The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Censorship of private correspondence was routine in the Soviet Union before the German invasion, and the NKVD censors stepped up their work as soon as war broke out. They flagged anything that sounded seditious, and retribution was swift. On June 24, for instance, the censors’ internal report quoted several letters.

  Chervyakov, identified only by his last name and the description that he had served in the tsarist army, claimed that the Kremlin had made a mistake by allying itself with Germany instead of with Britain and France and that the outbreak of the war was already revealing “great dissatisfaction in the army.” The censors’ report contained the final line: “Chervyakov was arrested.”

  An ethnic German “manufacturer” named Kuhn wrote, “The Soviet Union is totally responsible for the war,” echoing German propaganda that Soviet troop deployments along the border amounted to a provocation. “Soviet power isn’t the product of the will of the people,” he added. “And now people will protest.” Here, too, the final line was: “Kuhn was arrested.”

  Danilov, an employee of the road department of Moscow’s Stalin district, erroneously reported that Hitler’s armies had already captured five major cities, including Kiev and Odessa. “At last we shall breathe freely,” he wrote. “In three days Hitler will be in Moscow and the intelligentsia will live the good life.” There was no note about Danilov’s fate, but it isn’t hard to imagine.

  Kurbanov, who worked for the construction department of Intourist, the state travel bureau, wrote, “It’s questionable whether Soviet power will prevail in this war. In 1919–20 [referring to the Civil War] the people fought for liberty and their rights. Now they have nobody to die for. Soviet power has made people remarkably angry.” Here, too, there was no word on his fate.

  Finally, Mauritz, described only as another ethnic German, predicted that peasants would welcome the outbreak of the war. “It will free them from the Bolsheviks and the collective farms that they hate.” The notation: “Mauritz was arrested.”

  In fact, many Ukrainians and others on the western periphery of the Soviet Union initially greeted the Germans as liberators, since they were convinced that the conquerors would put an end to the wholesale terror they had experienced under Stalin. The forced collectivization campaign of the 1930s, accompanied by mass starvation, arrests, and executions, had led to millions of deaths, and it was hard for the survivors to imagine that the Germans could treat them any worse than that. “The local population showed genuine kindness towards the German troops and pinned great hopes on our arrival,” Hans von Herwarth, the German diplomat turned warrior wrote. “Everywhere we went we were greeted with bread and salt, the traditional Slav symbols of hospitality.”

  But if this behavior could be discounted because it was coming from the Ukrainians or other nationalities whose loyalty was suspect, the censors’ classified reports on intercepted letters showed that the inhabitants of Moscow and other Russian cities weren’t immune to such sentiments either during the earliest days of the fighting. While most rallied to the cause, the doubters—and those who unabashedly hoped for the defeat of the communist regime—weren’t simply figments of the paranoid imagination of Stalin and his enforcers. They may have constituted a small minority, but there were enough of them to feed the regime’s paranoia further. There were enough, too, to belie the propaganda line that the Soviet people were completely united in their resolve to defeat the German invaders.

  Far more serious than the signs of civilian discontent was the situation on the battlefields as the Germans kept advancing. Stalin had plenty of reason to suspect that many of his demoralized troops were giving up all too willingly and that discipline was breaking down in major units all across the front. “It was not the German attack that took Stalin by surprise but the collapse of our troops,” Sergo Beria, the son of the NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, maintained in his account of the period. Although he was wrong in his contention that Stalin wasn’t surprised by the attack itself, the younger Beria was right about the shock that the Soviet leader felt when he realized that his armies were, in many cases, disintegrating in the face of the German assault.

  Faced with this avalanche of alarming news, Stalin reverted to form, issuing a series of draconian decrees that would play a key role in how the battle for Moscow would be fought and every other battle afterward. In essence, they amounted to a death sentence not only for those who fled or wavered but also for many brave soldiers who stood their ground.

  On June 28, he authorized the first instructions that set out his attitude toward all those Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans. The “traitors who had fled abroad,” as he called them, were to be immediately punished upon their return, and, in the meantime, their families were to be punished as well. A month later, he issued Order 227, known as Not a Step Backward. Forbidding Soviet soldiers to retreat, it warned that they would be shot if they disobeyed. The NKVD was also given the authority to shoot any Soviet soldiers who escaped from German captivity. To be captured by the Germans, the prisoners soon learned, amounted to a virtual death sentence. A German report dated February 19, 1942, indicated that nearly three million of the four million Soviet prisoners they had taken up to that point had perished. While the report almost certainly exaggerated the number of Soviet prisoners, the 75 percent death ratio was in all probability close to accurate. And Stalin’s order meant that most were doomed even if they managed to escape.

  Then, on August 16, Stalin issued his infamous Order 270, spelling out the specifics of his policy. “I order that (1) anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be treated as a malicious deserter whose family is to be arrested as a family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot. (2) Those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines. And those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance.”

  Stalin had already demonstrated that he meant every word of that. A month earlier, Yakov, Stalin’s eldest son, a lieutenant in the Fourteenth Armored Division, found himself surrounded by German troops at Vitebsk. “I am Stalin’s son and I won’t allow my battery to retreat,” he announced, trying to follow his father’s instructions. But he was captured, which meant he hadn’t followed them to the end. When the Germans trumpeted the capture of this high-profile prisoner, Stalin was furious. “The fool—he couldn’t even shoot himself!” he exclaimed.

  After Order 270 was announced, the NKVD arrested Yakov’s wife—Stalin’s daughter-in-law—Yulia, dispatching her to a camp for two years. The Germans would later offer to exchange Yakov for their famed Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who was captured at Stalingrad on January 31, 1943. Stalin refused, and, a few months later, his son carried out his father’s wish. Stranded as a POW in Germany, Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the camp’s fence.

  Nothing could change Stalin’s mind about those who fell into captivity. Early in the war, the Germans suggested that a postal system should be set up for POWs on both sides. “There are no Russian prisoners of war,” Stalin responded. “The Russian soldier fights on till death. If he chooses to become a prisoner, he is automatically excluded from the Russian community. We are not interested in a postal service only for Germans.”

  That attitude meant that those Soviet POWs who managed to escape or to survive until the end of the war found themselves arrested if they were lucky and executed immediately if they weren’t. Nikolai Pisarev, for example, was wounded and captured in July 1941 in the western Ukraine. By October, he was among the first group of prisoners dispatched to Auschwitz, where Soviet POWs were ordered to build the Birkenau section of the camp, which would become the site of the gas chambers. Almost all of those Soviet POWs perished, but Pisarev managed to escape while assigned to a work detail at the railroad station in the town. With the help of local Poles, he dodged his pursuers and then survived the war
as a member of a Polish forced-labor brigade. When he returned to Moscow, NKVD interrogators imprisoned and tortured him for a month, beating him unconscious. He survived that ordeal, too, and a subsequent period of internal exile. That’s what passed for luck in such cases.

  As the Germans drove further east during the summer of 1941 and Moscow looked increasingly vulnerable, Stalin kept demanding more instant retribution anywhere that the Soviet lines were breaking—which was almost everywhere at first. On July 10, for instance, he had the Stavka, the main command headquarters, issue a declaration that it was “totally dissatisfied” with what was happening on the northwestern front. “The officers who did not carry out orders, abandoning their positions like traitors and leaving the defensive ridge without orders, have not yet been punished,” it complained. And it ordered a prosecutor and NKVD officers “to go at once to forward units and deal with the traitors and cowards on the spot.”

  There was no doubt about what was meant by the command “to deal with the traitors.” By September, just as the battle for Moscow was looming, “blocking units” began to appear. These were squads that took up positions behind Soviet troops going into battle, and their job was to mow down any of the men who tried to retreat. Hence the terrifying scenes of Soviet soldiers finding themselves driven back by the Germans only to be cut down by machine gunners from behind. “What can one think of an army in which one soldier is ordered to fire on the enemy and another is ordered to fire on his compatriots?” Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s secret police chief, asked later. “There was something dirty and sticky there, like in Dostoevsky’s books.” While the blocking units weren’t as well organized as they would be in later battles, such as Stalingrad, their origins can be traced to the build-up to the battle for Moscow.

  In other respects, the Stalinist system of retribution was already fully operational during that period. The shooting of deserters had become commonplace. Sometimes this meant the shooting of hundreds of soldiers in a single unit. Some soldiers shot themselves in the left hand, thinking this would allow them to escape the fighting. General Konstantin Rokossovsky later wrote that he had encountered “a great number of instances of cowardice, panic, desertion, and self-mutilation” during the initial fighting. “At first, this so-called ‘left-handedness’ appeared when [they] shot themselves in the palms of their left hands or shot off one or several of their fingers,” he reported. “Then we noted ‘right-handedness’ began to appear. Self-mutilation appeared by agreement: a pair of soldiers would mutually shoot one another in the hands.” But the soldiers who resorted to such desperate measures were signing their own death warrant. NKVD units were ordered to shoot anyone suspected of self-mutilation. Even those who had really sustained such wounds in battle weren’t believed. They, too, faced prompt execution.

  As for other forms of “justice,” they were equally swift and harsh. According to an NKVD report, 667,364 soldiers who had “escaped from the front” had been rounded up by October 10, 1941. Of those, 10,201 were shot, 25,878 were kept under arrest, and 632,486 were formed into new units—in many cases, penal battalions that were routinely sent on suicidal missions. During the course of the war, the ranks of the penal battalions were also filled with hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag. After all, they were considered perfect candidates for such tasks as marching through minefields ahead of the regular units. At the same time, Stalin continued supplying the Gulag with a steady flow of new prisoners, ensuring that those sent to the front were easily replaced with new slave laborers.

  Stalin wasn’t content with simply terrifying the masses of soldiers; he also wanted to drive the message home that their commanders were every bit as endangered by failure as they were. Besides, he needed at least a few scapegoats for the embarrassing string of early defeats. General Dmitry Pavlov, the commander of the Western front, whose forces were unable to stop the German invaders as they captured Minsk and kept moving east, and his top aides were quickly picked to serve that function. They were arrested and tortured until confessions were beaten out of them. Their alleged crime: participation in “an anti-Soviet military conspiracy.” Approving their death sentences, which immediately followed, Stalin issued clear instructions to his aides. “No appeal. And then inform the fronts, so they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy.”

  The executions would also include those officers who were already under arrest when the war started. A few days before the German invasion, Pavel Rychagov, a pilot who had distinguished himself during the Spanish Civil War and had later become Deputy Commander of the Soviet Air Force, was arrested along with Yakov Smushkevich, another highly decorated veteran of the same conflict. On October 28, 1941, at a moment when the fighting around Moscow was at a crucial stage, they were among several top officers, along with Rychagov’s wife, who was also an accomplished air force pilot, to face the firing squad.

  As Stepan Mikoyan, who served as a fighter pilot in the war while his father remained in Stalin’s inner circle, pointed out later, “A great war was on, our army was suffering severe losses and defeat, and in the meantime experienced battle commanders, instead of being relied upon for saving the situation, were hurriedly put to death…. It is painful to imagine the feelings of people who, at a time of acute danger to their country, were awaiting death at the hands of their own compatriots.”

  During the course of the entire war, an estimated 158,000 Soviet soldiers were sentenced to death. By contrast, German military tribunals sentenced a total of twenty-two thousand soldiers to death for desertion, not just on the Eastern front but everywhere they served. When it came to condemning the soldiers and officers in his armed forces, Stalin easily outdid Hitler. But that was hardly surprising. The Soviet leader had plenty of practice in executing his military men well before the war broke out. And that bloody track record proved to be a major factor in the appalling lack of preparedness of the Soviet armed forces when the Germans invaded. Stalin murdered early and often, and it wasn’t only the direct victims who paid the price.

  In the 1930s, when Stalin methodically extended his reign of terror to eliminate anyone he deemed an enemy or possible threat to his rule, no one and no institution was free from suspicion. One day in the middle part of that horrifying decade, Stalin was walking through the Kremlin corridors with Admiral Ivan Isakov. As usual, NKVD officers were standing guard at every corner. “Did you notice how many of them were there?” Stalin suddenly asked Isakov. “Every time I walk the corridors I think: Which one of them is it? If it’s this one, he will shoot me in the back. But if I turn the corner, the next one can shoot me in the face.”

  Aside from the obvious targets of terror, such as the Ukrainian peasants and those intellectuals and aristocrats who hadn’t been dealt with already, Stalin targeted the Communist Party, the NKVD, and, in 1937 and 1938, the armed forces. In each of those cases, many of the executioners would soon find themselves among those about to be executed. The logic of the purges and Stalin’s insatiable demand for more victims meant that there was no way to stop or even to slow down what became known as the Great Terror. During 1937 and 1938, when the purges included the military, the NKVD rounded up about 1.5 million people, of which only about 200,000 were freed later. Many were dispatched to the Gulag, but even more—probably about 750,000 of that number—were simply shot. Their bodies were dumped in the execution pits that were dug near almost every city across the country.

  Despite those staggering numbers, Stalin was often personally involved in the killing process. The NKVD had assembled albums with about 44,000 names of the more prominent proposed victims. “Stalin, a busy man, was expected to go through the list and tick off recommended sentences whenever he spotted a name he knew and had a preference for what should be done,” writes his biographer Robert Service. Stalin also insisted on getting the approval of his Politburo members, and some were prone to add their own comments to the death sentences as an expression of their enthusiasm. Molotov, for instance, liked to wri
te beside a name, “Give the dog a dog’s death!”

  When the military’s turn came, the Soviet leader was engaged in every major decision. He regarded the military as a priority target, since, if a revolt were ever conceivable, they would have to lead it. For someone who saw potential enemies everywhere, Stalin wasn’t about to overlook the institution that had the real firepower and knew how to use it. Besides, among the top brass, there were plenty of officers with evident vulnerabilities, whether because of their early experience in the tsarist army or later links with Leon Trotsky, who had been the first People’s Commissar for Military Affairs and had made many of the appointments of the officers who were now serving Stalin.

  At a Central Committee meeting on March 2, 1937, Kliment Voroshilov, the defense commissar, initially tried to avert a bloodbath by explaining that the military had been methodically purging its ranks ever since Trotsky had lost out in the power struggle and been forced to flee. “Without any noise, we got rid of a lot of useless elements, including Trotsky’s people and other suspicious scum,” he declared. He added that those actions had led to the purging of “about 47,000 people.”

  But there were more recent activities that Stalin also now deemed suspicious. During the period of close military cooperation between the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, the military brass of both nations had the chance to evaluate each other and to examine each other’s arms build-ups. German pilots and other officers were trained in the Soviet Union, and Soviet officers were invited to Germany to observe military maneuvers. That meant there were personal contacts that, at least in theory, could have served as cover for any kind of subversive activity.

  Stalin’s mind worked the same way when it came to those Soviet fighters, such as the fighter pilots Pavel Rychagov and Yakov Smushkevich, who had gone to Spain to fight the forces of Francisco Franco during the civil war there in the late 1930s. With Hitler and Mussolini supporting Franco, this became a proxy war, the first outright confrontation of the two ideologies, and Stalin was just as engaged in supporting the other side. No matter. The Soviet veterans of the conflict, who had fought alongside not just Spanish Republicans but also the multinational army of volunteers who responded to the calls by leftist parties for help, were tainted by their association with so many ideologically suspect foreigners.