Still in Soviet hands but gripped by the vice of the German and Finnish armies was Leningrad. The Germans and their allies had reached the outskirts of the city in September, and from then on the only road was over Lake Ladoga. Around the city were substantial numbers of Soviet troops, but the Germans lacked the resources to take it by assault, so they hoped instead to starve it out. Hitler planned to have it destroyed when he won, as a place of no use to the new Reich. Without effective means of replacement and further reduced by German bombing, food supplies dropped rapidly and starvation began. By mid-winter ten to twenty thousand people were dying every month. Heat and electricity virtually disappeared, all with continuing German shelling and bombing to make things worse. Only workers in the few remaining factories – almost all now devoted to weapons and other war production – had anything close to adequate rations. Fortunately the lake froze, and some supplies could come in over the “Ice Road.” The authorities had to improvise, opening stations in food stores that served only hot water or tea substitutes just to keep people a bit warmer. During the next summer the improvised transportation across the lake improved, but by the time the Red Army raised the siege in January, 1944, some eight hundred thousand people had starved to death.
In Leningrad many of the factories had been evacuated before the Germans came, and more were evacuated in 1942. They were part of the massive move of Soviet industry to the east, and the population went as well, in the tens of millions all across the country. The Soviets evacuated ordinary people and groups of children as well as officials. Indeed officials were often required to stay behind to form resistance groups, and those who tried to get out ahead of the Germans, as in the Moscow panic of October 1941, found themselves stopped by the NKVD and even the local populace. Virtually everything and everyone in the country was part of the war effort, a degree of mobilization unknown even in Germany. Women not only staffed the hospitals and took care of orphan children, but they also fought in the army. Anti-aircraft regiments were mostly female, pitting young women just out of high school against the Luftwaffe. In the army, radio operators were women as were other auxiliary positions, and women also made up a fighter regiment and two bomber regiments, including a night bomber unit. Altogether over half a million women served in the armed forces. The intelligentsia went to war as well, not only scientists and engineers. The Soviets evacuated the universities, research institutes, and theaters. Artists and writers who had lived in fear through the 1930s found themselves on transport planes coming out of Leningrad with fighter escorts. Moved east to Siberia and Central Asia, they continued to work, producing major works like Eisenstein’s epic movie Ivan the Terrible, filmed in Kakazhstan, or Shostakovich’s Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony, finished at Kuibyshev on the Volga. Their work contributed immensely to the morale of the population, not only by their content but also by the simple fact that something normal was still taking place. In the rear food was spartan if generally unfailing, and housing often meant several families crammed into a school classroom. Workers who had come east with their factories lived in tents in the Siberian winter while they built buildings and barracks in which to live, sometimes starting work in new buildings before the roofs were built. Yet most who remembered the war remembered it as a time of privation and sorrow mixed with enthusiasm and the warmth of solidarity. Stalin had greatly overestimated the extent of discontent among the population, and while his agents read mail and listened in on telephone conversations in search of German sympathizers, most people just went to work to help the army, whatever their views of the ultimate value of the Soviet system.
The victory at Moscow encouraged Stalin and the generals to try to exploit their success, and early in 1942 they mounted a series of attacks from Khar’kov in the south to well north of Moscow. All of these offensives were costly failures. The Germans were pushed back here and there, but with heavy Soviet losses. Again several large units were surrounded and ground to pieces. When the spring ended and the mud season with it, Hitler decided not to move against Moscow again, as Zhukov and Stalin expected, but to go south. His aim was the Caucasus with the oil supplies in Grozny and Baku. The Third Reich was short of oil, and this seemed the way to solve the problem. The Nazis smashed through Soviet defenses, getting all the way to the line of the Caucasus Mountains, but also directly east toward the Volga. To protect his flank and cut off the Russians from Baku, he needed to cut the rail lines at Stalingrad and cross the river itself. Stalingrad was the old Tsaritsyn, where Stalin had first encountered warfare in 1918 and was now the site of an immense tractor factory that was also producing tanks, but its main importance was its location.
By the end of August the Germans were on the edge of the city, sending wave after wave of armor and mechanized infantry against the defenders dug into the ruins of the city. It seemed that the war hung in the balance. Yet the German advance had brought many problems with it. The rail lines back to Germany were now so long that transport was jammed up almost to the German border. Hitler no longer had enough German troops to secure his flanks, so the sides of the German wedge pointed at the city were held by Italian and Rumanian troops. Most important, the defenders just kept fighting. By the end of the year the Russian salients were down to just a few acres, their artillery support coming from batteries on the eastern side of the river. In one place sergeant Iakov Pavlov held out for months with just a few dozen men in the basement of a shattered apartment block. The fighting went from house to house, and many Soviet soldiers decided that the most effective weapons were sharpened trenching shovels and grenades. The Nazis could not cross the river.
Around the burning wreckage of the city the Red Army was preparing its trap. Huge armored forces moved up to the north and south, facing the hapless Italians and Rumanians across the frozen steppe. Then on November 19 they attacked with massive artillery and air support and in four days came together to encircle the six hundred thousand German soldiers in Stalingrad. German attempts to supply the trapped army were futile, and in February the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army surrendered. Berlin radio played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s opera over and over again. Nearly a half a million men had died at Stalingrad on each side, but Soviet victory was now assured.
The German invasion had immense consequences for Soviet foreign policy and for the position of the USSR in the world. The day after the invasion the Soviet leadership was surprised to learn not only that Great Britain wanted an alliance but also that Winston Churchill had spoken on the radio to explain the new alliance. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years, and I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle that is now unfolding…I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial…I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine…” Churchill’s conclusion was that “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.” Until the rise of Hitler the Soviets had always assumed Britain to be their main enemy, and the rapprochement with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935 never extended to the British Empire. The day of the invasion many Russians, including some in the leadership, assumed that Hitler must have made a secret treaty ending the war with Britain, so Churchill’s announcement came as a great relief. In August, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Lend-Lease program designed to help England and any other power fighting Hitler would be extended to the Soviet Union, and after Pearl Harbor the United States joined the USSR and Britain to fight Germany and Italy as well as Japan. The Soviet Union and Japan, however, did not declare war on each other: both were far too preoccupied elsewhere to risk another front in Eastern Siberia or Manchuria.
Lend-Lease provided significant support to the Soviet war effort, both in equipment and food supplies. The Studebaker trucks went to make up the shortfall in Soviet truck production, crucial to the support of mechanized warfare,
and many of them served as launching platforms for the Katyusha rockets. The American Airocobra fighter covered gaps in Soviet aircraft supply in 1942, and Spam filled out the meager wartime diet for millions of Russians. If the scale of American efforts was not decisive, the contribution was real as was the morale effect. The Allied convoys around the North Cape of Norway through winter seas infested with U-Boats and under continuous bombardment from German aircraft were a difficult and dangerous operation, giving the Russians concrete proof that they were not alone against Hitler.
For Stalin and the generals, however, the real issue was not Lend-Lease but the possibility of a second front. After much discussion Roosevelt and Churchill decided to make their first move in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and then in the 1943 landings in Italy. These moves led to the overthrow of Mussolini and knocked Italy out of the war, though fighting continued against the Germans. Stalin was deeply disappointed that the moves came in the south rather than in France and were limited in scale; he complained bitterly, but to no effect. He never realized the extent of the US commitment in the Pacific theater. Finally he met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Teheran at the end of 1943, where the three allies agreed that they would demand unconditional surrender from Germany, that the USSR would declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated, and that the second front would consist of an allied invasion of northern France in the early summer of 1944. Stalin promised to coordinate a major offensive with the Anglo-American landing. Issues also arose at Teheran about the future of Europe, as Britain and America recognized by now that the Red Army would be the one to liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis and reach Germany first. In October 1944, Churchill came to Moscow and proposed to Stalin a “percentage agreement” on the Balkans: Britain was to have predominant influence (ninety percent) in Greece, while the Soviet Union was to have the same in Rumania. Bulgaria was to be seventy-five percent under Soviet influence, while the two powers would have equal shares in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Stalin agreed, but Eastern Europe was a major issue again at the Yalta conference in February 1945. There the three powers generally agreed on the joint occupation of Germany (for an undefined period), the destruction of the legacy of Nazism, and reparations to the Soviet Union. Stalin agreed to Roosevelt’s proposal to set up the United Nations. Some greater agreement was achieved on the status of Eastern Europe, such as the future Polish-Soviet boundary, and an agreement that the future Polish government would represent both Stalin’s Polish allies and the conservatives. Stalin promised elections after the war. Most of the other issues involving Eastern Europe were not settled. Roosevelt and Churchill did not want simply to cede control of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, but with the Red Army in possession of most of the territory and accounting for three quarters of the Wehrmacht’s losses, there was little that they could do.
The fate of Eastern Europe and Germany were not just issues of Soviet foreign policy. Since 1939 the Comintern had experience dizzying shifts in policy. The pact with Germany implied that fascism was no longer the main enemy: the war was a new “imperialist war” and the Communists were to oppose both Hitler and the Allies equally. The German invasion of the Soviet Union prompted yet another abrupt change in revolutionary strategy, a return to a variant of the Popular Front idea of 1935–1939. Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943, but most Communist parties of the world remained oriented toward Moscow. The Communists were ordered once again to make a coalition with anyone who opposed the Nazis, from conservative and aristocratic army officers like the French Gaullists to the Social Democrats. In most of occupied Europe resistance movements acquired this make-up, and even in France many aristocratic Russian émigrés joined the resistance, fighting and dying alongside working-class French Communists. As the Soviet army passed its western borders and came into the lands allied with Hitler or occupied by his troops, decisions had to be made. What sort of government should the Soviets put in place? Many local Communists believed that the time had come to seize power, to make up for the defeats of the interwar era. The Soviet tactic, however, was different. The new slogan was “people’s democracy,” meant to indicate a continuation of the wartime coalition. Land reform and limited nationalization of industry were to be central features of the new order, not “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the Communists were to rule together with Socialists and even anti-fascist liberals and conservatives.
At the moment of the German surrender at Stalingrad, all these issues were barely on the horizon. The task was to begin to drive the Nazis out of the country, and the Red Army moved to the west, pushing the Germans back to their starting points from the previous summer. In the spring of 1943, as the snow melted and the mud dried, Hitler tried for the last time to reverse the tide of defeat. The Wehrmacht planned a massive counter attack into the Soviet salient around Kursk, in the middle of the steppe, ideal ground for armored warfare. It was the German armor, the giant Ferdinand assault guns and the new Tiger tanks that were to carry the weight of the attack. The Red Army, however, fully reequipped and with new skill and confidence, planned its countermeasures without flaw. Though Stalin at first wanted a swift counter-offensive, Zhukov and the generals persuaded him to stay in defense until the Nazis were worn down. The German armor confronted massive fire from artillery, rockets and anti-tank guns as well as the Soviet air force. In a matter of days the offensive stalled and then the Soviet armor pushed the Germans back. The Red Army went on through the rest of the year to take back the eastern parts of the Ukraine, Kiev itself in November, as well as most of Russia proper. Soviet troops lifted the siege of Leningrad in January 1944. In the next months the Red Army surrounded and destroyed some fifty thousand German troops in one battle at Korsun, southwest of Kiev, pounding them to pieces in the snow with artillery and air strikes.
Hitler had now lost the war. All that he could do was feed more men and equipment into the meat grinder in the hope of staving off the inevitable defeat. By the early summer of 1944 the Soviets were ready to launch a huge offensive through Belorussia; the offensive was timed to coincide with the landings at Normandy. In this one operation the Red Army encircled the whole of the German army group Center, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, and moved into Poland. There they faced an unpleasant surprise. Without informing the Soviet command, the Polish Home Army, the main underground resistance group, staged an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw. The Soviet army was at the end of its operational line, on the other bank of the Vistula, with little capacity to help the Poles quickly. Molotov wanted to push on, not to help the Poles but just to exploit the victory. Zhukov was against any new offensive, for the army was exhausted and needed to rest and reequip. In any case, Stalin decided that it was not necessary; he was not going to help his opponents in the Polish Home Army and the Poles were left to fight on alone. In the same summer the Soviets moved south into Rumania, and the pro-German governments in Rumania and Bulgaria collapsed. In Yugoslavia the Red Army linked up with Tito’s partisans and went north toward Hungary. In Budapest the Germans put up furious resistance, but the Soviets were able to crush the resistance and move on to Vienna. Hitler’s coalition continued to collapse. In Finland, Baron Mannerheim, the commander in chief of the army, became the president of the country and immediately took Finland out of the war, signing an armistice in September.
The Red Army was now pounding at the gates of Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi command placed the bulk of their army in Poland and Eastern Germany facing the Soviets, even with the Americans and British moving rapidly to the German western border. The last year of the war brought incredible slaughter, as the now desperate Wehrmacht faced a well-equipped and huge Red Army. The Soviet command had learned how to fight and now had the equipment to do it, and Stalin had learned to work with his generals. The Russians fought their way through Poland, in the process liberating those prisoners of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps who were still alive. Soviet soldiers, many of whom had spent time in Soviet labor camps, had a glimpse of
something even more sinister in the gas chambers and crematoria. As they moved into Germany, they found a country in ruins but still showing the signs of pre-war prosperity. As one Soviet soldier said to a Western journalist, “if they had all this, why did they attack us?” As the Soviets approached Berlin, Hitler threw everything he had into battle. Northeast of the Nazi capital stood SS Charlemagne, the French SS brigade, and high school boys were mobilized to fight Soviet tanks with hand-held anti-tank weapons. None such desperate measures nor the persistence of the German army could stand up to the huge barrages by 152-millimeter self-propelled guns, rockets, and masses of heavy Stalin tanks. Even with such overwhelming force, the encirclement of Hitler’s capital and the final assault through the flaming ruins of the city cost the Red Army hundreds of thousands of men. By early May of 1945, they had fought their way into the city and raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. The Red Army had pounded a stake into the heart of the Third Reich.
21 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation
The Soviet Union emerged from the war victorious but with tremendous population losses and economic damage. The number of dead was at least twenty million, twenty-seven million by some estimates, including three million prisoners of war, some seven million soldiers killed in battle, two million Soviet Jews, and at least fifteen million Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian civilians. All areas occupied by the Germans were devastated, including the USSR’s richest agricultural land and the whole Ukrainian industrial complex, which had supplied the country with almost half of its products on the eve of the war. Housing stock and city services were smashed, and even in unoccupied areas the strain of the war showed everywhere. To make things worse, a bad harvest in 1946 led to famine conditions in much of the country. Soviet reparations from Germany and Eastern European countries helped somewhat, but the scale of loss and destruction was so great that even such measures provided only small recompense for the losses.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 46