usually tried to cut a genial figure, and business of lasting significance was conducted at Tehran. Churchill suggested that the Polish post-war frontiers should be shifted sideways. The proposal was that the USSR would retain its territorial gains of 1939–40 and that Poland would be compensated to her west at Germany’s expense. There remained a lack of clarity inasmuch as the Allies refused to give de jure sanction to the forcible incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the USSR. But a nod and a wink had been given that the Soviet Union had special interests in parts of eastern Europe that neither Britain nor the USA cared to challenge.

  This conciliatory approach was maintained in negotiations between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. Japan had not yet been defeated in the East, and the A-bomb stayed at an early experimental stage. Germany was still capable of serious counter-offensives against the Allied armies which were converging on the Third Reich. It made sense to divide German-occupied Europe into zones of influence for the immediate future. But Churchill and Stalin could not decide how to do this; each was reluctant to let the other have a completely free hand in the zone accorded to him. On his Moscow trip, therefore, Churchill put forward an arithmetical solution which appealed to Stalin. It was agreed that the USSR would gain a ninety per cent interest in Romania. She was also awarded seventy-five per cent in respect of Bulgaria; but both Hungary and Yugoslavia were to be divided fifty-fifty between the two sides and Greece was to be ninety per cent within the Western zone.

  Very gratifying to Stalin was the absence of Poland from their agreement, an absence that indicated Churchill’s unwillingness to interfere directly in her fate. Similarly Italy, France and the Low Countries were by implication untouchable by Stalin. Yet the understanding between the two Allied leaders was patchy; in particular, nothing was agreed about Germany. To say the least, the common understanding was very rough and ready.

  But it gave Stalin the reassurance he sought, and he scrawled a large blue tick on Churchill’s scheme. The interests of the USSR would be protected in most countries to Germany’s east while to the west the other Allies would have the greater influence. Churchill and Stalin did not specify how they might apply their mathematical politics to a real situation. Nor did they consider how long their agreement should last. In any case, an Anglo-Soviet agreement was insufficient to carry all before it. The Americans were horrified by what had taken place between Churchill and Stalin. Zones of influence infringed the principle of national self-determination, and at Yalta in February 1945 Roosevelt made plain that he would not accede to any permanent partition of Europe among the Allies.

  But on most other matters the three leaders could agree. The USSR contracted to enter the war against Japan in the East three months after the defeat of Germany. Furthermore, the Allies delineated Poland’s future borders
more closely and decided that Germany, once conquered, should be administered jointly by the USSR, USA, Britain and France.

  Stalin saw that his influence in post-war Europe would depend upon the Red Army being the first force to overrun Germany. Soviet forces occupied both Warsaw and Budapest in January 1945 and Prague in May. Apart from Yugoslavia and Albania, every country in eastern Europe was liberated from German occupation wholly or mainly by them. Pleased as he was by these successes, his preoccupation remained with Germany. The race was on for Berlin. To Stalin’s delight, it was not contested by the Western Allies, whose Supreme Commander General Eisenhower preferred to avoid unnecessary deaths among his troops and held to a cautious strategy of advance. The contenders for the prize of seizing the German capital were the Red commanders Zhukov and Konev. Stalin called them to Moscow on 3 April after learning that the British contingent under General Montgomery might ignore Eisenhower and reach Berlin before the Red Army. The Red Army was instructed to beat Montgomery to it.

  Stalin drew a line along an east–west axis between the forces of Zhukov and Konev. This plan stopped fifty kilometres short of Berlin. The tacit instruction from Stalin was that beyond this point whichever group of forces was in the lead could choose its own route.32 The race was joined on 16 April, and Zhukov finished it just ahead of Konev. Hitler died by his own hand on 30 April, thwarting Zhukov’s ambition to parade him in a cage on Red Square. The Wehrmacht surrendered to the Anglo-American command on 7 May and to the Red Army a day later. The war in Europe was over.

  According to the agreements made at Yalta, the Red Army was scheduled to enter the war against Japan three months later. American and British forces had fought long and hard in 1942–4 to reclaim the countries of the western coastline of the Pacific Ocean from Japanese rule; but a fierce last-ditch defence of Japan itself was anticipated. Harry Truman, who became American president on Roosevelt’s death on 11 April, continued to count on assistance from the Red Army. But in midsummer he abruptly changed his stance. The USA’s nuclear research scientists had at last tested an A-bomb and were capable of providing others for use against Japan. With such a devastating weapon, Truman no longer needed Stalin in the Far East, and Allied discussions became distinctly frosty when Truman, Stalin and Churchill met at Potsdam in July. On 6 August the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 9 August a second fell on Nagasaki.

  Yet Stalin refused to be excluded from the war in the Far East. Alarmed by the prospect of a Japan exclusively under American control, he insisted on declaring war on Japan even after the Nagasaki bomb. The Red Army invaded Manchuria. After the Japanese government communicated its intention to offer unconditional surrender, the USA abided by its Potsdam commitment by awarding southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union. Thus the conflict in the East, too, came to an end. The USSR had become one of the Big Three in the world alongside the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Her military, industrial and political might had been reinforced. Her Red Army bestrode half of Europe and had expanded its power in the Far East. Her government and her All-Union Communist Party were unshaken. And Stalin still ruled in the Kremlin.

  ‘Spring Sowing in Ukraine.’

  A cartoon (1942) showing Hitler and a German soldier planting a whip-carrying German government official in a Ukrainian village.

  CODA

  14

  Suffering and Struggle (1941–1945)

  The USSR would not have achieved its military victory if the country had not become one of the world’s great industrial powers by 1941. It outranked Germany in material output and natural resources, and had a population nearly three times greater. Soviet educational attainments and applied technological expertise were impressive. The USSR had institutions, policies and experience that could exploit such advantages in war. Consequently Hitler had taken a risk in attacking the USSR, and he had done this not only as a result of his ideological obsessions but also because he wanted to strike before the Red Army could recover from the Great Terror and the Soviet-Finnish war. It was for this reason that the Russians and the other Untermenschen of the USSR were paid the compliment of having three quarters of Hitler’s divisions concentrated against them.

  Yet the human cost of Stalin’s industrial strategy had been huge throughout the 1930s. Deaths occurred in their millions. The diet and health of the surviving population was poor, and popular hostility to the government had been intensified. Nor can it be wholly discounted that the USSR would have been able to achieve about the same volume of output from its factories and mines if the New Economic Policy had been maintained.1 State violence had not been a prerequisite of the country’s industrialization: such violence was really the product of the wishes and interests of Stalin and his close supporters in the communist party leadership. It is true that Stalin in the 1930s managed to give a priority to the defence sector of industry that had been lacking in the previous decade. But account must also be taken of the fact that Stalin’s blunders in June 1941 threw away a great portion of the USSR’s hard-won military and industrial achievements when Ukraine, Belorussia and western Russia fell under foreign occupation.

  Nor was there comprehensive success for the Soviet economy in the remainder of the German-Soviet war. The USSR demonstrated its excellence at producing tanks and aircraft while proving itself woefully inadequate in the feeding of its population. Moscow workers in the hardest manual occupations in 1943 were receiving only 2,914 calories per day; they needed at least 3,500 for mere subsistence.2 If the widespread drought of 1946 had occurred three or four years earlier, the result of the war itself might have been different.3 Stalin’s collective farms were the worst imaginable form of wartime food production. The USSR was in some ways at its peak of efficiency in the Second World War; but it was at its lower depths in others.

  The regime’s self-inflicted damage was not confined to the economy. In 1941 Stalin ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans from their autonomous republic in the RSFSR. Two years later, as the Wehrmacht was beginning to retreat into the eastern parts of Ukraine and Belorussia, the process was repeated. Karachai, Kalmyks, Ingushi, Chechens, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meshketian Turks and Greeks of Crimea were arrested and deported from their native lands in the North Caucasus and other southern parts of the RSFSR. Men, women and children were crammed into freezing cattle-trucks and transported to inhospitable areas of Kazakhstan, where they were abandoned without the rudimentary means of sustenance. Stalin secretly branded whole nationalities as traitors, and the NKVD was instructed to round them up in a lightning military operation; and Beria was able to report to Stalin on the fulfilment of these instructions by NKVD General I. A. Serov.4

  Armed groups of Chechens and others had indeed rendered active assistance to the Wehrmacht. But this was not the whole story; for thirty-six Chechens had been decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union for their conspicuous valour as Red Army soldiers.5 Moreover, even the Third Reich did not trust the Volga Germans. They had settled in Russia in the eighteenth century and Nazi officials classified them according to four categories of Germanhood – and the fourth category embraced those who were impervious to Nazi ideas and were to be handed over to the Gestapo.6 And vastly more Ukrainians than Volga Germans or Chechens had started by warmly greeting the German invasion. Nevertheless the Ukrainian nation was not subsequently deported. Presumably even Stalin blanched at the scale of resources that he would have to divert from the war against Hitler. Probably, too, he was using the maltreatment of small nationalities as a signal to the larger ones to accord the maximum co-operation to the Soviet authorities.

  Stalin also caused wholly needless resentment even among Russians. Lieutenant-General A. N. Vlasov, whom the German forces had captured in 1942, was infuriated by Stalin’s refusal to allow him to retreat in time from an unavoidable encirclement. Vlasov the unquestioning Stalinist turned into an anti-Stalin Russian patriot who agreed to organize a Russian Liberation Army out of Soviet POWs. Vlasov was a dupe. His inten
tion was for these armed units to fight on the Eastern front, overthrow Stalin and then turn on the Nazis, driving them out of Russia and installing a government committed to moderate socialist policies; but Hitler foresaw such a trick and restricted Vlasov’s men mainly to guard duties in the Channel Islands. Yet the Russian Liberation Army’s very existence testified to the hatred stirred up by Stalin, and Vlasov’s comrades undertook the most concerted endeavour ever made by Russians to bring him down.7

  Thus the ultra-authoritarian features of the Soviet regime caused harm to its war effort. Britain and the USA were states which lacked a capacity to enforce their political, social and economic commands before entering the war. This had not impeded them from carrying out the necessary wartime reorganization. Indeed a democratic state probably benefits from needing to secure voluntary acceptance of centralization and discipline. An elected political leadership, buoyed up by popular consent, has small reason to use violence on its own citizens.

  Such considerations were odious to Stalin and his cronies. Already having been a highly ‘militarized’ society before 1941, the USSR became co-ordinated as if it were simply a great armed camp wherein the Red Army itself was but the most forward and exposed contingent. ‘Everything for the Front!’ was the state’s rallying slogan. The NKVD unconcernedly reduced the dietary provision in the Gulag system by a further thirty per cent. The new norms for prisoners were far below the level of subsistence, and 622,000 of them are reckoned to have died in the penal-labour camps between 1941 and 1945.8 Food distribution had also become a powerful instrument for the control of the free population: urban inhabitants were eligible for official ration-cards, which could be withdrawn for acts of delinquence. For a brief and unique time in Soviet history, factories and mines had dependable work-forces.