Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  Zhukov found a two-storey building at Karlshorst in eastern Berlin that had once housed the canteen of the German military engineering school. There, at a little before midnight on May 8, the Allied representatives gathered. New surrender documents had been drawn up in Moscow and hurriedly brought there by Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor at the Moscow trials in the 1930s, who had become deputy minister for foreign affairs. Hours were spent trying to reconcile Soviet and Western versions. The text was typed and re-typed on a small portable machine by candlelight, following an electric power failure. At last, exactly at the stroke of midnight, Zhukov led the representatives of the other Allied powers, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, General Carl Spaatz and General de Lattre de Tassigny, into the hall. They sat at a long green table, and the German military leaders were ushered in, led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's headquarters chief of staff. Keitel struggled to maintain his dignity. His face was blotchy and red, his hand shook. As he walked to the table to sign the surrender his monocle dropped from his eye and dangled by its cord. He had, Zhukov later recalled, ‘a beaten look’, though other witnesses thought the Germans ‘arrogant and dignified’. At exactly forty-three minutes past midnight the ceremony was complete. Zhukov made what Stalin regarded as a dull speech for such an historic day, then hosted a night-long banquet, which ended with the Soviet generals, including Zhukov, dancing in the tradition of their country.45 Victory was announced in Moscow in the early hours of the morning of May 9. The day was declared Victory Day and a public holiday. The streets were filled with schoolchildren and students chanting ‘The war's over.’ Crowds gathered outside the American embassy shouting ‘Hurrah for Roosevelt!’46 In the evening two million to three million people gathered in Red Square and the streets around it. A thousand-gun salute was fired, and hundreds of airplanes flew low over the city, releasing red, gold and violet flares. There was wild, unrestrained jubilation, tinged, some observers noted, with a seriousness that bordered on the religious. The working men and women from the industrial suburbs wore their Sunday best. Police and guards allowed the revellers a free rein. Ilya Ehrenburg remembered ‘an extraordinary day, both in its joy, and in its sadness; nothing happened, and yet everything was full of significance’.47 He was recognized and tossed in the air by a crowd of well-wishers. He realized how much he had come to hate war. On May 9 he found people mourning their dead as though they had died that day. ‘To the thunder of guns,’ the poet later wrote, ‘for the first time we bade farewell to all who died in the war, the way the living say farewell to the dead.’48

  Victory brought Stalin to the pinnacle of his dictator's career. For a great many ordinary Soviet citizens the propaganda image of the supreme military leader was all they knew. Petr Grigorenko had, as a young man at the beginning of the war, begun to have second thoughts about Stalin's leadership. The war expelled that uncertainty. ‘I connected the turnabout in the course of the war with Stalin,’ he wrote; ‘though I had begun the war with doubts about the “wisdom” of Stalin's leadership, I ended it believing that we had been lucky, that without Stalin's genius, victory would have taken much longer to achieve and would have entailed far greater losses, had it come at all.’49 Stalin was appointed to the new rank of Generalissimus, though he complained that the new uniform made him look like a hotel waiter. The celebrations of victory went on intermittently for more than a month. Stalin played the part of warlord, basking in the reflected glory of his armies.

  The high point was reached on 24 June 1945 with a Victory Parade through Red Square. Stalin allowed his generals to take the honours. On June 19 he summoned Zhukov to his dacha and asked him if he could still ride a horse. Zhukov said he could and was told to take the salute in the victory march-past. When he argued that Stalin as Supreme Commander should take on the responsibility he received from the sixty-five-year-old dictator the reply: ‘I am too old to review parades.’50 The ceremony took place in a downpour. The fly-past had to be cancelled. A bedraggled Zhukov sat astride his horse while the regiments marched past, led by a Hero of the Soviet Union, Marshal Rokossovsky. Zhukov confessed in his memoirs to an unaccustomed nervousness. Line after line of drenched soldiers arrived in front of the Lenin Mausoleum, where they hurled down the regimental banners of the defeated German army. In the evening Stalin hosted a banquet for 2,500 marshals and generals, where he took the unusual step of praising the ordinary Soviet people, ‘the little screws and bolts’ of the military machine that had made victory possible.51 The victory banquet was conducted in the familiar way, awash with toasts to socialist progress and Stalin's genius. But the one group that Stalin left out, surely with deliberate intent, was the assembly of marshals and generals around him, which quite literally glittered with gold braid and battle honours. It was the first indication that Stalin was not prepared to allow the military heroes to overshadow their new Generalissimus. The working relationship established between Stalin and the generals in the middle years of the war, when he needed their expertise and their collaboration, was drawing to a close.

  There remained a great deal of unfinished business. The future of Germany, discussed at Yalta, was not decided by the documents of surrender. The settlement in Eastern Europe was not resolved. The war with Japan was not yet over. The three wartime allies agreed to meet for a conference in which they could explore the many political issues left over from the defeat of the Axis powers. The date agreed upon was July 15. Stalin persuaded his allies to add to the symbolism of surrender by meeting in Berlin. The site chosen was Potsdam, home of Prussian militarism. Zhukov was once again asked to find a suitable venue. He chose the Cecilienhof, a former palace of the Prussian royal family. Other villas were requisitioned for the thousands of officials who followed in train behind their heads of state. Zhukov organized the refurbishment of thirty-six rooms and an assembly hall in the palace. By request Truman's headquarters were painted blue; Churchill asked for pink; the Soviet delegation chose a stark white. No circular conference table large enough and in one piece could be found in Berlin, so the Lux furniture factory in Moscow was asked to build one in time for the conference.52

  Stalin was invited to travel to Potsdam in a Dakota airliner, but after his one and only flight, to Teheran, he refused to take to the air again. Beria arranged a trip by rail, with armoured carriages and an armed guard. The security arrangements exceeded anything yet seen. Stalin was more obsessed than ever with his personal safety, for he now travelled to the heart of what had been, only weeks before, enemy territory. Seventeen thousand NKVD troops and 1,515 regular soldiers lined the route, between six and fifteen men for every kilometre of track. The route was patrolled by eight armoured trains with NKVD troops. In Berlin the complex of sixty-two villas where the Soviet delegation stayed was defended in depth by three concentric circles of NKVD men, seven regiments strong. Beria set up two airfields for Soviet use, also bakeries and working farms, all staffed from Moscow. When Stalin arrived on July 16, resplendent in a white high-collared tunic with burnished epaulettes, the uniform of the Generalissimus, he was met at the station by Zhukov.53

  The Big Three – Stalin, Churchill and Truman, Roosevelt's successor – met at the centre of a European order transformed from the old world of 1939. In the 1930s European, and much of world, politics was dominated by the European great powers, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. In 1945 the dominant powers were the Soviet Union and the United States. Britain maintained its claim vigorously, but the change in the balance of power was evident from Churchill's own gloomy petulance. In American and Soviet domination lay the seeds of either a new peacetime collaboration or a new confrontation. Despite growing tension in the alliance, some form of co-operation was not entirely out of the question. The parties around the conference table were, in Dmitri Volkogonov's words, ‘both friends and enemies’.54 The difference this time was that neither side needed the other, now that Germany was defeated. The Soviet Union knew by Potsdam that the generous supply of American goods begun in 1941 was drying up a
nd would not be renewed. Reconstruction had to be planned without American aid. Likewise, the war with Japan did not now need Soviet assistance. Truman refused Churchill's offer of troops and was privately unhappy about Stalin's promise of armed assistance, which had been extracted at Yalta in rather different circumstances. The self-interest of the three parties at Potsdam did not require continued friendship. A peacetime union depended in the end on goodwill.

  This was a commodity with a poor future. Despite the gestures of warmth and celebration at Potsdam, the two sides were separated, as they had been for most of the time since 1917, by a canyon of mistrust and aversion. For Westerners, as for Stalin, this was a return to a familiar battlefield. Stalin saw imperialistic capitalism as the real enemy, from which he had been diverted by the contest with Hitler. At the end of the war the Soviet security agencies began to describe the United States as ‘Main Adversary’ in their reports. ‘I think we can tear off the veil of amity,’ Stalin wrote to Molotov in the autumn of 1945, ‘some semblance of which the Americans are so eager to preserve.’55

  This view certainly overstated the Western position. Churchill anticipated his famous speech on the division of Europe, which he delivered at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, when he wrote to Truman in May 1945, four days after the end of the war in Europe:

  An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line Lübeck –Trieste–Corfu will soon be completely in their hands… It would be open to the Russians in a very short time to advance if they chose to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.56

  Churchill remained a constant critic of Soviet intentions throughout Potsdam. Truman kept to the form of Roosevelt's goodneighbour-liness, but not to the substance. He privately viewed the Soviet delegation as ‘pig-headed’. He was surrounded by men who could see no grounds for collaboration. Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that there were no grounds for ‘permanently safe international relations’ between ‘two such fundamentally different national systems’. George Kennan, who had long experience of trying to work with the Soviet Union, viewed Potsdam ‘with unmitigated scepticism and despair’. Zhukov observed the ‘strained atmosphere’ of the conference. 57

  The immediate reasons for this distrust were exposed by the issues themselves. Stalin would not budge on the question of Poland. His control of the Baltic states could not effectively be challenged. He ignored the ‘percentages deal’ made with Churchill in 1944, as he had every right to do. Both sides agreed to a joint policy of de-Nazification, democratization and demilitarization in conquered Germany, but no one was under any illusion that democracy to Stalin meant something very different from Western practice. Over reparations there were protracted and bitter arguments. Truman and Churchill refused to abide by the figure of $20 billion of reparations for the Soviet Union talked of at Yalta. Since most of German industry had fallen into Western hands, there was something to bargain with. The Soviet side was compelled to accept a scaling-down of reparations from the other occupied zones, which Stalin took only because the West did not press the Polish question to the limit. A peace settlement with Germany was touched upon, but nothing firm could be decided as long as the two sides were unwilling to trust the other not to bring Communism westward or capitalism to the east. Germany was partitioned in all but name at Potsdam. Though Stalin announced at the conclusion of the conference that it could be regarded as a success, the final statements betrayed the reality of a divided Europe.

  This was still some way from Cold War, further still from anything hotter. Neither side was in a position to risk a violent confrontation. The West was aware of Soviet land power, made stronger by the day as American troops were pulled out of Europe. There was no question of American forces storming to the liberation of Warsaw or Budapest. There was no serious prospect of Red soldiers standing, as Churchill feared, on the Channel coast. The Soviet Union was aware of Anglo-American power in the air and at sea. Stalin was not inclined to take risks with what he had already won. He haggled, but he had a price he would accept. The United States also had the atomic bomb. The first successful test of the new weapon was carried out while the Potsdam Conference was in session. Truman was eager to tell Stalin about it so as to strengthen his own hand in negotiation. At the end of the session on July 24, the day that Churchill learned that he had been defeated in the election in Britain (‘One party is better,’ Stalin had smugly told him at Yalta), Truman walked up to Stalin and declared the momentous news that America now had a bomb of awful destructive power.58 Witnesses recalled that Stalin showed no reaction. He replied that he hoped Truman would know how to use it. The President was taken aback by Stalin's apparent indifference. But in subsequent meetings Truman's colleagues noticed a new forcefulness, a new confidence in their President's behaviour towards Stalin. The interpretation of those who watched the exchange, including the despondent Churchill, was that Stalin did not understand what Truman was talking about. He knew all too well. That night he telephoned Beria to speed up the Soviet nuclear programme, which had been placed under NKVD control. ‘They are trying to bid up,’ Molotov remarked. Stalin laughed: ‘Let them.’59

  The bomb was intended for use against the Japanese, whose war in the Pacific and in China was drawing to a close under the relentless heavy bombing of Japanese cities. Stalin's promise to Truman, made at their first meeting, that he would help to finish off Japan was kept a week after the Potsdam Conference closed on August 2. The Soviet attack on Japanese armies in northern China brought the prospect of solid strategic gains at little military cost. Stalin wanted specific territorial gains, but he wanted much more than this. Participation in the defeat of Japan placed the Soviet Union in a strong position in the re-establishment of the Chinese state. It promised to make the Soviet Union into one of two major Pacific powers, along with the United States. There was revenge, too, for the humiliating defeat of the Russian empire in the war of 1904.

  Soviet and Japanese forces had first clashed in 1938, and again in 1939 along the Manchurian border. The victor in 1939 was a younger Zhukov, but it had needed all his operational skill to achieve it. The war then opened up an unbridgeable gap between the two sides in military power. Preparations for the offensive into Manchuria began in June. They were well under way by the time the Big Three met at Potsdam. Some ninety divisions crossed Russia to fight Japan. By August there were 1.5 million Soviet troops against a little over one million Japanese, many of them from the very bottom of the barrel of recruitment. Against 5,500 heavy tanks the Japanese could muster only 1,155 light models. Against the 26,000 guns of the Red Army the Japanese could muster only 5,000.60 It was nonetheless a difficult operation. Soviet troops were tired from months of warfare. They faced an enemy whose defensive line was buttressed by formidable geographical obstacles – narrow gorges through high mountain barriers. To the north and north-west permanent concrete fortifications provided an artificial supplement to Manchuria's natural protection.

  Yet Soviet victory was emphatic. Following the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima on August 6, Stalin ordered an immediate attack, in case Japan surrendered. On August 9 the attack began. Japanese soldiers expected the Red Army of the 1930s, but they met a massively armed army, led by skilful officers who used their forces with a sophistication learned from the harsh battlefields of Europe. In just ten days their resistance was over. The war on mainland Asia went on for five days after the Japanese surrender on August 14, following a second atomic bomb. Some Japanese soldiers fought as Soviet soldiers had done on occasion, dying to the last man, but most surrendered: more than 600,000 prisoners were taken. Soviet forces covered vast distances to occupy Manchuria. By August 23 they had occupied the Kurile Islands, southern Sakhalin and the Pacific coast around Mukden. Without telling his allies, Stalin had also planned for a landing on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, in order to make the Soviet Union party to the post-war settlement in
Japan, but at the last moment he cancelled the operation, from fear of alienating the United States and spoiling what had already been gained, which was a good deal.61 Mongolia remained a virtual Soviet satellite. Manchuria and North Korea came under Soviet influence. Port Arthur became a Soviet naval base. On September 3 a second national holiday was declared throughout the Soviet Union. Peace came at last; Stalin took his first vacation since 1941.

  At the end of the war the Soviet Union had recovered much of the territory the former Tsarist state had lost in the earlier wars of the century. Stalin was well aware of the achievement. Molotov recalled a visit to Stalin's dacha when the Generalissimus was presented with a new map of Soviet territory. Stalin pinned it to the wall and stood gazing at it. ‘Let's see what we've got, then.’ He listed the new territory seized at Finland's expense in the north; the Baltic states, ‘Russian territory from ancient times‘; western Belorussia, taken back from the Poles; and Moldova, unshackled from Romania. In the east he ran his pipe across China and Mongolia, then on to the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin, with evident satisfaction. Only in the south, around the Black Sea, did he find room for further improvement, at the expense of Turkey. This, too, was an historic axis of Russian advance, which long pre-dated 1917.62

  Stalin's empire was won with reservoirs of Soviet blood. The cost of the war dwarfed the sacrifices of any other fighting power. By the time the last salvo had been delivered in Manchuria, Soviet forces alone had casualties of over 29 million: 6.2 million killed, over 15 million wounded, 4.4 million captured or missing, 3–4 million incapacitated by illness or frostbite. Of the 34.5 million men and women mobilized an incredible 84 per cent were killed, wounded or captured. Total military deaths from all causes, according to the official figures recently published, are given as 8.6 million. Other recent estimates produced by Russian historians suggest an even higher figure, in one case 23 million, in another 26.4 million. These higher totals have been arrived at on the basis that the official figures did not contain all of those who were mobilized, particularly in the frantic effort to create a popular militia in the first year or so of war, and that many of those killed were not listed as dead because of the difficulty of accounting for them during the period of retreat. Both of these factors should be taken into account, but it seems implausible that they should yield more than double the official total. For the present the figure of 8.6 million must be regarded as the most reliable. To these figures must be added the estimates of civilian deaths. No precise figure can be agreed upon, because for the thousands of murdered men and women, or the hundreds of thousands who starved to death, there can be no