A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  As a result, when, despite Stalin’s concluding of the infamous Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939 in a futile attempt to avoid war, the führer’s armored divisions burst across the Soviet frontier in the opening thrust of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the Red Army was commanded by men too young or too inexperienced to know how to handle their units in combat. Seventy-five percent of all officers had held their current assignments for less than a year. Stalin also made the catastrophe worse by placing many of his forces, including aviation units, relatively close to the frontier, where planes were caught on the ground by the Luftwaffe and troops quickly overrun, rather than availing himself of the Soviet Union’s depths to hold them farther back until the main lines of the German advance could be identified and powerful and well-organized counterattacks launched. Miraculously, enough talented men like Georgi Zhukov, who was to become the leading Soviet marshal of the Second World War, survived the purge, and Stalin, after additional costly blunders, finally understood the mortal danger in which he stood and had the sense to listen to them. They were able to buy time with those vast Russian spaces and gradually reconstitute an officer corps that, along with the extraordinary courage and fortitude of the ordinary soldier of the Red Army, first halted and then broke the back of the Wehrmacht and drove the Germans all the way to Berlin.

  None of this is to say that tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens did not follow Stalin enthusiastically. His crimes went unrecognized and the relentless propaganda of the regime constantly extolled the magnificent leadership and genius of Comrade Stalin. Faith in the dream of “building socialism” was also still vibrant in Stalin’s time and expressed itself in the 1930s in such herculean projects as the creation of the new steel center at Magnitogorsk, deep in the Urals east of Moscow, which proved indispensable during the Second World War in providing the material for the guns and tanks that defeated the Germans. Ironically, the war could not have been won without the program of heavy industry Stalin had fostered in a backward Russia. The war further enhanced his prestige with the Soviet public. The actor in him reached out cleverly to arouse the wellspring of patriotism for “Mother Russia,” whose very existence was threatened by the Germans. His calamitous errors were hidden, and he made certain that he, rather than his generals, received credit for the victories. By 1945 he was widely regarded as a superhuman savior who had led the Russian people to triumph and safety through the most perilous ordeal in their history.

  Stalin was proud of the command economy he had created, whereby resources could be channeled into projects he deemed of priority, regardless of deprivation elsewhere. He wanted the bomb as quickly as possible, not because he was worried about any immediate threat of war—relations were only starting to become strained—but because he was concerned that Truman and Byrnes, through their atomic diplomacy, might succeed in imposing a postwar settlement inimical to Soviet interests. Stalin understood the political implications of the atomic bomb. As long as the United States held a monopoly, the bomb gave America an aura of unique technological and military prowess. Once the Soviet Union had its own bomb, that aura would be broken, and Stalin would achieve what amounted to strategic parity with Washington. Kurchatov told Beria, and thus Stalin too, as the information would certainly have been relayed by Beria to his master, that the task would take approximately two and a half years. A plutonium-type bomb was to be tested by January 1, 1948. Kurchatov and the fellow nuclear physicist he had selected as his deputy, Iulii Khariton, a slim, scholarly man who had experimented with nuclear fission prior to the war and whose talent Kurchatov admired, decided that copying the Nagasaki plutonium bomb was the shortest and most certain route. (With perhaps one or two exceptions, they were the only scientists involved who were permitted to read the intelligence information from Fuchs and Hall, and apparently from Koval as well. The other physicists and engineers thought that Kurchatov and Khariton were coming up with these ideas.)

  Peter Kapitsa, then the best known internationally of the Soviet physicists, objected. Kapitsa had done research at that home of genius, the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, for thirteen years until he made the mistake of coming back to the Soviet Union for a visit in 1934 and Stalin blocked his return to England. He was to win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1978. Kapitsa was also privy to the intelligence information as a member of the supervisory Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb chaired by Beria. In letters to Stalin, he argued that mimicking the Americans would place too great a burden on the war-ravaged Soviet economy. Soviet physicists were perfectly capable of coming up with their own, cheaper bomb design and also of building it more quickly. Stalin did not trust his own physicists to better what their American counterparts had already achieved, he was not certain the path Kapitsa was proposing would be faster, and he did not give a damn about the expense.

  In a January 1946 meeting with Kurchatov in the Kremlin, Stalin gave the back of his hand to Kapitsa’s argument. “It was not worth engaging in small-scale work,” he said, according to Kurchatov’s notes, “but necessary to conduct the work broadly, with Russian scope.” Speed was all that mattered. “It was not necessary to seek cheaper paths,” Stalin emphasized. He also held out to the nuclear physicists and engineers the carrot of privileged living that he accorded those who were particularly useful to him. For a nation that supposedly celebrated the equality of its citizens, Stalin’s Soviet Union had always been a society riven with inequality. Food, medical care, apartment space, clothing, and luxuries like imported goods were apportioned according to one’s rank and position in the Party and the regime. The NKVD was especially pampered, with higher salaries, the best housing, and special shops and canteens. Now Stalin was proposing, if it succeeded, to similarly reward the nuclear weapons community. “Our state has suffered very much,” he said to Kurchatov, “yet it is surely possible to ensure that several thousand people can live very well, and several thousand people better than very well, with their own dachas, so that they can relax, and with their own cars.” But there was peril in this promise of privileges, because the beneficent emperor who awarded them was also a hangman who rewarded failure with death. In this lay the second explanation for copying the American bomb. Kurchatov and Khariton knew that if they and their colleagues performed the task of copying well, the bomb they produced would go off. If they struck out on their own and sought a different design and it fizzled, the senior physicists and engineers involved would be shot.

  Given the nature of Stalin’s state, it was logical as well that he appoint Lavrenti Beria head of the committee to oversee the building of his atomic bomb. Stalin had installed Beria, a fellow Georgian whom he had spotted during a trip to the Caucasus in 1931, as head of the NKVD in 1938 when he removed and had shot its previous chief, Nikolai Yezhov, who had carried out most of the Great Purge for him. A round-faced, balding man who wore a pince-nez, Beria was a sadist who sometimes personally tortured and shot his and Stalin’s victims and had a penchant for young women that Stalin let him indulge. When he spotted a woman he wanted, he would send his aide to fetch her in one of the dreaded black limousines the NKVD employed to transport its victims to the Lubyanka. The number on which he forced himself ultimately ran into the hundreds. If the young woman refused him, the consequences for her and her family were invariably hideous. At the same time, he was a shrewd and effective administrator who handled a wide variety of projects for Stalin, assuming, correctly, that fear would energize everyone involved. Beria was Stalin’s closest collaborator, with privileged access to him, and the NKVD was the keystone in the bureaucratic structure Stalin had fashioned. It secured his position through its ubiquitous network of surveillance and terror and also controlled one of the important economic resources of his state—the millions of prison laborers.

  Hundreds of thousands of these labor camp inmates, called zeks in Russian slang, were now marshaled to create the atomic industry necessary for the bomb. They worked under a number of Beria’s subordinates who had, ove
r the years, become construction managers. Iakov Rappoport, the man charged with laying out the roads and erecting the buildings for the first large-scale reactor and separation plant to produce plutonium at a secret site called Cheliabinsk-40, because it was located in the Urals northwest of the industrial city of Cheliabinsk, was an NKVD major general. Rappoport had received his initial construction management experience in the early 1930s helping to supervise the creation of the White Sea Canal, a horrendously brutal project in which tens of thousands of prison laborers had died. At Cheliabinsk-40, he was assigned 70,000 zeks.

  Arzamas-16, the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos where the bomb would actually be put together under the direction of Iulii Khariton, was also built by prison labor in the village of Sarov, about 250 miles east of Moscow. The site was chosen because it was isolated and on the edge of a large and beautiful forest reserve that allowed for expansion. (It drew its secret name from the city of Arzamas, about forty miles to the north.) The churches and living quarters of an Orthodox monastery closed by the Communists in the 1920s were still standing in the village. The monastery had been a famous one, dedicated to Saint Serafim of Sarov, who had been renowned for his asceticism and concern for the poor. The first laboratories were set up in the cells where the monks had once dwelt, while the prisoners built new laboratories and houses for the physicists and engineers and other technicians. Prison laborers were part of the social landscape of the Soviet Union and the privileged scientists had to get accustomed to seeing them every day. Lev Al’tshuler, a physicist who arrived at Arzamas-16 at the end of 1946, described the sight in an interview published more than forty years later, which David Holloway quotes in Stalin and the Bomb: “The columns of prisoners passing through the settlement in the morning on their way to work and returning to the zones [prison camps] in the evening were a reality that hit you in the eyes. Lermontov’s lines came to mind, about ‘a land of slaves, a land of masters.’”

  More, an estimated 80,000 to 120,000, were consigned to the new uranium mines opened in Soviet Central Asia. Little is known of the conditions in those mines, but they were apparently appalling. Those who died were buried in communal graves. Some idea of the conditions can be obtained from those that were observed in the Soviet occupation zone in East Germany, where by 1950 the Russians had 150,000 to 200,000 conscripted German laborers toiling in newly opened uranium mines. Safety measures in these mines were non ex is tent, there was no medical care, and the workers were housed in primitive barracks surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by NKVD troops. In what may have been the cruelest twist of all, there are no memoirs of the Soviet prison laborers whose bodies built the atomic industry, because only a few were released at the end of the penal labor terms to which they had originally been sentenced. To preserve the secrecy of the various installations of the atomic complex, once construction was completed Stalin had them shipped to the Gulag’s worst camps, the gold mines of Kolyma in the Far East, where they died.

  15.

  A CONFRONTATION AND A MISREADING

  Looking back, it seems inevitable that there would be a confrontation as soon as the wartime alliance had shed its usefulness with the defeat of Germany and Japan. Even had Franklin Roosevelt lived, it appears doubtful that the policy of accommodation and cooperation he had hoped for could have been maintained, given Stalin’s personality and the nature of his state. With Truman’s distinctly differing outlook, relations could only deteriorate even more rapidly. The Soviets wanted to be rewarded for defeating Germany and for the price they had paid to do so. That price had been as appalling as the courage of the Soviet soldier had been extraordinary. For every American lost in the Second World War, approximately twenty-seven Soviet servicemen and women died: 11.285 million, including the 2.7 million who perished in German captivity. Because of the extent and nature of the conflict in the East, there are no reliable statistics for civilian deaths in the Soviet Union. What appears to be the most reasonable estimate places the combined military and civilian toll at about 28 million. A second estimate, probably excessive, speaks of nearly 50 million. The statistics are, however, quite clear on who played the major role in winning the war in Europe. Over the entire course of the conflict, Nazi Germany suffered combat losses of 13.6 million killed, wounded, missing, and captured. Of these, approximately 10 million, or about 73 percent, occurred on the Eastern Front.

  Contrary to popular American belief, the turning point of the war in Europe was not the Allied landing in France on June 6, 1944, and the ensuing battle of Normandy. The turning point had taken place nearly a year and a half earlier and almost 2,000 miles to the east at Stalingrad on the Volga. There, between September 1942 and February 2, 1943, when the last German elements surrendered, the Red Army had stood and held on in desperate struggle amidst the ruins of the city, rallied, and then encircled and killed or captured, with the exception of 10,000 wounded flown out on Luftwaffe transports, the entire German Sixth Army of well over a quarter of a million men. The victory was a Russian accomplishment, achieved before American and British Lend-Lease supplies and equipment had reached the Red Army in quantity. From that day onward the retreat of the Wehrmacht from Russia had been inexorable, the somber, gray-clad German columns forced back in battle after battle. “The Tigers Are Burning,” the headline of one Russian report exulted at the destruction of this most formidable of German tanks during the stupendous battle of Kursk in central Russia in July 1943, when Hitler sought to recoup by going back on the offensive. Instead, the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht at its own game of firepower and maneuver and the Germans lost approximately 2,000 tanks, well over a thousand planes, and tens of thousands killed in a matter of days.

  By the end of 1943, Soviet industry had also recovered to the point where Russia was outproducing Germany in tanks, including thousands of T-34s, universally acknowledged as the best medium tank of the war, and in tracked, or self-propelled, artillery, and other heavy weaponry and aircraft. By June 6, 1944, when the Allies were finally able to open a second front across the Normandy beaches, the Red Army had pushed the Germans out of most of European Russia and was approaching the Polish frontier. Without Normandy the Soviets would have had to fight their way to Hitler’s bunker at an even higher cost in blood, but Normandy or no Normandy, the Russians were going to Berlin.

  And without Stalingrad and its aftermath, the invasion across the English Channel and the ensuing battle for Normandy would have been far costlier in American, British, and Canadian lives. During that year-and-a-half interval, the Soviets had torn the vitals out of the German army. There were excellent German infantry and panzer divisions in France and they would show their mettle by fighting tenaciously, but taken as a whole the German forces facing the Americans, British, and Canadians were a shadow of the mighty Wehrmacht that had stormed across the Soviet frontier. The savaging in Russia was apparent even in some of the panzer divisions, which lacked their full complement of armor, deploying less than a hundred tanks each, about half what they would face in an armored division of their Allied opponents. A number of the infantry divisions were also second-rate. Six were composed of underage and only partially trained recruits, two more were scrambled together from Luftwaffe ground crews no longer needed in Hermann Göring’s shrinking air force, and others were manned by older conscripts (the average age was thirty-seven) organized into static formations considered fit only to garrison trenches and strongpoints along the coast until they were wiped out or relieved. An indication of how desperate the bleeding in Russia had made the Germans for manpower was that 60,000 of the support troops for these overage divisions were Soviet prisoners of war who had volunteered for German service (and been accepted despite being Untermenschen!) to avoid slave labor and starvation.

  Whether Truman understood any of this is doubtful. Most Americans then and now see the Normandy landing as the decisive event of the war in Europe. If Truman did understand, he certainly did not act as if Soviet casualties concerned him. He viewed the Red Army as a
potential threat rather than as a savior of American lives. Stalin and Molotov had hoped for a multibillion-dollar reconstruction loan from the United States after the war. The hope was quickly abandoned in the cooling atmosphere that followed the victory.

  The confrontation was also inevitable because both sides were ignorant of or misunderstood the real motivations of the other. A move by one side was invariably misinterpreted by the other. Matters were thus constantly made worse and the animosity rapidly darkened into that long night the world was to call the Cold War. Since the opening of many of the Soviet archives in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the sifting of them by young and open-minded Russian historians like Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, we can discern at last how Stalin actually viewed the world and the true motivations behind his acts.

  The most important misreading of him by the Truman administration, the evidence shows, was that while he was a monster, he was not an expansionist monster in the likeness of Hitler. The people threatened by his paranoiac personality were the inhabitants of the Soviet Union and the populations of the East European lands he had placed within his baleful rule by the defeat of Germany, not normally those beyond. Stalin assumed that the post-Second World War period would see a multipolar world resembling that of the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s. Germany and Japan, he thought, would rise from their rubble during that interregnum to one day become military powers to be reckoned with again. He was also enough of a Marxist-Leninist ideologue to be convinced that capitalist nations like the United States and Britain would fall out with one another in rivalry over markets and imperial possessions (he and Molotov were always hopefully scanning the intelligence reports for rifts between the British and the Americans) and that eventually there would be a Third World War into which the Soviet Union would be drawn as it had been drawn into the Second World War. When that Third World War had ended, Communism, in some unspecified fashion, would triumph throughout the world. His task was to keep the Soviet Union powerful enough to survive and surmount any of these challenges as they arose.