Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  Death was inescapable, ever present, but, as Ehrenburg found on his many visits to the front, the soldiers deliberately distanced themselves from it: ‘The men lived in such close proximity to death itself that they had stopped noticing it; a way of life had been established.’58 No one talked about death. There was a pervasive sentimentality, captured in the poetry and literature of the war and its popular songs. Ehrenburg's soldiers preferred to think about the past or hope for the future. They each believed with a superstitious conviction that they would survive while others perished. The future kept a great many soldiers fighting. For some it was a future in which the German enemy was smashed and the motherland regained; but for most soldiers the future must have beckoned in more mundane ways. ‘I do not complain of my lot/,’ ran one poem, ‘but long to see, if only for one day/ a day that is an ordinary day/ when the darkness of the thick shade of trees means nothing more than summer, silence, sleep.’59

  The fatalism of the ordinary soldier was at the root of that willingness for self-sacrifice which many of them exhibited throughout the war. It is easy to romanticize Russian stoicism. The artist Aleksandr Dzhikiya, writing in 1990, argued that during the war ‘in spite of all the deprivations, burdens and victimization’ there existed ‘some kind of spiritual light’.60 Soldiers may indeed have felt at certain moments an intense spirituality, a mobilization of the soul, a longing for a beautiful death. These sentiments seem less out of place in the context of Russian culture than they would be in much of the rest of Europe, and they should not be overlooked. Yet the day-to-day reality of a soldier's existence was less elevated. They were fearful, tired, bullied by their officers, often short of food and endlessly homesick, but despite the climate of deprivation most displayed a stubborn resilience and a simple, unselfconscious patriotism in the daily struggle for existence. They continued to fight and to die in their millions, not for Stalin, not for Communism, but for numberless smaller ambitions.

  After Kursk the war made greater sense to the Soviet public. Its object was to drive the Germans from what remained to them of the Soviet Union, from the Ukraine, from Belorussia, from the Crimea. In August 1943 Stalin again pressed for a general offensive from Leningrad to the Black Sea, before the enemy recovered from the losses of the previous two months. In the centre, where German forces had had eighteen months to prepare a defence in depth, the Red Army made slow progress. After a complex and costly operation they captured Smolensk in late September. Stalin's chief objective was the Dnepr River, which ran from Kiev in the north down to the Black Sea. This became Hitler's objective too. German intelligence, which had misjudged the size and depth of Soviet forces at Kursk, now produced a gloomy picture of a Soviet colossus bearing down on a weakened German front. ‘All hell is loose on the eastern front,’ wrote Hitler's chief of staff to his wife.61 Hitler at last approved a general retreat. German forces, while pursuing an active defence to slow down the Soviet steamroller, were ordered to move to the western bank of the Dnepr and to stand fast there at all costs.

  Soviet forces were not as fearsome as the German picture suggested. The numbers of men and tanks were much reduced after Kursk. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army was reduced from five hundred tanks to fifty. As he advanced towards the Dnepr he divided the fifty into three separate units, then set up a phantom radio communications net to persuade German eavesdroppers that he had a whole tank army at his back. In the south, German forces faced large infantry armies with a weak sprinkling of Soviet armour. Red Army divisional strength was approximately half the number it had been in 1942. Soviet weaknesses prevented a more decisive attack, and although much of the Donbas industrial region was recovered, German forces eluded capture and re-formed a powerful Panzer group to defend the lower reaches of the river from Zaporozhe to the Black Sea.

  Nevertheless the movement was almost all one way. The Red Army had a string of victories behind it; German forces knew that, with operations in Italy and the threat of a cross-Channel invasion, they could not provide the strength now to hold everything in the East. By the third week of September the Red Army had reached the Dnepr north and south of Kiev. Stalin announced that he would award the

  Caption

  Map 8 From Kursk to Kiev, August–December 1943

  coveted title of Hero of the Soviet Union to the first soldiers to cross to the other side of the river. Over the following week no fewer than forty small bridgeheads were established on the far bank. Soldiers improvised as best they could. Hundreds took small boats under constant enemy fire in their eagerness to breach Hitler's rampart. A few swam across. The German army surrounded the bridgeheads, but could not dislodge them.62

  One bridgehead they neglected. North of Kiev, near the village of Liutezh, one infantry division had negotiated the swamps and marshes of the upper Dnepr, where it waited in what the Germans regarded as impassable terrain. On the east side of the Dnepr lay Vatutin's Voronezh Front, which had begun the campaign defending Kursk, now many miles to the rear. It was renamed the 1st Ukrainian Front as an indication of its new destination. Vatutin was ordered to send armour and men into the swampy enclave as a stepping-off point for an attack on Kiev. Soviet methods of deception and concealment were now so sophisticated that the enemy guessed nothing of what was happening. The first tank corps to arrive crossed the marshland by sealing up every orifice of their T-34 tanks and rushing at full speed through the mud. In October a second group, 3rd Guards Tank Army, was moved in complete secrecy into the bridgehead. Poor weather conditions prevented German air reconnaissance, and extensive deception measures further south persuaded Field Marshal von Manstein, in command of the Kiev defence force, that the enemy would attack from its larger and drier bridgeheads below the city. Instead, on November 3, the German defenders were taken by complete surprise as two whole armies poured out of the swamps to the north of the city.63 Two days later the armies entered Kiev itself. At four o'clock in the morning of November 6 the Ukrainian capital was captured, just in time for the annual celebration of the Russian Revolution.

  In Moscow the liberation of Kiev was welcomed with an extravagant display of fireworks. Stalin talked of the ‘year of the great turning-point’ in his commemoration speech. On November 7, while Soviet forces fought pitched battles against Manstein's Panzer divisions to enlarge their grip on Kiev, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, threw a sumptuous party. It was later reported to be the most opulent of the war. Soviet officials were dressed in a newly designed pearl-grey uniform, hung with gold braid. The atmosphere was lush, the drink plentiful, so much so that the British ambassador fell face-first onto the table, cutting himself. Other diplomats were carried out unconscious. Shostakovich appeared in full evening dress. Endless toasts were drunk to the successes of Allied armies, and to international goodwill. The mood was reported to be exuberant, even bohemian.64

  After five months of continuous campaigning, almost two-thirds of the area once occupied by Axis forces was cleared. Stalin was now in a position to think about the future, after German defeat. He accepted an invitation from Roosevelt to meet outside the Soviet Union, in the Iranian capital of Teheran, to discuss the future of Allied strategy and the politics of the post-war world. On November 24 he boarded a special train for the south, accompanied by Molotov and Voroshilov and officers from the General Staff. The train travelled through the broken city of Stalingrad. At intervals Stalin summoned the staff officers to give him the latest information from the fighting fronts. The train arrived in the oil city of Baku, where two aircraft were waiting to take the party on to Teheran. Stalin was invited to fly with the more senior pilot, a general. He refused on the grounds that ‘generals don't do much flying’, and flew instead with a colonel at the controls, escorted by twenty-seven Soviet fighters.65

  The Teheran Conference marked a clear change in the relationship among the three Allied powers. Churchill found himself isolated between the two new superpowers. After Stalingrad and Kursk, Stalin was now arguing from a position of strength,
and he wanted his allies to honour their commitment to absorb some of the German army's fighting capacity and relieve the drain on Soviet manpower. Roosevelt came to the conference curious to meet his Soviet partner and eager to lay the foundation for a more permanent relationship. On the first day Stalin informed the President of a possible German plot to assassinate him and invited him to stay in the Soviet embassy, where the conference was to be held. Roosevelt agreed, unaware perhaps of Stalin's persistent paranoia about assassination but pleased to be able to establish closer physical contact with the Soviet delegation. Stalin and his party were housed in the embassy grounds, in the ambassador's residence. The rest of the Soviet delegation was housed in a former harem close by.66 Stalin and Roosevelt began the conference on November 28 with an informal, private conversation that excluded Churchill. The two men, according to the interpreter's recollection, established a quick rapport. After the usual small talk, Roosevelt made it clear to Stalin that his aim was to start up a front that would ‘divert some thirty to forty German divisions away from the Soviet-German front’. Stalin gave a laconic reply – ‘It would be very good if that could be done’67 – before moving on to a wide range of lesser issues.

  The question of a western front was the central issue. Roosevelt arrived in Teheran determined to force the British to commit themselves to a cross-Channel invasion in 1944. This early conversation laid the groundwork. When the three leaders met later that afternoon the second front was raised by Stalin in his opening remarks, delivered in a voice so soft that the whole conference room descended into a deathly hush in order to hear him. Stalin asked his coalition partners for a firm commitment to invade northern France as soon as possible. The invasion plan, Operation Overlord, had been in preparation for some months, but Churchill was personally less attracted to the plan than Roosevelt and his advisers. Stalin's insistence on a commitment to Overlord made Churchill's position difficult. Stalin unfurled two cigarettes as he was talking and placed the tobacco in his pipe, lit it, screwed up his eyes and stared at the President and Churchill. Roosevelt was observed to wink at Stalin. When Churchill finally spoke, he knew that he was outnumbered. He described the possibility of other fronts in the Mediterranean. Stalin interrogated him as he might a senior commander. The discussion became awkward and tense, and was postponed.

  Churchill continued to argue that Overlord could not be mounted the following spring, when Stalin wanted it, but on the second day, following a direct question from an exasperated Stalin, Churchill was forced to concede in front of the assembly that he, too, favoured a cross-Channel invasion in the spring. The following day the President began the conference session by baldly stating the Western Allies' intention of invading in force in May 1944. Stalin showed little outward sign at hearing the news. His interpreter noticed a slight paleness and a voice softer than ever: ‘I am satisfied with this decision.’ In return Stalin pledged the Soviet Union to invade Japan after the defeat of Germany. Some inconclusive discussion was begun on the post-war settlement in Europe and the fate of Germany and its leaders. The main decision made, the mood of the conference lightened. That night the British embassy hosted Churchill's sixty-ninth birthday celebration. Stalin toasted his allies after the feast: ‘My fighting friend, Roosevelt,’ ‘My fighting friend, Churchill.’ Churchill was more circumspect after the bruising engagements with Stalin around the conference table. He toasted ‘Roosevelt, the President, my friend!’ but ‘Stalin the mighty,’ a shift of emphasis that needed no interpretation. Roosevelt, who had acted the peace-maker for much of the conference, hailed, not his partners, but his ideal of world co-operation: ‘To our unity – war and peace!’ The conference broke up with mutual expressions of goodwill.68

  Stalin flew back to Baku, where he changed into a simple soldier's greatcoat and cap without insignia. The train taking him back to Moscow stopped briefly at Stalingrad, where Stalin alighted to look at the destroyed city before going on to Moscow. The Soviet side placed little trust in the promise extracted at Teheran. The second front was needed to ease the strain on the Red Army. But Stalin came away from Teheran with the knowledge that his own armed forces had inflicted defeats on a force three times greater than the armies manning the Atlantic wall. On his return from Teheran he told Zhukov, ‘Roosevelt has given his word that extensive action will be mounted in France in 1944 I believe that he will keep his word. But even if he does not, our own forces are sufficient to complete the rout of Nazi Germany.’69 This was a bold statement. Kursk did not win the war, but after the Soviet Union had lived for two years in the shadow of defeat, it opened the door to the possibility of victory.

  8

  False Dawn:

  1943–44

  It is five o'clock in the morning of a grey, rainy, autumn day; the foremen are driving out the hungry men, drenched and angry, clothed in rags and torn boots, many of them hardly able to move their feet from exhaustion; and there on the platform near the gates a band is playing a lively march tune.

  a Gulag prisoner

  If the term ‘total war’ has any real meaning it surely describes the Soviet Union at the height of its war with Germany. No other state diverted so much of its population to work for the war effort; no other state demanded such heavy and prolonged sacrifices from its people. Life on the home front was a struggle that mirrored the bitter conflict at the warring front. The victories after 1943 were purchased at a heavy price. Stalin's promise to turn the Soviet Union into a single war camp was no mere rhetoric. War dominated every element of daily life.

  From the very start of the war normal civilian life ceased. Peasants grew food for the war; factory workers produced weapons for the war; scientists and engineers invented new ways of waging war; bureaucrats and policemen organized and oppressed the rest. In the shadow of impending defeat in 1941 and 1942 the lives and interests of individuals counted for very little. The country's scientists, drawn from no fewer than seventy-six research institutes, were uprooted and transplanted into the Ural city of Sverdlovsk and organized under a State Science Plan, published in May 1942. Committees of scientists were given responsibility for different parts of the war effort – some for tanks, some for aviation, some for agriculture and so on. Geologists were sent into the remote areas of Siberia to find new sources of minerals and oil to compensate for the losses in the Ukraine.1 Even some experts were recruited who had fallen foul of the regime in the 1930s and ended up in labour camps. The aircraft designer Aleksandr Tupolev and his team, imprisoned because Stalin turned against the large multi-engined aircraft they designed, worked, in 1941, on drawing-boards inside the camp compounds.2

  Daily life was at its grimmest on the land. The villages gave up their male workers to the armed forces. By 1944 nearly three-quarters of the men who had worked the collective farms had gone. Those who remained were the sick or the elderly, or farmers who had been disabled at the front. The great bulk of the work to produce the food supplies vital to the cities and the fighting front was done by Russian women. They made up half the rural workforce in 1941; by 1944 the figure was nearly four-fifths.3 Their routine was relentless and miserable. Unlike the rest of the population, peasants did not qualify for ration cards. At the collective farms they were given a few chunks of bread or an occasional potato. They were expected to subsist on what they could grow themselves on their small garden plots. The lucky ones might sell their surpluses on the open market – after the Government had taken its quota. Some peasants grew temporarily rich by exploiting the black market. But for most peasant women, and the boys and old men who helped them, the war years were uniformly bleak. They lacked the tools and horses to plough and sow. They hacked away at the ground with sticks and rods; teams of women hauling ploughs became a familiar sight. When they finished their daily shift, some were forced to join local logging gangs, hauling the wood often long distances, summer and winter, to provide vital fuel for the cities. Many peasants went hungry and cold for want of the food and firewood they produced for others. They lost mill
ions of their menfolk at the front. They found themselves the unwilling hosts of thousands of refugees from the west, many of whom starved to death in the early years of the war, abandoned by the regime and victimized by villagers who saw no reason to feed unwanted guests.

  Life in the city was harsh, but in one important respect it was easier to bear. Work earned food. Everyone who was fully employed was entitled to a ration card. Those who would not or could not work either lived from the charity of their families or starved to death. In the bleakest months of the war, in 1942, the weakest perished. There was in this a cruel rationality. Those who worked and fought were rewarded. The rest were dispensable. Work was difficult to escape. On 13 February 1942, the Supreme Soviet decreed the mobilization of every able-bodied citizen for the war effort. Not every factory was placed under martial law, but NKVD troops were always on hand. New conditions of work were set. A sixty-six-hour week became the norm, with one rest-day a month. Vacations were suspended. Compulsory overtime was introduced.4 More than half the factory workforce were women; many were young boys, waiting until they were old enough to trade in their overalls for a uniform. The hours they worked, in factories where safety standards were at best rudimentary and work norms fiercely imposed, were uniformly debilitating. Health declined over the war years, as the city populations, short of medical personnel and medicines, became prey to typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and scurvy.