The Finnish-Soviet border was the result of the internationalization of an internal border of the Russian empire. When Russia annexed Finland in 1809, the Karelian isthmus to the west of St. Petersburg had been part of the Russian Empire for a hundred years, but in a concession to the Finns, was reunited with the rest of Finland. By 1918, at the time of Finnish independence, this meant that the border was only a short tram ride away from the center of Petrograd. The border had been a problem for Soviet military planners ever since, and Stalin decide to fix it. He proposed to the Finnish government a deal, giving the USSR control of strategic islands near the coast and moving the border some kilometers west in return for territory in the far north. The Finns decided that this was a ploy to take control of the country and refused. Thus began the Winter War, in which the small but well-trained and enthusiastic Finnish army held off the Soviets for several months, eliciting support from Britain and other Western powers that allowed them to draw public attention from the “phony war” along Germany’s western boundary. After many setbacks and heavy casualties, the Soviets finally got their army together and defeated the Finns, leaving an impression of incompetence that only encouraged their future enemies in Berlin. In the wake of the war, Stalin replaced the Commissar of Defense, his old Civil War crony Voroshilov, with S. T. Timoshenko, a professional military officer who quickly proceeded to reform the army and speed up its re-equipment.
Thus by 1940 the Soviet western frontier had moved hundreds of miles west, and Stalin and Timoshenko had bought some time to put the armed forces in order. This was a huge task, one that had many complications. In 1935 the Soviets had realized that they had the ability and need to finally turn the Red Army into a mass army with a peacetime strength of one-and-a-half million men; in 1939, Stalin ordered an increase in the size of the army to three million. The expansion followed in short order, but the inevitable result was that the soldiers, and particularly the officers, were poorly trained and inexperienced. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and junior officers were only a step away from the villages. For many soldiers, their rifle was the first really modern piece of equipment that they had ever seen. The army purge of 1937–38 only made things worse, especially at the level of high command. Here lay the explanation of the army’s poor performance in the Winter War. Furthermore, the army’s equipment was no longer up-to-date. After the great push in the early 1930s, Soviet military production had stagnated and new designs were not forthcoming. Thus the appearance of the German Messerschmidt fighter over Spain in 1937 was a great shock to the Red Air Force, for their best planes were no match for it. German tank technology was moving quickly as well, and all this came at just the moment when the Soviet design bureaus and the armed forces were paralyzed by the purges. Starting in 1938, new designs came into being, but they had to be tested and then put into mass production. Thus by the summer of 1941, the USSR had the first of its modern weapons, the Ilushin-2 ground attack fighter, the T-34 and KV tanks, and the Katiusha rocket artillery. The tanks and rockets were way ahead of the German equivalents, but there were not nearly enough of them or of any modern aircraft.
As the Soviet factories furiously put the new weapons into production and the army struggled with the problems created by rapid expansion and new borders, Hitler was planning his assault. In 1940 he had overrun France and the Balkans. He had failed in the Battle of Britain to bring the English to their knees, but the British Empire, dangerously overstretched by the need to defend the Far East and the Mediterranean as well as the home islands, seemed to the Führer doomed. He would turn his attention to Russia.
All through the winter Wehrmacht units moved east into Rumania, Finland, and what had been Poland. Hitler’s tactical intelligence was excellent, for he knew exactly where the Soviet units were stationed, their strength, and their defensive positions. What he did not know, or even care about, was the economic and military potential of the USSR. To Hitler, the Soviet state was simply a Jewish-Mongol horde that would fly apart at the first blows. His generals, who thought in terms of the Russia of 1914, were only slightly less contemptuous of the enemy. Stalin was perfectly aware of the German moves, for his spy network was just as good as Hitler’s. His interpretation of the German moves, however, was completely wrong. Stalin never fully grasped the radicalism of the Nazi regime, still seeing it in the light of older German rightist movements, or perhaps as a German version of Mussolini’s fascism. He also was convinced that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he had defeated Britain, for Stalin could not imagine that Hitler would be stupid enough to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake and fight a war on two fronts at the same time. Thus Stalin interpreted the troop movements as a bluff: he expected that Hitler would hold off for a year or two, and in the meantime perhaps try to bluff the Soviets into delivering much needed raw materials to the Reich. His worst fear was that Soviet troops along the border might provoke Hitler too soon; hence he ordered them to ignore German overflights and other suspicious actions. Soviet military intelligence believed differently, but when their reports reached their top commanders, they were shelved as not consistent with the policy and analysis that emanated from the Kremlin. Nevertheless, in April 1941, Stalin ordered nearly a million additional men mobilized under the cover of large-scale maneuvers and he moved more troops west. The Red Army now had a theoretical strength of some five million men. Only in the last days before the war were orders issued to put some of the troops into a state of greater readiness: the night before the invasion Timoshenko ordered the air force to disperse the planes on the air strips so that they would not make an easy target. Only the Odessa military district obeyed the orders, for even in Stalin’s Russia, commands from the center did not necessarily get through in time or call forth instant obedience.
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, at first light – 3:30 in the morning – Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, named after the medieval German warrior emperor. Some three million German soldiers crossed the border, together with nearly a million allies, Finns, Rumanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Italians, and small volunteer and collaborationist units from nearly every country in Europe, including neutral ones like Sweden (SS Nordland). Hitler’s army was fresh from victory all over the continent, from Norway to Greece, backed by an economic machine greater than that of the USSR (if not by much) and the resources of occupied Europe. Facing them were the five million men in the Soviet armed forces, but almost half of them were either deployed far in the rear or were still only in the process of formation and training. In addition to being caught in the middle of mobilization and learning to use new equipment, the Soviet forces were placed too close to the border and were easy targets for the Luftwaffe and the German armor. The placement was a relic of the long-standing offensive orientation of the Soviet army, which assumed that soon after an attack the Soviet forces would move to make a series of deep incursions into enemy territory to spoil the attack as the Red Army moved to full mobilization. To make things worse, the Soviets erred in predicting the main direction of the German attack. Until 1940 all Soviet war plans had assumed that the German army would attack directly east through Belorussia toward Moscow, as indeed turned out to be the case. In 1940, however, Timoshenko, the new chief of staff general Georgii Zhukov, and Stalin had decided that Hitler would more likely strike south into the Ukraine. Along the central axis there were only farms and large forests, while the Ukraine was still the most important industrial area of the USSR and a major agricultural region to boot. Surely Hitler would go for needed resources. Thousands of troops were moved south into the Ukraine.
Instead the main blow came directly forward the east. German armor repeated its tactics from France and slashed through Soviet defenses along the main roads and rail lines, pushing deep into the country. Lithuania and much of western Belorussia fell in days. The Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force on the ground in the first few days, leaving the army with no air cover and no ability to move without German knowledge
. With the weight of the German advance directed toward the center, the Soviet front was overrun within weeks and nearly a million and a half Soviet soldiers found themselves in captivity. Almost none of them survived, for the Germans, as part of their racial policies, chose not to feed them and simply let them die. To the north and south, the Germans advanced almost as swiftly, and by the end of the summer they were at Kiev and the gates of Leningrad.
Conditions on the Soviet side of the front were chaotic as poorly designed communications collapsed under the onslaught, command posts were destroyed, and large bodies of Soviet troops desperately tried to retreat east. The Soviet commander in Belorussia was out of communication with his men as well as with Moscow for days. The orders from Moscow at first followed the old and now utterly irrelevant scheme of counterattack against the invaders. Local commanders were lucky if they never got the orders and just followed their instincts. Some units fought to the end, others until food and ammunition ran out. The next orders from Moscow were to hold on long after the situation was hopeless, and commanders who led their troops out of entrapment found themselves under suspicion or worse for retreating without orders. In July Stalin ordered the trial and execution of a number of the generals whose armies had been destroyed in the first weeks of the war.
Fortunately Stalin and army leadership did more than look for scapegoats. On the second day of the war Stalin set up a State Defense Committee headed by himself, soon replacing Timoshenko with himself also as People’s Commissar of Defense, and additionally he became the head of the High Command and formal supreme commander of the armed forces. Zhukov remained as chief of staff. Stalin thus took personal responsibility for the whole conduct of the war. He learned to work with Zhukov and the other generals, but his was the final decision in all matters. Sometimes his orders led to more defeats, but ultimately they led to victory. He had, more than ever, supreme power. The mobilization of the army continued, and became even more essential with the loss of millions of men over the first summer of war. As the situation at the front deteriorated, the government began to evacuate industry from the Ukraine and Leningrad and other areas threatened by the advancing Nazis. In the short run this meant a fall in military production just as the Wehrmacht was capturing and destroying masses of Soviet equipment. Ultimately it was a crucial and a heroic effort, for tens of thousands of men and machines and their families had to move thousands of miles east to the Urals and Siberia, and then build factory buildings to house the equipment, build housing for themselves, and start production on vital goods as quickly as possible. Not just factories were evacuated: the kolhoz and state farms were ordered to move their cattle and other larger animals to the east as well. Huge herds of thousands of cattle moved through the cities, prodded along by women from the villages heading toward the east.
In September the Germans began the final advance toward Moscow, sure of victory. Hitler even considered that he could soon send troops to help Mussolini in the Mediterranean. As the Nazis advanced, Soviet armies to the west of Moscow were ordered to hold on and hundreds of thousands were encircled and perished, but their deaths bought time. Time was of the essence, for the Germans had no conception of Soviet resources. Their pre-invasion intelligence had underestimated the size of the Red Army at the moment of the attack by nearly a third, by one hundred divisions. Even in the first weeks German commanders in the field were surprised to find that new Soviet units suddenly appeared where they thought that resistance had been smashed. Yet as the autumn advanced, German victory seemed assured: in October the foreign embassies and most of the Soviet government evacuated east to Kuibyshev (Samara) on the Volga. Only the announcement that Stalin was still in Moscow and did not intend to leave staved off panic in the capital. On November 7, he appeared on the Lenin Mauseoleum on Red Square as in previous years to review the parade in honor of the October Revolution, a major Soviet ritual. This time the soldiers marched past in the snow straight to the front. German reconnaissance units began to appear on the outskirts of the city, around and inside the ring highways that encircle it today. The government formed volunteer units of students, older office and factory workers, and sent them to the front to fill the gaps torn by the attackers. Yet the situation was better than it appeared. As the Germans plowed on toward Moscow, the Soviets had formed a substantial strategic reserve, part of which now moved west of the city to meet the Nazis. Now for the first time the Germans were halted, for the apparently seamless advance to the east had in fact cost the Wehrmacht dearly. German casualties were greater than the German losses for all campaigns of the war until the invasion of the USSR. German armor had lost thousands of tanks to enemy fire, and many were inoperable from the wear and tear of Russian conditions or out of ammunition. German engines and automatic weapons froze in the cold. Unlike the Russians they had not thought how to keep them working at night temperatures of forty below freezing. Even the Luftwaffe, which had ruled the skies in the first months, was taking rapidly mounting losses as newly built Soviet aircraft with newly trained pilots filled the gaps left by the massive losses of the summer. In early December, the Red Army counterattacked, pushing the Germans away from Moscow and far to the west, inflicting (and taking) massive casualties. By the end of January 1942, the Nazis had lost nearly a million men and four thousand tanks, half of them in the final battle for Moscow. The Soviets had stopped the Wehrmacht, the first time any army had done so since 1939.
While the Red Army’s losses were horrific, the German losses were ultimately crippling. Germany lacked the population of the Soviet Union, and its superbly functioning industry had not been used to prepare supplies for a war on this scale. The German army at Moscow lacked winter clothes not just because Hitler had assumed a rapid victory but also because he had not counted on the massive expenditure of supplies and the need to fully mobilize to counter Soviet industry. He had no idea that the Soviets could produce far more tanks and aircraft than Germany from a smaller industrial base. By early 1942 the evacuated Soviet industries had come back into production and began to turn out equipment in numbers Germany could not match. This equipment was also superior to the German, especially the tanks, the rocket artillery and many of the aircraft. Now the Soviets had to learn how to use it properly, but they had already inflicted a major strategic defeat from which Germany did not have the resources to recover. Germany could no longer defeat the Soviet Union, although Hitler had no intention of stopping.
The German invasion was not only a military conflict but also a political conflict as well. Stalin saw the war in political terms, as he did everything else, and as in the case of the conduct of war, it took him some time to understand what he was dealing with. He made no statement at first, ordering Molotov to make the formal announcement of war on June 22, several hours after the invasion. Stalin’s first speech came on July 3 and reflected his determination to fight, for he ordered a scorched earth policy in the path of the German invaders and called on Soviet citizens to form partisan units. The old illusions still remained, for he asserted that the Nazis were coming to restore tsarism and the rule of the landed gentry. Though he also stated that the Germans wanted to destroy the culture and statehood of the Soviet peoples, his description of the Nazi aims missed the essential truth. The Wehrmacht and its European allies were paving the way for the extermination of the great majority of the Russian and other Slavic peoples and the colonization of the territory by Germans, the famous “Lebensraum” that Hitler had wanted from the beginning. Yet Stalin concluded with a ringing declaration that the German people, enslaved by the Nazi leaders, would be an ally. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
The extermination began in the first days. The orders to the German troops had been that all “representatives of the Soviet way of life” were to be eliminated, and that no food was to be given to soldiers or civilians out of any misguided sense of humanity. These orders applied to Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet citizens and were behind the destruction of Soviet prisoners of war.
The extermination of the Jews also followed the first German victories, for Einsatzgruppen began to round up Jews in occupied territory, the first large-scale massacre taking place in Kaunas on June 25, 1941, with the enthusiastic participation of the local Lithuanian population. Ultimately two million of the five million European Jews who perished in the holocaust were Soviet citizens. Contrary to Stalin’s expectations, Hitler did not restore the pre-soviet order, keeping the collective farms since they made it easy for the Germans to extract grain and meat from the population. The remaining factories went to German businessmen, though sabotage by the workers meant that few really went back into production. Any remaining Russians, elite or otherwise, were to become the slaves of the Reich and were to be prepared for that role. Most schools closed and the Germans frequently hanged the teachers as “representatives of the Soviet way of life.”
Figure 20. The Ilyushin 2m3 (Shturmovik). Designed as a ground attack aircraft, the two-seater bomber was the Soviet Union’s most effective warplane.
The thousands of soldiers who had been surrounded by the Germans but escaped captivity formed a new menace to the invaders. In the huge forests of Belorussia, the northern parts of the Ukraine, and western Russia they took refuge, collected food and weapons, and formed partisan units. The partisans began to attract local peasants as well, and to attack German communications and transport. By the fall of 1941, the disruption to the rail network was considerable, seriously reducing the output of the already desperately overstretched German supply routes. By the end of the next year there were nearly a half million partisans under arms, and they controlled substantial areas where the Nazis could not move. The Soviet command established a central partisan staff to supply them by air, sending over old and slow but sturdy and hard to detect biplanes that could land on a dime in forest clearings. Hitler’s army reacted to the partisan attacks with vicious brutality, exterminating village after village – men, women, and children – where they suspected contact with partisan units. Collaborationist units from all over Europe and the western territories of the USSR were often more savage than the Germans in dealing with the population of the partisan areas.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 45