The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  The increased compliance did not mean that the previous informal patterns of organization were eliminated. The opposite was the case: both the cliental ‘tails’ and the ‘family circles’ were indispensable to the operation of administrative machinery in wartime, when abrupt movements of the military front could cut off a city, province or whole region from commands from Moscow. The vertical and horizontal linkages which Stalin had tried to uproot in the Great Terror had been replanted in 1939–41; they were crucial to the state’s ability to organize its military effort.

  And so committees of defence were formed in all cities, typically involving the leading figures in the party, soviet, police and army command. The precise relationships among institutions behind the front line underwent modification and the further enhancement of the party’s authority was particularly noteworthy. Nikolai Patolichev, who served successively in Yaroslavl and Chelyabinsk as first secretary of the party province committee, later recorded how he had intervened in factories when industrial targets were not being met. He countermanded instructions from military commanders and the local NKVD for the good of the cause. Patolichev knew that, if his judgement was called into question, he could get on the phone to Moscow and seek central political support.9 Party committees were not as dominant as they had been in the course of the First Five-Year Plan: they had to share power with other institutions at the local level. Yet the reinforcement of the communist party’s authority was none the less substantial.

  Stalin used cunning to restrict the potential for insubordination to himself. He made appointments from rival cliental groups to the most important institutions, localities and fronts. This brought him several advantages. It ensured a lively competition to fulfil his orders. It gave ample opportunity, too, for denunciations of one group by another: the slightest sign of disloyalty to Stalin would be reported to him. He also kept watch over the Red Army through political commissars whose main task was to check on the obedience of military officers.

  Yet at the same time he reduced some of the annoyance given to such officers. In November 1942 he decreed that the commissars should become mere deputies to their commanders and no longer be their equals. Moreover, the best-nourished citizens were those on active service. Each soldier, in addition to his daily ration, was given a 100-cc tot of vodka to steady the nerves and keep out the cold.10 The officers were looked after still more carefully, and the central state organs ensured that their families were given additional privileges.11 Epaulettes were restored to uniforms. The practice of saluting superiors was reintroduced. A swagger returned to the gait of generals. Stalin had little alternative but to treat them better than before 1941. The losses in the officer corps were grievous in the Second World War. According to Red Army records, 1,023,093 commissioned officers were killed and 1,030,721 were invalided out of service.12

  The plight of the armed forces in summer 1941 was such that thousands of officers convicted as ‘spies’ were recalled from Siberian labour camps, given a couple of square meals and recommissioned to fight against their alleged spymasters. These were the lucky ones. Other inmates who had not been officers before their arrest were also released, but only on condition that they served in the dreaded penal regiments which marched out in front of their own side’s tanks and armoured vehicles, clearing the enemy’s minefields at the high risk of their lives. They were motivated by patriotism as well as by a desire to erase the undeserved shame of a prison sentence: the regulations of the penal regiments allowed them to earn their freedom in reward for acts of conspicuous bravery.13 They also saw the frightful dangers as being more tolerable than the living death of Gulag labour on starvation rations.

  Not that the Gulag system was dismantled: the great majority of camp prisoners were given no chance to fight Hitler. The exact number of them at the moment of the German invasion and through the war is still uncertain; but probably there was a decline by two fifths in the three years after January 1941. Thereafter the camps were replenished with fresh intakes. By January 1945 the estimated total came to nearly nine tenths of the pre-war one.14

  Slave labour had become a permanent category of Stalin’s thought and a permanent mode of his governance. None of his associates dared to challenge this. The timber still needed felling and the gold mining; the new factory sites still had to be completed in the Urals and Siberia. Confidential official discussions started from the premiss that the economy would be seriously dislocated if the Gulag camps were to be closed and emptied of their prisoners. A certain industrial administrator, when his department had difficulty in hitting its production target, was heard to remark: ‘The fact is that we haven’t yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonments.’15 It is therefore hardly surprising that many prisoners felt they had nothing to lose by rebelling. In January 1942 an uprising was led by Mark Retyunin in the Vorkuta.16 The insurgents were put down with exemplary savagery and the terror-regime was reinforced.

  Repression continued through the war. Soviet citizens were warned to continue to treat foreigners warily, including citizens of the Allied countries. After December 1941, when the USA entered the war, a new offence was created by the NKVD: the praising of American technology (voskhalenie amerikanskoi tekhniki). An unguarded, admiring comment about an American jeep could lead to someone being consigned to the labour camps.17 By 1943, as the Red Army reconquered the western USSR, the security police arrested not only those Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Germans but even those who had just been taken prisoner-of-war by them. Victories in battle also encouraged Stalin to resume campaigns for Marxist-Leninist indoctrination in the armed forces themselves. Soldiers had previously been ordered only to fight well. Now they had to think acceptable thoughts too.18 Evidently Stalin had already decided that the pre-war regime was to be reinstated in all its brutality as soon as was possible.

  Nevertheless this was not yet obvious to most people. What many of them preferred to note was that Stalin had introduced several concessions since the beginning of the German-Soviet war. And hopes grew that the regime would become more humane once Germany had been defeated.

  This mood was encouraged by the concessions made in culture. Artists were permitted to create what they wanted so long as their works avoided direct criticism of Marxism-Leninism and had a patriotic resonance. The magnificent Leningrad Symphony was written in the city of that name by composer and part-time fire-warden Shostakovich, who had been in trouble with the official authorities before 1941. Writers, too, benefited. One was among the century’s greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova, whose innocent son had died in the NKVD’s custody. She continued to compose without fear, and the following stanza drew forth an ovation from within the Hall of Columns in Moscow:19

  It’s not awful to fall dead under the bullets.

  It’s not bitter to be left without shelter –

  We will preserve you, Russian speech,

  Great Russian word.

  We will bear you free and pure

  And hand you to our grandchildren, and save you forever from captivity.

  Many ordinary working citizens were attracted to high art as never before, and the link that bound the arts and politics became a source of strength for the state authorities.

  Stalin also somewhat moderated his rough approach to the religious faith of most Soviet citizens. At a time when he needed the maximum co-operation in the war effort it made no sense to give unnecessary offence to such believers, and the word was put about that the authorities would no longer persecute the Russian Orthodox Church. In its turn the Church collected money for military needs and its priests blessed tank divisions on their way from the factories to the Eastern front.

  The shift in policy towards organized religion was formalized in September 1943, when Metropolitan Sergei was summoned to the Kremlin. To his bemusement, he was given the good news that permission was being given by the Soviet authorities for the Russian Orthodox Church to hold an Assembly and elect the first Patriarch since the death of Tikhon in 1925. Stali
n playfully affected surprise that the Metropolitan had so few priests escorting him – and the Metropolitan forbore to mention that tens of thousands of priests would have been available had they not been killed by the NKVD. In fact Metropolitan Sergei died soon after being confirmed as Patriarch and he was succeeded in 1944 by Metropolitan Aleksi of Leningrad. But both Sergei and Aleksi followed a policy of grateful accommodation to Stalin’s wishes.

  The Russian Orthodox Church was helpful to Stalin as an instrument whereby he could increase popular acquiescence in his rule. It was also pressed by him into the service of suppressing other Russian Christian sects as well as those Christian denominations associated with other nationalities. As the Red Army moved into Ukraine and Belorussia, nearly all ecclesiastical buildings were put under the authority of Patriarch Aleksi. The Russian Orthodox Church became one of the main beneficiaries of Stalinism. Real authority, it need hardly be added, remained with Stalin, whom Aleksi grotesquely described as a ‘God-given leader’.20

  While making manipulative compromises with religion, Stalin extended those which he had already offered to Russian national sensitivities. In June 1943 the Internationale was dropped as the state anthem. Stalin ordered the composition of a less internationalist set of verses which began:

  An indestructible union of free republics

  Has forever been welded by Russia the Great.

  Long live the land created by the will of the peoples:

  The united, powerful Soviet Union!

  Cheap copies of it were reproduced on postcards for soldiers to send back from the front. Stalin also tried to appeal more generally to Slavic peoples, including not only Ukrainians but also Czechs, Serbs and Poles. The bonds between the Slavs were stressed by official Soviet historians. Stalin wanted to increase the Red Army’s popular welcome in eastern Europe as it moved on Berlin. Russia’s role as past protector of the Slav nations was emphasized (and, it must be added, exaggerated).21

  Special praise was showered upon the Russians for their endurance and commitment to the defeat of Hitler. An unnamed partisan gave an account to Pravda about German atrocities in a provincial city; his conclusion was defiant: ‘Pskov is in chains. Russian history knows that the people have more than once broken the chains welded on to a free town by the enemy.’22

  The Russian nation was encouraged to believe that it was fighting for its Motherland (and Fatherland: propagandists used the terms indiscriminately), and that this included not only Russia but the entire USSR. Political commissars urged troops to charge into action shouting in unison: ‘For the Motherland, for Stalin!’ It is doubtful that most of them really mentioned Stalin in their battle-cries; but certainly the idea of the Motherland was widely and enthusiastically accepted by Russians on active service. They would have taken this attitude even if the regime had not given its encouragement. The German occupation of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic republics in the first two years of the war meant that the great majority of Red Army soldiers perforce originated from the RSFSR and were Russians; and such soldiers needed little convincing that the Russian contribution was uniquely crucial to the struggle against Hitler.23

  Yet the eulogies of the Russians also had to avoid giving offence to other nations whose young men had been conscripted into the Red Army. Multinational harmony was emphasized in the following appeal to the Uzbek people: ‘The home of the Russian is also your home; the home of the Ukrainian and the Belorussian is also your home!’24 Such invocations were not without their positive impact upon several peoples belonging to the USSR. The war induced an unprecedented sense of co-operation among nations.25

  But this was very far from meaning that a ‘Soviet people’ was created. Most national and ethnic groups experienced an increase in their sense of distinctness in the heat of the war. The brutal policies before 1941 had induced permanent hatred of Stalin among most non-Russians. Antagonism was especially noticeable both among the deported nationalities but also among peoples living in states which had recently been independent from Moscow. Western Belorussians, for example, were reported as being keen to fight against Hitler but not to swear a military oath of loyalty to the USSR. ‘Why,’ some of them asked, ‘is our nation being trampled upon?’ Romanians from Moldavia took a similar attitude; they especially objected to being prohibited from singing their own patriotic songs on campaign and being forced to learn the officially-approved Russian ones.26 For such conscripts, talk of the Soviet Motherland was a disguised way of advocating Russian imperialism.

  Yet still they fought in the ranks of the Red Army; for they judged Hitler’s defeat to be the supreme goal. The Soviet regime exploited this situation and anti-German sentiments were given raucous expression in the mass media. A poem by Konstantin Simonov ended with the words:

  Then kill a German, kill him soon –

  And any time you see one, kill him.

  Propagandists who had portrayed Germans as honorary Russians during the two years of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty came to treat the entire German people as the enemy; and most citizens of the USSR readily condoned this in the light of the barbarities of the Nazis.

  They also approved of certain alterations in economic policy. For example, the authorities earned a degree of popularity by quietly dropping the May 1939 restriction on the size of private plots on kolkhozes: there was recognition that the goodwill of the peasantry was vital to halt the steep decline in agricultural output. In practice, too, peasants were allowed to trade their produce not only in the legal private markets but also illicitly on street corners. The Soviet state continued to bear responsibility for the supply of all kinds of food to the armed forces; but only an extremely small range of products, mainly bread, was guaranteed to urban civilians, who had to supplement their diet in whatever fashion they could. Sanction was given for the marking out of vegetable allotments outside factory buildings and on the outskirts of towns. The potatoes grown on these little patches of ground prevented many families from starving to death.27

  Only in Stalin’s USSR could such meagre concessions to cultural, religious, national and economic aspirations be regarded as startling indulgences on the part of the authorities. If conditions had not been so hard for most people, the concessions would also have been discerned as a sign of the inability of the state authorities to exert total, detailed control over society. This inability, which had already been observable before 1941, attained even greater salience during the German-Soviet war: Stalin had learned the need for a dose of pragmatism in his choice of policies.

  Urban conditions were appalling. Hunger was incessant for most townspeople in the regions held by the Red Army. There was a very high rate of mortality; and human corpses in some places were used by the living to survive a little longer. Cattle, pigs and poultry had gone first; then dogs, cats and rats, followed by any berries and herbs and then nettles, grass and tree bark. So that dead people were sometimes quite literally a last resort. Geographical factors had a deep and direct influence on things. Leningrad was the city worst supplied with food: the courageous convoys sent over the ice of Lake Ladoga could not always get through the German siege. But malnutrition and disease affected all urban areas; and houses demolished by artillery and bombing from the air were not replaced; sanitation was ruined. Precious few families escaped the loss of loved ones: even Stalin’s son Yakov was killed by the Germans.

  In the countryside it was mainly old women and men judged unfit for military conscription who worked on the farms. Most of the twelve million military volunteers and conscripts came from the villages;28 and appeals were made also for able-bodied men and women to enter industrial employment so that the factory labour-force increased by a third between 1942 and 1945.29 The consequence was a further depopulation of the countryside. Not only that: the tractor drivers who were needed for the maintenance of large-scale arable cultivation were among the earliest lads to be pressed into the Red Army. The technical core of collective farms imploded; whole rural areas collapsed to a level
of production insufficient to meet the subsistence requirements of the villages. On farms in the vicinity of the military fronts there was usually total devastation. Homes, byres and barns were bombed into oblivion, and it was common for peasants to live out the war sheltering in holes in the ground.30

  So whence came this capacity to endure and resist? The answer cannot lie only with the industrial might and organizational efficiency of the regime, even when allowance is made for the informal institutional patterns and the modified policies that enhanced performance. What was crucial was the reaction of countless millions of Soviet citizens to the news of what was going on in the vast area of the USSR currently under German occupation. Above all, they learned that the policies of Hitler were even more ghastly than those of Stalin. They learned that defeat by the German forces would bring about consequences of almost unimaginable horror.

  Thus the Gestapo and Wehrmacht had the task of killing every Jew and Gypsy. Captured communist party members were to be summarily executed. There was piteous slaughter at Babi Yar in Ukraine where 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned to death over the edge of a ravine; and around the town of Cherkessk alone there were ‘twenty-four vast pits filled with the corpses of men, women and children tortured and shot by the German monsters’.31 Further millions of people – Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians – were deported to labour camps such as Auschwitz where all but very few met their deaths through brutal labour, starvation and beatings. The author of Mein Kampf did not merely despise the Russians and other Slavs: he classified them as sub-human. About eleven million Soviet citizens died under German occupation, and of these roughly five million perished in captivity.32

  Not all governments in the eastern half of Europe were simply victims of German oppression. Hungary and Romania, albeit under pressure from Berlin, provided contingents for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler also gave favoured status to Croats in what had been pre-war Yugoslavia; and the Germans encouraged Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers to form SS units that sought revenge for their sufferings at Stalin’s hands. The Wehrmacht was warmly received, too, further south. Ukrainian peasants offered bread and salt as a traditional sign of welcome to their invaders in the hope that Hitler would break up the collective farms and abolish the state quotas for grain deliveries.