Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  The meeting between the two men that convened in the evening of October 9 at the Kremlin found two of Europe's great powers doing what they had done for centuries: disposing of the future of the lesser powers with scant regard for any principle but their own interests. Churchill in his memoirs dramatically recounted how he scribbled down on a piece of paper a list of Eastern European countries, against which he set a percentage for Soviet influence, a percentage for British. For Stalin there was 90 per cent in Romania, 50 per cent in Hungary and Yugoslavia, 75 per cent in Bulgaria. Greece he wanted for himself: ‘In Greece it was different. Britain must be the leading Mediterranean power…’60 He handed the sheet to Stalin, who with a casual gesture drew a large blue tick and handed it back in silence. The reality was a little different. The negotiations were more protracted. They involved Poland, where Churchill merely suggested that its fate be left to the nationalist and Communist Poles to sort out between them.61 The tick on the piece of paper, if such there was, did not indicate approval or agreement, but was a habit of Stalin's to show that he had read something. But in essence Churchill's version of the story was true. The whole discussion made a mockery of his later credentials as a Cold Warrior, just as it compromised his relations with Roosevelt. It amounted to a virtual acceptance of more than Stalin could have hoped for in Eastern Europe.

  Churchill later had cause deeply to regret the character of his intervention in Moscow. No formal agreement was signed or asked for. The ‘piece of paper’ had no more political weight than that more famous ‘piece of paper’ Hitler gave to Chamberlain late at night in Munich in September 1938. Soviet leaders did not need British permission to establish Soviet domination in the areas of Soviet liberation. British acquiescence, on the other hand, simplified the Soviet position. Britain and the United States had, to Stalin's intense irritation, refused to allow the Soviet Union a part in the occupation of liberated Italy. Churchill's unforced candour would make it all the more difficult to challenge the Soviet monopoly in the east and the establishment of regimes modelled on the Stalinist dictatorship.

  The widening gap between East and West remained a subterranean fissure as long as the war against Germany and Japan persisted. It was agreed among the three Allied leaders that they should meet at yet another summit conference. Stalin suggested the Crimean resort of Yalta . Roosevelt, now in the final throes of the illness that dispatched him in April 1945, agreed, against the strong advice of his doctors and colleagues. Stalin had been offered a site in Scotland, then Malta or Athens (even at that stage of the war a risky choice), but on the advice of his own doctors rejected them all. Roosevelt now had to travel 4,883 miles by sea and a further 1,375 miles in the new presidential aircraft, oddly named ‘The Sacred Cow’. According to Churchill ten years of research could not have found ‘a worse place in the world’.62 The President was to be lodged in the Livadia Palace, built for the Tsars. His cavalcade from the airport took five hours to reach Yalta. The party was driven through the wreckage of war, along a route lined by Soviet soldiers, both men and women, who clicked their heels to attention as the cars swept by. At the palace Roosevelt was attended by a staff brought down from three Moscow hotels. The furnishings were pre-Revolutionary, dark, heavy and wooden. The local countryside had been scoured for everything from coat hangers to ashtrays.63

  The conference was conducted throughout with a level of cordiality and collaboration that belied the growing mistrust between the two sides. Stalin had the advantage over his allies of secret intelligence from NKVD agents, including the highly placed State Department official Alger Hiss, and information revealed through the many microphones concealed about the Livadia Palace.64 The agreements that were reached on the future conduct of the war almost certainly reflected the influence of this secret intelligence. Stalin agreed to enter the war with Japan as long as the Soviet Union was guaranteed the return of former Russian territories in Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands which he knew the Americans were willing to concede. This was granted with few misgivings; the Americans were convinced that Japan would take another year or two to defeat, and Soviet help would shorten the time. There were more misgivings over Germany. It was agreed that Germany be demilitarized and de-Nazified, and that spheres of influence for the three major Allies and for France be established. The Soviet Union asked for, and won grudging approval of, a bill of $20 billion in reparations from Germany. Stalin insisted on including the word ‘dismemberment’ to describe Allied policy on Germany. This was resisted at first but finally conceded. The future of Poland was hotly debated, but again a rough agreement emerged, giving the Soviet Union slices of Polish territory in the east in return for the transfer of German territory in Silesia and East Prussia to Poland. The only concession wrung from Stalin was his agreement to allow Polish nationalists into a broader provisional government. (Soviet spies had revealed how important this issue was to the West.) It was a tactical move, to be set aside when the time was ripe.65

  Roosevelt had one ambition above all. He wanted to give real shape to the United Nations. Like Wilson in 1918, Roosevelt believed that a new idealism in world affairs might end what he called ‘the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power…’ Stalin did not reject this vision out of hand – he had no need to – but he refused to accept the principle of self-determination of peoples. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's confidant, who arrived at Yalta in even worse health than his master, believed that Yalta signalled ‘the dawn of the new day’. No one on the American side doubted, he continued, ‘that we would live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine’.66

  It is sometimes suggested that the West was fooled by Stalin at Yalta. Certainly Roosevelt and Hopkins projected a misplaced idealism which three years of alliance with Stalin ought to have dissipated sooner. Yet even the more cynical Churchill was moved after Yalta to tell the House of Commons that he came away from the conference with the impression that Stalin wished to live ‘in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond.’67 The Soviet side of the story of Yalta remains locked in the archives, but it can be assumed with confidence that idealism played a more junior role, as it always had.

  Stalin did not fool the West; they fooled themselves. Nothing in Stalin's record suggested that he would forgo political opportunism and national self-interest for long. In 1944 he picked up where Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe had begun in 1939. His priority was Soviet security, which is why Poland mattered so much to him: ‘Throughout history,’ he reminded his allies at Yalta, ‘Poland has been a corridor through which the enemy passed to attack Russia.’68 In almost all the discussions at Yalta the West failed to extract a watertight agreement on their terms, though they agreed to what Stalin wanted. Re-reading the discussions, it is difficult to place on them the optimistic gloss that Stalin's visitors later gave them. Stalin had not survived in the jungle of Soviet politics for more than twenty years for nothing. He was an opportunist, accustomed to move cautiously, as circumstances allowed. There is unlikely to have been any master plan to take over Europe. He knew that at that point he could not risk an open breach, for the Soviet Union was hoping for an extension of economic aid from the United States to help with industrial reconstruction; but he made few concessions on the things that mattered. In one of the many toasts at one of the many dinners at Yalta, Stalin sounded a warning: ‘The difficult task will come after the war, when diverse interests will tend to divide the Allies.’69 Here was the voice of realism.

  9

  Fall of the Swastika:

  1945

  Victory

  Not in paradise, but on this vast tract of earth,

  where at every step there is sorrow, sorrow, sorrow,

  I awaited her, as one waits only when one loves,

  I knew her as one knows only oneself,

  I knew her in blood, in mud, in grief.

 
; The hour struck.

  The war ended.

  I made my way home.

  She came towards me, and we did not recognize each other.

  Ilya Ehrenburg, 9 May 1945

  Stalin was determined that Berlin, Hitler's capital, should be his prize. ‘I think it's going to be quite a fight,’ he told Zhukov.1 The capture of Berlin was heavy with symbolism. Stalin wanted the Red Army to seize it as a reward for its almost four years of ceaseless conflict, carrying the main weight of the war against Hitler. He also wanted to command the last campaign himself, and in November 1944 he restored the Stavka to direct control of the front. Vasilevsky, the chief of staff, was pushed aside and in February resigned his post. Zhukov was chosen to command the front which would close in on Berlin, but the accolade was tarnished by Stalin's evident intention of seizing back the reins of command. Berlin was to be Stalin's triumph as well as Zhukov's.

  The capture of the German capital was not a foregone conclusion. Stalin did not trust his Western partners not to drive on to Berlin simply to forestall him. He did not trust the Germans not to abandon the fight in the west in order to concentrate everything on the war against Communism, and he strongly suspected Churchill, who Stalin believed ‘wouldn't flinch at anything’, of seeking a separate German surrender in order to achieve just this.2 Stalin was right that German forces would fight stubbornly to defend German soil and the German capital. He was right that Nazi leaders would try to divide the Allies. German propaganda leaflets were dropped over the advancing Western troops, calling on them to join with the German army to hold back the tide of ‘Asiatic’ barbarism. But he was wrong about his Allies. The voices that were raised in favour of a rush to Berlin were stifled, and the agreements made at Yalta, which placed Berlin in the Soviet sphere, were honoured. Nonetheless, British and American forces got closer to Berlin than had seemed possible when they stood on the boundaries of western Germany in December 1944. The collapse of German resistance in the west made the race for Berlin a possibility. Stalin eventually accelerated the timetable for the Berlin operation to ensure its conquest. Unlike the other major operations since the end of 1943, the strike at Berlin was hurried and improvised.

  When Stalin assumed control of the front line in November, almost 500 miles separated the Soviet armies, stretched out along the Vistula, and the German capital. The character of the war now changed. Soviet forces were fighting for the first time away from Soviet soil. Russian armies had last traversed the heartland of Europe as victors in 1813, when they fought side by side with Germans to overthrow Napoleon. In the First World War the vast imperial army lumbered westward to defeat at Tannenberg and Lodz. In 1920 the young Red Army was stopped humiliatingly in its tracks by the Polish legions of Marshal Pilsudski in the approaches to Warsaw. Perhaps recollection of defeats explains Stalin's growing caution. He did not want a repeat. He could not afford to have the final triumph turn sour, even if German successes were as short-lived as the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's final failed offensive in the west in December 1944. So it was that each new drive westward was halted in order to secure the flanks and straighten the Soviet line. In January 1945, after months of careful preparation, a second great operation, less daunting than Bagration but vast in scale, was launched between the Vistula and the Oder rivers to bring the Red Army to within forty miles of the German capital.

  The unglamorously-named Vistula-Oder Operation began on January 12. Along the whole eastern front over 6 million Soviet soldiers were faced by 2 million German troops and 190,000 of their allies, a dwindling remnant of the army of two years before. Some of the German troops were of high quality and heavily armed with the most modern defensive weapons, but many were scratch regiments of under-age conscripts or older volunteers, short of fuel and ammunition and desperately short of tanks and vehicles. They stood behind prepared defences that proved more of a threat on paper than in battle. Soviet forces were also very short of trained manpower, the numerous divisions all well under strength, but they now had an exponential lead in weapons, vehicles and aircraft. They also enjoyed the element of surprise, for once again German commanders were almost entirely in the dark about the intentions of the enemy. To confuse the Germans still further the assaults were again staggered. As one front advanced, German reserves were hastily deployed to repel the attack, only to find that a second front had exploded far to the north or south. Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front began the campaign on January 12 and in two weeks was deep in Silesia. Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front attacked on January 14, and in a little over two weeks swept German forces from central Poland. On January 29 Zhukov stood on the banks of the Oder river with Berlin in his sights.

  At times Soviet armies travelled fifty miles a day, driving before them an increasingly disorganized and demoralized German army and streams of frightened German refugees, who sought any avenue out of the clutches of an enemy whose thirst for vengeance was terrible and undiminished. When on January 13 the armies of the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts in the north began the operation to clear East Prussia, Soviet forces at last found themselves deep in German territory. German resistance was frantic, even suicidal. By February 2 a large German garrison was bottled up with thousands of civilians in Konigsberg and along its coastline, subject to constant air and artillery attack. The rest of East Prussia lay open to Soviet revenge. There can be no disguising the treatment meted out to the German

  Caption

  Map 10 The Vistula-Oder Operation, January-May 1945

  population. The trail of savagery had unmistakable echoes of an earlier age. In the first villages they occupied in October 1944 the soldiers slaughtered the population, raping and torturing the women, old and young. Refugees were shelled and bombed and crushed beneath the tracks of advancing tanks. In Silesia and on the banks of the Oder the orgy of violence threatened the discipline of the troops at what was a critical point of the campaign, and commanders took harsh steps to rein in the wave of atrocities and the widespread looting.3

  Vengeance was easy to understand. As troops arrived at the frontier they read notices posted along the way reminding them of their hatred for things German. For years Soviet soldiers had been taught that the enemy were beasts fit only for destruction. ‘The Fascists,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, author of the poems of hate penned in the summer of 1942, ‘brought with them savagery, atrocities, the cult of violence, death.’ Outside Minsk, in 1944, Ehrenburg came across a pile of the charred bodies of Russian women and girls. Red Army soldiers found them, too, and took instant revenge upon the Germans in their path. ‘Nowhere,’ wrote Ehrenburg, ‘was the fighting so ferociously cruel.’ In East Prussia he found the same deep loathing. He accosted a demented Belorussian soldier who was repeatedly stabbing a shop-window dummy with his bayonet in futile vengeance for the death of his wife.4 The advance across the shattered, depopulated landscape of Belorussia and eastern Poland led Soviet forces to their first encounter with an extermination camp at Maidenek in July 1944. They found around 1,000 sick, emaciated prisoners.5 The Jewish inmates had been taken westward on one of the hundreds of death marches. Most of those who remained were Soviet prisoners of war. General Chuikov ordered his men to file through the camp. ‘How much hate raged in the heart of our soldiers,’ he later wrote.6 Soviet soldiers were horrified less by the camp than by the warehouses stuffed with clothes, handbags, shoes and children's toys, all taken from the doomed prisoners. Lists were found containing detailed requests from the Reich for warm children's clothing for evacuees from the bombed German cities.7

  Maidenek was given wide publicity among the troops. By the time the Red Army reached Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, those camps had been obliterated by the German authorities, the land ploughed under and farmed once again. That left Auschwitz, most notorious of all the camps. In January 1945, as the Red Army approached the camp, the population of slave workers, surrounded by SS guards, was made to march off into the snow. Those who remained, most too ill to march, were abandoned by their German captors as the roar
of Soviet artillery drew nearer. On the afternoon of January 27 a Soviet patrol reached the camp. Prisoners, waving improvised red flags made from clothing or bedding, swarmed around the soldiers. There were only 2,819 prisoners left, hundreds of them on the point of death. All around the Red Army discovered the grisly evidence of mass murder. The soldiers found (and counted) 348,820 men's suits and 836,255 women's coats and dresses.8 Some of the liberated prisoners were Soviet citizens. To their horror they were interrogated, in the same Auschwitz buildings they had just been freed from, by agents of Smersh, a military counter-intelligence agency set up in 1943 to root out spies and counter-revolutionaries in the army and among prisoners freed during the Soviet advance. The name was thought up by Stalin himself, an abbreviation of the Russian words ‘Death to spies!’ Auschwitz shocked the Soviet soldiers who liberated it; the news of German atrocities made it ever more likely that the Red Army would seek a merciless revenge. The authorities, however, remained silent on this occasion. The details of the liberation of Auschwitz were revealed only on 7 May 1945, at the end of the war in Europe. In the Soviet report no mention was made of the Jews. The victims were ‘4,000,000 citizens of various European countries’.9

  Stalin was not ignorant of the behaviour of Red Army soldiers, but it worried him little. When he was told of the treatment meted out to German refugees he was reported to have replied: ‘We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative.’ When the Yugoslav Communist, Milovan Djilas, complained to Stalin's face that the Red Army was raping Yugoslav women he received a lecture on the Russian attitude to war: