In places nearer to the front the new recruits waited less long, drank less vodka and indulged their illusions not at all. Misha Volkov worked in Kiev’s fast-growing metal industry. A married man with a small child, his main concern for years had been his fragile health. He suffered from a heart condition that his own taut nerves made worse, but his illness had not been serious enough to excuse him from military service years before, and he was recalled in the first round of mobilization that summer. On 24 June, he and a group of fellow junior officers were ordered to join a unit in Lvov. Volkov was so anxious to get on with his new task that he did not even spend a last night at home with his wife and daughter. The memory of his hasty departure for the barracks would haunt him for five years.
As Volkov worried himself to sleep in a strange bed on his first night in uniform, Lvov was burning. The local NKVD, in preparation for their own retreat, spent their night murdering the inmates of its crowded jails.48 Volkov knew none of this. His problem would be getting there. His call-up papers included a pass that paid his train fare, but there were no special carriages or requisitioned seats. Like everyone else, he had to fight to get a place on the first train that looked as if it might make the twelve-hour journey west. Here was another piece of Stalinist logic: no means of getting to Lvov was guaranteed, but failure to appear on time would count as desertion. The result, as always, was a desperate scrum. Volkov somehow managed to shove a dozen other conscripts aside. He hauled himself up the iron steps of a carriage, clutching at the folds of someone else’s coat. But then he tripped. His boot slipped and he fell hard. He would have injured his back on the rails, he wrote to his wife, if another man had not already slumped across them, softening his fall. ‘It was my first incident,’ he wrote. It was a fitting prelude to the journey in the overcrowded train. ‘On the way,’ he went on, ‘we passed columns of refugees from Lvov and other cities in western Ukraine. They told us that there was street fighting in Lvov and that life in the city had come to a standstill.’
Volkov and his friends soon came under bombardment, but ‘I was lucky again, because I’m still alive.’ When he arrived in Lvov, a city now in complete chaos, he discovered that the unit he was meant to join had fled. Again he faced a troubling dilemma. There was no sign of his commanding officer, but if he did not report for duty he would count as a deserter once again. He lingered in Lvov for three more days, but still no orders came. The street fighting was never far away, the shops were empty and the nights macabre. The locals, many of whom were patriots for a free western Ukraine, were as likely to spit in a Soviet soldier’s face as they were to offer him directions, let alone a meal. At last Volkov decided to leave, taking the twenty men who seemed to be in his command. There was no one to help with advice or supplies. None of the men had even seen a map, for these counted as secret documents back then. All the recruits could do was set out for the east, braving the constant shelling and machine-gun fire. ‘We walked without a break for forty-eight hours,’ Volkov told his wife. ‘There was nothing to eat, and we were very thirsty. We walked through ravines and woods, through mud, we fell into potholes. Ten people got left behind on the way; they didn’t have the strength to go on.’ A hundred miles later, the remnants of his group arrived at Tarnopol and joined up with their main unit at last. ‘When I remember this,’ he wrote, ‘I still can’t understand where I got the strength from, where I found the stamina, especially since I’d had no time to toughen up.’49
Volkov’s letter was written when he was safely reunited with the Red Army. For him, the story of those panic-stricken weeks ended quite well. But he knew how complete the insecurity had been. That June, he would not have been able to guess whether Lvov was the last stronghold the Germans held, or conversely, if it were true, as the leaflets dropped from German planes announced, that Moscow had fallen and Stalin was dead. His walk through the woods and hills of western Ukraine was a last act of faith. As a Jew, he may have known what kind of reception he would have met in German hands. To remain in Lvov, he may have guessed, would mean capture and certain death. Other soldiers at the front, including tens of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, chose to surrender to the invaders rather than plunging eastwards through the wild. Still others simply picked up their greatcoats and their heavy packs and walked back home. The choices of those first few days were lonelier than any they had ever made.
The turning point, for many, came on 3 July. On that day Stalin finally addressed the Soviet people, reading from a script and pausing frequently, as if distressed, to drink from a glass at his elbow. The speech itself, beginning with its famous address to Soviet citizens as ‘brothers and sisters, friends’, was a calculated break with communist formality and a watershed in Stalin’s relationship with his people. As a recent Russian history of the time affirms, it was a crucial moment for morale. ‘Although Stalin admitted that the country was in mortal danger,’ writes O. V. Druzhba, ‘this was better than the untamed fear of leaderlessness and betrayal.’50
One of the few outsiders to witness it all was Alexander Werth, a journalist who was based in Moscow to report for the Sunday Times. In his great history of the war, written from notes that he made inside Russia, he described Stalin’s performance as ‘extraordinary’. Its effect, he considered, ‘addressed to a nervous, and often frightened and bewildered people, was very important. Until then, there had been something artificial in the adulation of Stalin; his name was associated not only with the stupendous effort of the Five Year Plans, but also with the ruthless methods employed in the collectivisation campaign and, worse still, with the terror of the purges. The Soviet people now felt that they had a leader to look to.’51
The speech was indeed shrewd, admitting to the country’s mortal crisis without breathing a word about the panic at the front. Stalin did not spell out the extent of the German advance, but he conceded that the enemy was ‘wicked and perfidious… heavily armed with tanks and artillery’. There was also a deft admission of unpreparedness. ‘Soviet troops had not been fully mobilized,’ the people learned, ‘and had not been moved to the frontier’ when ‘Fascist Germany unexpectedly and perfidiously violated the 1939 non-aggression pact’. Such crumbs seem to have satisfied some members of an audience that hungered for real news. ‘The Leader did not remain silent about the fact that our troops have had to retreat,’ a Moscow plastics worker commented. ‘He does not hide the difficulties that lie ahead for his people. After this speech I want to work even harder. It has mobilized me for great deeds.’ The call for volunteers to train for civil defence, as well as the injunction to tireless effort in the factories, seemed to inspire thousands of people and make them take heart. Others, encouraged by Stalin’s assurance that the enemy would not prevail, declared that they were leaving for the front at once. ‘If our leader says that victory is certain, it means that we will win.’52
The reports of improved morale and collective determination far outweigh those that describe dissension. For millions, Stalin’s speech was the real start of patriotic struggle. Without their dedication and their faith, the war might have been lost within a year. But there were others who could not be soothed with slogans and fine words; the speech did not allay suspicion everywhere. Werth might not have known it – and he certainly could not have reported the fact – but Stalin’s speech was met with bitter laughter in some quarters, even in the capital. People had learned to read between the lines whenever an official spoke. Now some of them gave in to their worst fears. ‘All this talk about mobilizing the people and organizing civil defence just goes to show that the situation at the front is absolutely hopeless,’ said one Moscow engineer. ‘It’s clear that the Germans will take Moscow soon and Soviet power will not hold out.’ ‘It’s too late to start talking about volunteers now,’ a woman muttered to friends in her office. ‘The Germans are practically in Moscow already.’ ‘Some kind of collapse is inescapable,’ another office worker said. ‘Everything that we have been building for twenty-five years has turned o
ut to be a chimera. The collapse is obvious from Stalin’s speech, in his desperate summons to the colours.’53
The leader’s words made even less impact in villages where people still distrusted Soviet power. In Kursk province, for instance, there were peasants who resented the order to dig tank traps and defence trenches. ‘Shoot me if you like,’ an angry woman told local police, ‘but I’m not digging any trenches. The only people who need trenches are the communists and Jews. Let them dig them for themselves. Your power is coming to an end and we’re not going to work for you.’54 ‘A war has started and people are going to get killed,’ a man told fellow villagers at their meeting. ‘I personally am not opposed to Soviet power, but I hate communists.’55 ‘Your war isn’t anything to do with me,’ another told the party men. ‘Let the communists fight.’56 Collectivization was one focus for this opposition to Soviet power, political repression another. ‘It’s a good thing Hitler has invaded the Soviet Union,’ a dinner lady whose husband was in prison commented that July. ‘They’ll have to let the prisoners out.’57 Such views were amplified, in different ways, among members of the non-Russian ethnic groups.
The greatest test of Stalin’s speech, however, was the reaction in the Red Army itself. Official histories and memoirs published under Soviet power agree that many saw it as the first true ray of hope. ‘It is hard to describe the enormous enthusiasm and patriotic uplift’ with which the speech was met, recalled front-line General I. I. Fedyuninsky. ‘We suddenly seemed to feel much stronger. Where circumstances permitted, short meetings would be held by the army units.’58 These meetings, sometimes the first that politruks had dared to call, provided an opportunity to discuss the gravity of the attack at last. Instead of lies and silences, the men now learned what kind of effort each of them would have to make if the invaders were to be driven from Soviet soil. War that had been unreal until that point, like a play that had suddenly deviated from its script, now became serious, the fear as well as sacrifice more valid. In his war novel The Living and the Dead, Konstantin Simonov recalled the men’s response. ‘Stalin did not describe the situation as tragic,’ he has a wounded soldier muse. ‘The truth he told was a bitter truth, but at last it was uttered, and people felt that they stood more firmly on the ground.’ The speech, wrote Simonov, left its audience with ‘a tense expectation of change for the better’.59
Accounts like this, from Soviet times, reflect the sense of awe that the catastrophe inspired. Stalin, like Churchill in Britain at the same time, understood and responded to the emotional intensity of the moment. But the leader’s strong words did not impress everyone. The ‘bitter truth’ that Stalin told was far from accurate. It was true, as he said, that thousands of troops were ‘fighting heroically’, but it was also true that tens of thousands more were missing or captured, striking out towards their homes or waiting in depots for transport to take them anywhere at all. Nor could the leader’s speech help people stranded in the mosquito-haunted marsh. Among these was a politruk called Nikolai Moskvin.
Moskvin’s war had begun with the same fine words and lofty hopes as any loyal citizen’s, words written in the collective national trance. ‘I profoundly believe in the rightness of our cause,’ he wrote in his diary on 22 June. ‘I love my motherland, I will defend it to the last ounce of my strength, and I will not begrudge my life for my people.’ That night he kissed his family goodbye as they joined the long convoy of evacuees. He did not think they would be separated long. Two days later, he was with his regiment and preparing to defend Belorussia. But disturbing rumours of loss – 850 planes and 900 tanks – soon began filtering east, and the shrewd politruk already guessed that these estimates might prove to be low. ‘Who tells the truth in wartime?’ he wondered. Moskvin began to weigh the odds. ‘We’ll win for sure,’ he still believed. ‘But the cost will be colossal.’ Ten days later, on 4 July, the truth had dawned. ‘Our situation is very bad,’ he wrote in despair. ‘How could it have turned out that we, preparing to fight on enemy soil, absolutely failed to consider that we might have to mount some kind of defence? Something was up with the doctrine of our armed forces.’60
Moskvin’s main job was to maintain morale. After a short delay, he received a transcript of Stalin’s speech with instructions to read it to the men. But by this stage his regiment had little time for meetings. ‘No time to write,’ the politruk noted on 15 July. ‘It is possible that we are not completely defeated yet, but the situation is extremely difficult… The enemy’s aviation is destroying absolutely everything. The roads are littered with the bodies of our soldiers and the civilian population. Towns and villages are burning. The Germans are everywhere – in front, behind, and on our flank.’ A couple of new recruits from western Ukraine were calling on the men to surrender their arms. Their situation seemed hopeless enough. By 23 July, the regiment had been encircled. ‘What am I to say to the boys?’ Moskvin asked in a scribbled note. ‘We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us?… It seems that I didn’t do a good job of convincing them,’ he added the next day. The previous evening, after his pep talk to the men, thirteen of them had slipped away into the forest.61
The Red Army collapsed in the first weeks of the war. This is no criticism of its individual troops; it is a statement about bureaucratic rule, coercion, lies, fear and mismanagement. The problems were not new, nor were they unfamiliar. Transport, for instance, which was identified by nearly every frontline officer as the reason why retreat turned into rout that June, was like a running sore for units based along the Soviet border. ‘It is absolutely unknown to us where and when we will receive the motorized transport we need for newly mobilized units,’ the commander of an infantry division in the 4th Army had written on 12 March 1941. That same month, another report found no unit with more than four fifths of the required transport strength. Even then, spare parts, fuel and tyres remained impossible to guarantee.62 Four months later, when the crippled armies of the western region needed transport to bring fresh reserves up to the front, they found themselves short by at least one third of the required strength.63
Gabriel Temkin, a Jewish refugee from Hitler who would later fight in the Red Army, witnessed the impact of the transport shortage from his lodging near Bialystok. The soldiers he saw on their way to the front that first week made a depressing spectacle: ‘Some in trucks, many on foot, their outdated rifles hanging loosely over their shoulders. Their uniforms worn out, covered with dust, not a smile on their mostly despondent, emaciated faces with sunken cheeks. Equally miserable,’ he added, ‘were the small trucks pulling the vehicles with ammunition, food and personal belongings.’64 The men’s morale was desperately low. It was a matter of poor leadership, inadequate training and lack of faith in their own cause, but the long marches and even longer bivouacs, sometimes in the open air, made the whole nightmare worse. ‘Sometimes,’ Fedyuninsky wrote of the retreating armies, ‘bottlenecks were formed by troops, artillery, motor vehicles and field kitchens, and then the Nazi planes had the time of their life… Often our troops could not dig in, simply because they did not have the simplest implements. Occasionally trenches had to be dug with helmets, since there were no spades…’65
Red Army soldiers receiving their supply of shells before battle, 1941
Other equipment was in short supply as well. The Germans genuinely feared Soviet bayonets, and troops were encouraged to use them for that reason. The problem was, for many, that they had no other choice. That June, soldiers in Belorussia and Ukraine ran out of cartridges and bullets. Anastas Mikoyan recalled his government’s surprise when it learned that the army had run out of rifles, too. ‘We thought we surely had enough for the whole army,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘But it turned out that a portion of our divisions had been assembled according to peacetime norms. Divisions that had been equipped with adequate numbers of rifles for wartime conditions held on to them,
but they were all close to the front. When the Germans crossed the frontier and began to advance, these weapons ended up in the territory they controlled or else the Germans simply captured them. As a result, reservists going to the front ended up with no rifles at all.’66 Retreating troops also abandoned all the things they could not carry, which included wounded men as well as Maxim guns.
The Red Army had been restructured in the last few months of peace. The debacle in Finland had provoked an initial programme of reforms, but it was the fall of France in 1940 that inspired the General Staff to focus on their preparations for land-based attack. If they should happen to be faced with a massive strike from German planes and tanks, they reasoned, their strategy should now incorporate the deployment of large anti-tank artillery brigades in support of the infantry. The huge formations must have looked impressive, but when the attack came in 1941 they were good for little more than show. The front line would soon be so broad that the best the large armoured brigades could do was to huddle in their deep consolidated rows, unable to predict or respond to the movements of an enemy whose measure they had yet to take. Infantry divisions faced German tanks without the consistent support of their artillery. Since their air cover had also been utterly destroyed, many soldiers concluded that the back-breaking effort of Soviet industry in the 1930s, the pride of Stalin’s revolution, was now as good as wasted, lost. Soviet troops had been expecting to enjoy the science-fiction spectacle of their own machines in battle. Instead, they watched as the horizon filled with the fruits of German modernity. A new word – ‘tank fright’ – was soon coined by the General Staff to describe the conscripts’ terrified response.67
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