In fact the Ostministerium, which Hitler established to govern the territory seized from the USSR, refused to de-nationalize the collective farms and large industrial enterprises but instead transferred them into the property of the Third Reich.33 But other concessions were forthcoming. Elections were held to local administrative posts. German officials held such functionaries under ruthless control, but at least a semblance of self-administration existed for some months. In addition, former entrepreneurs could apply for licences to run their workshops and cafés again: small-scale private business was restored to the economy.34 The Ostministerium also authorized the reopening of churches. In contrast to the Soviet authorities, the Germans prevented the re-emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and gave preference to Ukrainian and Belorussian denominations (although these, too, were highly restricted in their public activities).35 Thus the Ostministerium endeavoured to alleviate the tasks of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front.
Initially collaborators were not hard to find. Many deportees and ex-prisoners were persuadable to work for the Nazis. For example, a policeman called Noga from Prokovskoe district in southern Ukraine enthusiastically informed on ‘the people who interested the Germans’. Noga, having served out six years of Siberian exile, eagerly took his chance to beat a captured partisan to death.36 Plenty of such persons volunteered their services to the German occupiers; and inhabitants of the western provinces of Ukraine and Belorussia (which had recently been annexed to the USSR) deserted the Red Army in large numbers.37 In December 1941 Hitler sanctioned the recruitment of volunteer military units from among the non-Slav nationalities. The Turkestani, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Tatar and North Caucasian legions were quickly formed. Even a Cossack unit came into existence since Hitler’s racial theorists rejected the incontrovertible fact that the Cossacks were descended from runaway Russian peasants and from Russian soldiers who had completed their military service.
Most of the conquered people soon learned by direct experience that one of three destinies had been planned for them: execution; deportation for forced labour; or starvation. In the kolkhozes the German delivery quotas were raised even above the levels imposed by Stalin before 1941. Field-Marshal Reichenau implacably explained to the Wehrmacht: ‘To supply local inhabitants and prisoners-of-war with food is an act of unnecessary humanity.’38
There was astonishment at the savagery ordered by Hitler. Ferocious conflicts had taken place between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the previous two centuries; but the butchery had by and large been confined to the fields of battle. The last time when Russians confronted an external enemy disposed to take hostages as a normal method of war was in the campaigns against the Chechens in the 1820s and 1830s – and the Chechens were the objects of Russian aggression, not themselves the invaders. In the 1930s it had been the unconscious assumption of Soviet politicians and ordinary citizens alike that if ever war broke out with Germany, the fighting would be no dirtier than in the First World War. They failed to anticipate that an advanced industrial society, even one that had been infected with belligerent racism, could resort to mass inhumanities on Hitler’s scale.
Resistance intensified as Hitler’s intentions became public knowledge, and the German-occupied zone was never free from military conflict. Even in many areas where non-Russians were the majority of the population and where the Wehrmacht had initially been welcomed, there was a spirit of defiance. Groups of armed men formed themselves in the woods and made sporadic attacks on German armed units. By mid-1942 there were 100,000 partisans active against the Wehrmacht.39 German soldiers and airmen could never forget that they were detested by local inhabitants determined to see the back of them and to push a bayonet between their shoulder-blades for good measure. The student Zoya Kosmodeyanskaya was hailed as a national heroine. Captured by the Germans after setting fire to their billets in the village of Petrishchenko, she was tortured and hanged. On the scaffold she called out defiantly: ‘German soldiers, give yourselves up before it’s too late!’40
Yet even where the partisans had minor successes, terrible retaliation was effected upon nearby towns and villages. The Wehrmacht and the SS applied a rule that a hundred local inhabitants, usually randomly selected, would be shot in reaction to every killing of a German soldier. The result was that the Soviet partisan groups did not cause decisive damage to German power even when, from 1943, munitions and guidance started to reach them from Moscow.
In practical terms, then, it was the attitude to the war taken by civilians and soldiers in Soviet-held territory that was the crucial component of the USSR’s victory. They had quickly understood what was in store for them if Hitler were to win. They got their information from conversations with refugees, soldiers and partisans as well as from the mass media. Reporters such as Vasili Grossman, who was at double risk as a Jew and a communist party member, travelled to the front areas, and the facts as discovered by them were so terrible that the newspapers were allowed to reveal them without the usual official distortions. The regime, moreover, had the sense not to over-fill the press with eulogies to Stalin, Marxism-Leninism and the October Revolution. Only after the battle of Kursk, when it was already clear that the Red Army was likely to win the war, was the ‘cult’ of the great Stalin resumed in its pre-war devoutness.41
There was always an abundance of volunteers to join the Red Army. The war gave many people who were deeply dissatisfied with the Soviet regime a reason at last for co-operating with the authorities.42 This was especially noticeable among refugees whose minds burned with the ambition to fight their way back to their home towns and villages to rescue their families before it was too late.43 Thus the hostility caused by Stalin’s policies since the late 1920s could, at least to some extent, be put into suspension. The will to beat the Germans had a unifying effect.
Militant patriotism was in the air. Russians in particular acquired a more intense sense of nationhood as millions of them came together as soldiers and factory workers. Many other peoples of the USSR, furthermore, displayed the same toughness and resilience. All drew upon reserves of endurance associated with a life-style that, by the standards of industrial societies in western Europe, was already extraordinarily harsh. The Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror had habituated Soviet citizens to making the best of an extremely bad lot: hunger, disease, low wages, poor shelter and state violence had been recurrent features in the lives of most of them. Their material expectations were low even in the good times. The difference in 1941 was that the torment originated from without rather than within the country. This time it was a foreign Führer, not a Soviet General Secretary, who was the source of their woes.
The genocidal intent of Nazism impelled both Russians and the other peoples living in the regions unoccupied by the Wehrmacht to put up the sternest defence. If it had not been for Hitler’s fanatical racism, the USSR would not have won the struggle on the Eastern front. Stalin’s repressiveness towards his own citizens would have cost him the war against Nazi Germany, and the post-war history of the Soviet Union and the world would have been fundamentally different.
Part Three
* * *
‘Whether you believe it or not, I’m telling you that there really was an occasion when I managed to get a quick interview with the boss here.’
A comment in the magazine Krokodil in 1952 about the relentless growth of queues in administrative offices after the war. It is a mild satire; but not every official statement in the Soviet Union claimed that all was well in the running of society.
15
The Hammers of Peace (1945–1953)
The compound of the Soviet order had been put under an excruciating test from abroad and had survived. Not only was Stalin still in power but also the one-party, one-ideology state was intact. There also remained a state-owned economy orientated towards the production of industrial capital goods and armaments. The mechanisms of the police state were in place; and, as before, it was not even a police state w
here due process of law was respected.
Yet there were features of the Soviet compound that had proved their ineffectiveness during the war even from a pragmatic viewpoint. Political, economic, national, social and cultural difficulties were acute. In the subsequent twenty-five years the political leaders tried various answers. Stalin simply reimposed the pre-war version of the compound and crushed any hopes of incipient change. His successors under Khrushchëv tried to remove certain elements in a campaign of reforms. But Khrushchëv introduced deep instabilities and fellow leaders came to regard his policies and techniques as a threat to the regime’s long-term durability. After sacking him, they attempted to conserve the compound by policies which trimmed the commitment to reform. All these changes, furthermore, were made while Soviet leaders wrestled with problems of geo-politics, technological modernization, popular indoctrination and their own power and its legitimization as a group and as individuals. Their constant quest was to conserve the compound in a manner that suited their interests.
For the world in 1945 had changed beyond retrieval since 1939. Adolf Hitler had shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Benito Mussolini had been hanged by Italian partisans and Hideki Tojo was awaiting trial before American judges. German, Italian and Japanese racist militarism had been shattered. The USA, the USSR and the United Kingdom had emerged as the Big Three in global power.
It was they who established the United Nations in October 1945. Without the Big Three, no big international project could be brought to completion. Britain had incurred huge financial debts to the Americans in the Second World War and already was a junior partner in her relationship with them. The crucial rivalry was therefore between the Big Two, the USA and the USSR, a rivalry which at times threatened to turn into all-out military conflict. Fortunately the Third World War did not break out; and the American-Soviet rivalry, while constituting a constant danger to global peace, became known as the Cold War. Global capitalism confronted global communism. President Harry S Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, was determined to assert the superiority of free markets and electoral politics over the Soviet system; but the likelihood of capitalism’s eventual victory in this struggle was far from being self-evident.
Multitudes of people in the USSR and Eastern Europe detested communist government, and there was no paucity of commentary in the West about Stalin. The horrors of his rule were vividly described by journalists and diplomats. Quickly the admiration of the USSR for its decisive contribution to the defeat of Hitler gave way to revulsion from the policies and practices of the Soviet regime after 1945.
Yet the Soviet Union of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin continued to attract a degree of approval. It still seemed to many observers that the USSR served as a model for enabling the emergence of industrial, literate societies out of centuries of backwardness. Central state planning had acquired global respect during the war. But whereas most countries with capitalist economies tended to restrict such planning after 1945, the USSR persisted with it on the grounds that it obviated the social evils characteristic of the West. Unemployment did not exist in the USSR. Among the large capitalist economies after the defeat of Germany and Japan, only a few such as Britain and Sweden sponsored a comprehensive system of state welfare-assistance. Furthermore, the new communist authorities in Eastern Europe commenced a campaign of universal education and took steps so that the local nationalisms which had helped to cause the First and Second World Wars might be prevented from exploding again into violence.
The world communist movement followed the USSR’s example: even the Chinese communist party, which took power in Beijing in September 1949, acknowledged the USSR’s hegemony. The large communist parties in Italy and France had fought their own partisan struggles against Fascism and Nazism; but they, too, obeyed Moscow’s line of the day; their relationship with the All-Union Communist Party was more filial than fraternal. The Soviet Union was a military power of the first rank. In the post-war years, through to the break-up of the USSR, pride in the Soviet armed forces’ victory over Hitler and in their ability to compete with the USA’s nuclear power pervaded the regime. The resonance of her ideology reached parts of the globe where it had been unknown. Soviet political institutions had never been stronger, and the confidence of the country’s leaders never greater.
If Stalin and his confederates were to maintain their image around the world, however, they had to curtail the world’s knowledge about their country. The consequences of war were dreadful. Stalin sent NKVD investigators into all the areas that had ever been under German occupation to draw up an account of Soviet losses, and their reports made for depressing reading. Roughly twenty-six million citizens of the USSR lay dead as the direct result of the Second World War.1 The western regions of the USSR suffered disproportionate damage: perhaps as much as a quarter of the population of Ukraine and Belorussia failed to survive the war. The losses in Russia itself were also enormous. The number of Russians killed in wartime is not yet known; but indisputably it was huge. The Germans had occupied large regions of central, northern and southern Russia for lengthy periods and 1.8 million civilians were killed by them on the territory of the RSFSR.2 This was half the number of such deaths in Ukraine; but it should not be forgotten that Russians constituted one tenth of Ukraine’s population in 1939.3 In any case the RSFSR, where four fifths of citizens were Russians, had supplied most of the conscripts to a Red Army which suffered grievous losses throughout the Soviet-German war.
The dead were not the only victims. Russia and the rest of the USSR teemed with widows, orphans and invalids. Innumerable families had been destroyed or disrupted beyond repair. The state could not cope with the physical rehabilitation of those veterans left disabled at the end of military hostilities. Nor could it secure adequate food and shelter for the waifs and strays on Soviet streets. And since many more men than women had been killed, there would inevitably be a demographic imbalance between the sexes. The USSR’s people appeared more like the losers than the victors of the Second World War.
The urban landscape throughout the western Soviet Union was a ruin. Minsk, Kiev and Vilnius had become acres of rubble. In the RSFSR, Stalingrad was a blackened desert. The Red Army had implemented a scorched-earth policy in its rapid retreat in 1941. But the damage done by the Wehrmacht on its own long retreat in 1944–5 was vastly more systematic. Hardly a factory, collective farm, mine or residential area was left intact; 1710 towns were obliterated along with about 70,000 villages. Whole rural districts were wrecked so thoroughly that agriculture practically ceased in them.4 In Cherkessk in Stavropol region, for instance, the Soviet investigative commission reported the demolition of thirty main buildings, including the party and soviet headquarters, the furniture factory, the radio station, the saw-mill and the electricity-generating plant. Hospitals and clinics had been put out of action. The town’s thirty-five libraries had been blown up along with their 235,000 books. The commission added in a matter-of-fact fashion: ‘All the good new schools were turned into stables, garages, etc.’5
It had been Nazi policy to reduce the Russians and other Soviet nations to starvation, poverty and cultural dissolution. And so, as the Wehrmacht and Gestapo moved out of north-western Russia, they paused at Petrodvorets in order to annihilate the palace built for the Empress Elizabeth to the design of the Italian architect Rastrelli. No one who has visited that now-reconstructed great palace is likely to forget the records of vandalism: pictures defaced, wall-coverings burnt, statues bludgeoned to smithereens.
Displaced civilians and disattached soldiers swarmed on to the highways and rail-routes leading to Moscow. The Smolensk Road, from Warsaw to Moscow, was crammed with Soviet troops making their way back home and often carrying war booty. Lorries, cars, horses and even railway carriages were commandeered by them. The chaos of administration increased at the end of military hostilities, and total detailed dominance by the Kremlin was unobtainable. The police state was at its most efficient in Moscow; but the Soviet security police was overstretched
by its recently-acquired responsibility for conducting surveillance over the countries of Eastern Europe. An attempt had been made in 1943 to rationalize the NKVD’s functions between two agencies: the NKVD itself and a new NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security). But the workload was enormous, and the result was that in many towns and most villages of the USSR there was a temporary relief from the state’s interference on a day-to-day basis.
A depiction of the scene comes to us from the Italian writer Primo Levi. Having escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Levi had to make his own arrangements to get back to his native Turin. He wandered into Warsaw, where thieving and black-marketeering were rife. He walked on from Warsaw into Belorussia, and yet again he found that illegal private bartering was the only way to stay alive. After much haggling, he exchanged a few trinkets with peasants for one of their chickens. Of the party-state’s presence there was little sign.6
For Stalin, therefore, military victory in 1945 presented many risks.7 The material and social damage would take years to mend, and disorder might occur in Russia or any other Soviet republic or indeed any country of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s discomfort was sharpened by the reports that broad segments of society yearned for him to abandon the policies and methods of the past. The Red Army soldiers who had marched into Europe had seen things that made them question the domestic policies of their own government. Greeting fellow soldiers of the Western Allies on the river Elbe or in Berlin, they had been able to learn a little about foreign ways. Those other citizens, too, who had never crossed the boundaries of the USSR had had experiences which increased their antagonism to the Soviet regime. Partisans and others had resisted Hitler without needing to be compelled by the Kremlin; and Stalin’s near-catastrophic blunders in 1941–2 had not been forgotten.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 35