A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  ten-year agreements. In the summer of that year the Soviet government signed treaties with Czechoslovakia and Rumania - the establishment of diplomatic relations with the latter country marked the long delayed, temporary Soviet reconciliation to the loss of Bessarabia. And in the autumn of 1934 the U.S.S.R. joined the League of Nations.

  The following year witnessed the conclusion of the Soviet-French and the Soviet-Czech alliances. Both called for military aid in case of an unprovoked attack by a European state. The Soviet-Czech treaty, however, added the qualification that the U.S.S.R. was obliged to help Czechoslovakia only if France, which had concluded a mutual aid treaty with the Czechs, would come to their assistance. France, it is worth noting, failed to respond to Soviet pressure for a precise military convention, while neither Poland nor Rumania wanted to allow the passage of the Red Army to help the Czechs in case of need.

  Also in 1935 the Third International, which had become somewhat less active as a revolutionary force in the course of the preceding years, at its Seventh Congress proclaimed the new policy of popular fronts: Communist parties, reversing themselves, were to co-operate in their respective countries with other political groups interested in checking Fascist aggression, and they were to support rearmament. In its turn the Soviet government demanded in the League of Nations and elsewhere that severe sanctions be applied to aggressors and that forces of peace be urgently mobilized to stop them. Yet both the League and the great powers individually accomplished little or nothing. Italy completed its conquest of Ethiopia, while Japan developed its aggression on the Asiatic mainland. In the summer of 1936 a great civil war broke out in Spain, pitting Franco's Fascist rebels and their allies against the democratic and Left-wing republican government. Once more, the Soviet Union proved eager to stop Fascism, while France and Great Britain hesitated, compromised, emphasized nonintervention, and let the Spanish republic go down. Whereas Italian divisions and German airmen and tankmen aided Franco, none but Soviet officers and technicians were sent to assist the Loyalists, while the international Communist movement mobilized its resources to obtain and ship volunteers who fought in the celebrated "international brigades." Although much in the Soviet intervention in Spain remains obscure and controversial, studies by Cattell and others demonstrate both the seriousness of the Soviet effort to defeat Franco and the remarkable way in which the Communists, including the secret police, proceeded to extend their hold on republican Spain and to dispose of their rivals. But,

  with massive Italian and German backing, the insurgents won the bitter civil war in Spain, hostilities ending in the spring of 1939.

  The position and prospects of the Soviet Union became graver and graver in the course of the '30's. In November 1936, Germany and Japan concluded the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact aimed specifically against the U.S.S.R. Italy joined the Pact in 1937 and Spain in 1939. In the Far East in 1935 the Soviet Union sold its dominant interest in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, thus eliminating one major source of conflict. But relations between Japan and the U.S.S.R. remained tense, as Japanese expansion and ambitions grew, while the Soviet leaders continued to send supplies to Chiang Kai-shek as well as to direct and support Communist movements in Asia. In fact, in 1938 and again in 1939 Japanese and Soviet troops fought actual battles on the Manchurian and Mongolian borders, the Red Army better than holding its own and hostilities being terminated as abruptly as they had begun. Hitler's Germany represented an even greater menace to the Soviet Union than Japan. The Fuhrer preached the destruction of communism and pointed to the lands east as the natural area of German expansion, its legitimate Lebensraum. Again, as in the cases of Japan and Italy, the Western powers failed to check the aggressor. Following the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, Hitler annexed Austria to the Third Reich in March 1938, making a shambles of the Treaty of Versailles.

  Soviet Foreign Policy from September 1938 until June 1941

  The climax of appeasement came in September 1938 at Munich. Great Britain and France capitulated to Hitler's demand for Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, a largely ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia; Chamberlain and Daladier flew to Munich and sealed the arrangement with Hitler and Mussolini. The unpreparedness and unwillingness of the Western democracies to fight, rather than any collusion of the West with Hitler against the U.S.S.R., motivated the Munich surrender. Still, the extreme Soviet suspicion of the settlement can well be understood, especially since the Soviet government was not invited to participate in it. Although it had expressed its readiness to defend Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union had been forced to remain a helpless bystander when France failed to come to the aid of the Czechs and Prague had to accept its

  betrayal by the great powers. Moreover, after Munich the Franco-Russian alliance appeared to mean very little, and the U.S.S.R. found itself, in spite of all its efforts to promote collective security, in highly dangerous isolation.

  His appetite whetted by appeasement, Hitler in the meantime developed further aggressive designs in eastern Europe. In March 1939 he disposed of what remained of Czechoslovakia, establishing the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and another one of Slovakia. This step both destroyed the Munich arrangement and made plain Nazi determination to expand beyond ethnic German boundaries. Next Hitler turned to Poland, demanding the cession of Danzig to Germany and the right of extraterritorial German transit across the Polish "corridor" to East Prussia. The alternative was war.

  Poland, however, did not stand alone against Germany in the summer of 1939. France and Great Britain finally saw the folly of appeasement after Germany had seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. At the end of March they made clear their determination to fight if Poland were attacked. As war clouds gathered, the position of the Soviet Union became all the more significant. In May Molotov replaced Litvinov as commissar for foreign affairs, retaining at the same time his office of Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, equivalent to prime minister, as well as his membership in the Politburo. Thus for the first time since Trotsky in 1918 a Communist leader of the first rank took charge of Soviet foreign policy. Moreover, in contrast to his predecessor Litvinov, Molotov had not been personally committed to collective security and, therefore, could more easily undertake a fresh start. In retrospect commentators have also noted the fact that Molotov, again in contrast to Litvinov, was not Jewish. After an exchange of notes in the spring of 1939, Great Britain and France began in the summer to negotiate with the U.S.S.R concerning the formation of a joint front against aggression. But the Western powers failed to come to terms with the Soviet Union, or even to press the negotiations, sending a weak and low-ranking mission to Moscow. The Soviet government, on its side, remained extremely suspicious of the West, especially after the Munich settlement, and eagerly sought ways of diverting impending hostilities away from its borders. On August 23 a German-Russian agreement of strict neutrality was signed in Moscow - secret talks had begun as early as May - an event which produced surprise and shock in the world. Fortified by the pact, Hitler attacked Poland on the first of September. On the third, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Second World War became a reality.

  The Bolsheviks and the Nazis hated each other and considered themselves to be irreconcilable enemies. That no illusions were involved in their agreement is indicated, among many other things, by the fact that Molotov, who signed the treaty for the Soviet Union and thus represented the "pro-German orientation," retained his position and Stalin's favor after Hitler attacked the U.S.S.R. Yet both parties to the pact expected to gain major temporary advantages by means of it. Germany would be free to fight Western powers. The Soviet Union would escape war, at least for the time being. Besides, the agreement was accompanied by a secret protocol dividing the spheres of influence and enabling the Soviet Union to expand in eastern Europe.

  The Red Army occupied eastern Poland, incorporating its White Russian and Ukrainian areas into the corresponding So
viet republics. Next the Soviet government signed mutual assistance pacts with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, obtaining a lease of Baltic bases. But in July 1940 these states were occupied by Soviet troops, and, following a vote of their beleaguered parliaments, they were incorporated into the U.S.S.R. as union republics - a procedure that the Western democracies with excellent reasons failed to recognize. Finland was more troublesome: the Finnish government turned down the Soviet demand that they move the Finnish boundary some twenty miles further away from Leningrad, abandoning a Finnish defense line, in exchange for a strip of Karelia; a war between the two countries resulted and lasted from the end of November 1939 until mid-March 1940. In spite of the heroic Finnish defense and the surprising early reverses of the Red Army, the Soviet Union eventually imposed its will on Finland. Finally, in the summer of 1940 the U.S.S.R. utilized its agreement with Germany to obtain from Rumania, by means of an ultimatum, the disputed region of Bessarabia as well as northern Bukovina. The new Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formed from the territory acquired from Rumania. In April 1941 the Soviet Union signed a five-year nonaggression treaty with Japan, which had chosen to expand south rather than into Siberia.

  But, although the Soviet government did not know it, time was running short for its efforts to strengthen its position on the European and Asiatic continents. Following his stunning victory in the west in the summer of 1940, Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union. In December he issued precise instructions for an attack in May 1941. The defeat that Germany suffered in the autumn in the aerial Battle of Britain apparently only helped convince the Nazi dictator that he should strike his next major blow in the east. The schedule, however, could not quite be kept. A change of

  government in Yugoslavia made the Germans invade Yugoslavia as well as Greece, which had stopped an earlier Italian offensive. While brilliantly successful, the German campaign in the Balkans, together with a certain delay in supplying the German striking force with tanks and other vehicles, postponed by perhaps three weeks the invasion of Soviet Russia. The new date was June 22, and on that day German troops aided by Finnish, Rumanian, and other units attacked the U.S.S.R. along an enormous front from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

  The Soviet Union in the Second World War

  The blow was indeed staggering. Hitler threw into the offensive some 175 divisions, including numerous armored formations. A huge and powerful air force closely supported the attack. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, the German blow caught the Red Army off guard. Apparently, although Stalin and the Politburo were preparing for war, they had ignored Western warnings as well as their own intelligence and did not expect such an early, sudden, and powerful offensive. The Germans aimed at another Blitzkrieg, intending to defeat the Russians within two or three months or in any case before winter. Although it encountered some determined resistance, the German war machine rolled along the entire front, particularly in the north towards Leningrad, in the center towards Moscow, and in the south towards Kiev and Rostov-on-Don. Entire Soviet armies were smashed and taken prisoner at Bialystok, Minsk, and Kiev, which fell in September. The southern wing of the invasion swept across Ukraine. In the north, Finnish troops pushed to the Murmansk railroad, and German troops reached, but could not capture, Leningrad. The city underwent a two-and-a-half-year siege, virtually cut off from the rest of the country; its population was decreased by starvation, disease, and war from four to two and a half million. Yet the city would not surrender, and it blocked further German advance north.

  The central front proved decisive. There the Germans aimed their main blow directly at Moscow. But they were delayed in fierce fighting near Smolensk. The summer Blitzkrieg became a fall campaign. Hitler increased the number of his and his allies' divisions in Russia to 240 and pushed an all-out effort to capture the Soviet capital. In the middle of October German tanks broke through the Russian lines near Mozhaisk, some sixty miles from Moscow. Stalin and the government left the city for Kuibyshev, formerly Samara, on the Volga. Yet, instead of abandoning Moscow as in 1812, its defender, Marshal George Zhukov, had his troops fall slowly back on the capital, reducing the German advance to a crawl. The Germans proceeded to encircle the city on three sides, and

  they came to within twenty miles of it, but no further. Late in November the Red Army started a counteroffensive against the extremely extended German lines on the southern front, recapturing Rostov-on-Don at the end of the month. In early December it struck on the central front, attacking both north and south of Moscow as well as in the Moscow area itself. The Germans suffered enormous losses and had to retreat. Winter came to play havoc with unprepared German troops and to assist the Russians. On January 20 the Red Army recaptured Mozhaisk, thus eliminating any immediate threat to Moscow. But German troops had to retreat much further west before they could stabilize the front. In fact, its lines overextended, its troops unequipped for cold weather and exhausted, the German army probably came near complete collapse in the winter of 1941/42. Some specialists believe that only Hitler's frantic determination to hold on prevented a catastrophic withdrawal. As it was, the German army gave up about one hundred thousand square miles of Soviet territory, but retained five hundred thousand when fighting finally quieted down.

  In retrospect it seems clear that, in spite of its many splendid victories, the great German campaign of 1941 in Russia failed. The Red Army remained very much in the field, and the Blitzkrieg turned into a long war on an enormous front. Quite possibly Hitler came close to crushing the Soviet Union in 1941, but he did not come close again. Taking into account Soviet resources and the determination to resist, the Nazis had to win quickly or not at all. German losses in their initial eastern campaign, large in quantity, were still more damaging in quality: the cream of German youth lined the approaches to Moscow.

  Furthermore, although the Soviet Union bore the brunt of Nazi armed might from the summer of 1941 until the end of the Second World War in Europe, it certainly did not fight alone. Churchill welcomed Soviet Russia as an ally the day of the German attack - although shortly before he had been ready to wage war against the U.S.S.R. in defense of Finland. Great Britain and the United States arranged to send sorely needed supplies to the Soviet Union; and after the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States became a full-fledged combatant. In spite of German submarines and aircraft and the heavy losses they inflicted, British convoys began to reach Murmansk and Archangel in the autumn of 1941, while American aid through Persia started to arrive in large quantity in the spring of 1942. More important, the Axis powers had major enemies to fight in Africa, and eventually in southern and western Europe, as well as in the east.

  The second great German offensive in Russia, unleashed in the summer of 1942, was an operation of vast scope and power, even though it was more limited in its sweep and resources than the original attack of 1941: in 1942 the Germans and their allies used about 100 divisions and perhaps

  a million men in an attack along the southern half of the front, from Voronezh to the Black Sea. Having occupied the Kerch area and captured Sevastopol after a month of bitter fighting, the Germans opened their main offensive early in July. They struck in two directions: east toward the Volga, and south toward the Caucasus. Blocked on the approaches to Voronezh, the German commander, Marshal Fedor von Bock had his main army of over 300,000 men cross the Don farther south and drive to the Volga. At the end of August the Nazis and their allies reached Stalingrad.

  That industrial city of half a million people, strung along the right bank of the Volga, had no fortifications or other defensive advantages. Yet General Basil Chuikov's 62nd Army, supported by artillery massed on the other bank, fought for every house and every foot of ground. Reduced to rubble, the city became only more impassable to the invaders in spite of all their weapons and aircraft. Both sides suffered great losses. Hitler, who had assumed personal command of the German army in December 1941 and possibly saved his troops from catastrophe in the winter of 19
41/42, began to make disastrous strategic errors. He kept pounding at Stalingrad for fruitless weeks and even months and, disregarding professional opinion, would not let his troops retreat even when a Soviet counteroffensive began to envelop them. Eventually, at the end of January 1943, Marshal Friedrich Paulus and some 120,000 German and Rumanian troops surrendered to the Red Army, their attempt to break through to the Volga thus ending in a complete fiasco. The German offensive southward had captured Rostov-on-Don once more and had swept across the northern Caucasus, the attackers seizing such important points as the port of Novorossiisk and the oil center of Mozdok. But again the extended German lines crumbled under Zhukov's counteroffensive in December. The invaders had to retreat fast into the southern Ukraine and the Crimea and were fortunate to extricate themselves at all.

  After some further retreats and counterattacks in the winter of 1942/43, the Germans tried one more major offensive in Russia the following summer. They struck early in July in the strategic watershed area of Kursk, Orel, and Voronezh with some forty divisions, half of them armored or motorized, totaling approximately half a million men. But after initial successes and a week or ten days of tremendous fighting of massed armor and artillery the German drive was spent, and the Red Army in its turn opened an offensive. Before very long the Red drive gathered enough momentum to hurl the invaders out of the Soviet Union and eventually to capture Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, stopping only with the end of the war. The smashing Soviet victory was made possible by the fact that the German forces had exhausted themselves. Their quality began to decline probably about the end of 1941, while the