Table 3 Soviet losses in World War Two
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A: MILITARY LOSSES
Total mobilized armed forces 29,574,900
Total mobilized manpower (including other agencies) 34,476,700
Total losses (dead/POW/missing) 11,444,100
Total killed in action, died of wounds etc 6,885,100
Total missing/POW 4,559,000
Total dead 1941–45 8,668,400
Total medical casualties 18,344, 148
of which: wounds/psychiatric disablement
15,205,692
sickness
3,047,675
frostbite
90,880
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B: ESTIMATES OF CIVILIAN LOSSES*
Sokolov Total civilian dead 16,900,000
Korol Total civilian dead 24,000,000
Kozlov Total demographic loss** c4o, 000, 000
Kurganov Total demographic loss** c35,500,000
Source: J. Erickson, ‘Soviet War Losses: Calculations and Controversies’, in J. Erickson, D. Dilks (eds.), Barbarossa: the Axis and the Allies (Edinburgh, 1994) pp. 256–8, 262–6; B. V. Sokolov, ‘The Cost of War: Human Losses of the USSR and Germany 1939–1945’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1996), pp. 156–71; V. E. Korol, ‘The Price of Victory: Myths and Realities’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1996), pp. 417–24.
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neat statistical record. Many were victims of Soviet brutalities and would have died anyway, war or no war. The best estimate available suggests a further 17 million dead from all causes. Taken together with the military deaths, total Soviet war dead may have been as high as 25 million, one quarter higher than the official figure of 20 million announced by Khrushchev in 1956, but consistent with the numbers publicly declared by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.63 Precision in the record is hardly necessary. There is no dispute that the Soviet population suffered out of all proportion to the sufferings of Soviet allies, and suffered in many cases not a quick end from bomb or bullet but an agonizing end from starvation, or torture, or enslavement, or from countless atrocities whose mere recital still, after the accumulation of almost sixty years of further miseries world-wide, humbles and defeats the imagination.
10
The Cult of Personality: Stalin and
the Legacy of War
‘Turned into a deity, Stalin became so powerful that in time he ceased to pay attention to the changing needs and desires of those who exalted him… He knew that he was one of the cruelet, most despotic personalities in human history. But this did not worry him one bit, for he was convinced that he was executing the judgement of history.’
Milovan Djilas
For Stalin the victory of 1945 was a paradox. His identification with total victory over an enemy that Soviet propaganda had for years made out to be the very force of darkness invoked a personality cult that turned Stalin, for millions of his people, into something approaching a deity. A different leader might have revelled in it all, but not Stalin. His paranoiac fear of enemies, real and imagined, at home or abroad, reached a ferocious climax. His intense, irrational jealousies placed everyone around him in danger. No one was permitted to cast even a portion of his shadow over the divine countenance. Stalin's own fears oozed out over the whole system, smothering it with a blanket of terror and uncertainty. Victory did not bring in its wake the promise of a better, freer future – that was reserved for the defeated Germans and Japanese – but instead plunged the Soviet people into a second Dark Age.
The dictator was sixty-five years old when the war ended. The strain of the previous four years showed in his thinning hair and sallow face. He had put on weight, which gave his slight figure a more avuncular, even, at times, genial appearance. Over time Stalin had developed two very different personalities. He was not schizophrenic, as far as can be judged. Yet the Stalin who greeted Roosevelt or Churchill, smiling, courteous, self-effacing, was a different creature from the man who routinely ordered the deaths of thousands, sparing neither his family nor close friends and colleagues. The divided personality reflected a more profound division in Russia's own past, the divide between Westernizers and Russophiles, between the modern and the ancient, between openness and despotism. These divisions produced a tension in Russian history that was evident throughout the two centuries that preceded Stalin. In the figure of the Soviet dictator the two elements of Russia's past jostled with each other in uncomfortable proximity.
The modern Stalin was instantly recognizable. Averell Harriman, who saw a great deal of Stalin during the war as Roosevelt's emissary and then ambassador, was deeply impressed by him: ‘his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness… better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill… the most effective of the war leaders’.1 At Potsdam President Truman was soon under the spell. He liked the way that Stalin ‘looked [him] in the eye when he spoke’.2 At Teheran the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, thought that Stalin's grasp of strategy was the fruit of ‘a military brain of the highest calibre’. At Teheran Stalin did not, in Brooke's view, put a foot wrong.3 Stalin was no pampered potentate. He worked exceptional hours on affairs of state, major and minor. He achieved some understanding of modern technology; he knew that modern warfare, to which he was completely converted, needed weapons, supplies and transport, and he placed these areas of the war effort on the same level as the military campaigning. Stalin's contribution to the modernization of the Soviet war effort and to its ultimate triumph cannot be ignored. He worked for a more modern state before 1941, and its achievement made possible Soviet victory.
The pursuit of the modern age continued after 1945. Stalin's priority was to repair the material damage inflicted by the war. It was an extraordinary catalogue of loss – 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns, 32,000 factories, 40,000 miles of railroad track. Over one-third of Soviet wealth was destroyed; 25 million people were homeless.4 The whole modernization project of the 1930s had to be begun again almost from scratch throughout the war-scarred areas of the western Soviet Union. Stalin saw the project as another kind of war. The population, used to almost twenty years of mobilization, in peace and in war, was rallied for one more effort. In Leningrad the entire able-bodied population was made responsible for reconstruction work, ten hours a month for juveniles, thirty hours for workers, sixty hours for the rest. The regimented workforce absorbed the cost in low wages, few goods, inflation and shoddy housing. In three years industrial production was restored to pre-war levels. By 1950, if the statistics are to be believed, the economy was double the size it had been in 1945. The output of cement to rebuild Soviet cities rose 1,000 per cent.5
Stalin's other face was kept from the public gaze. Harriman was not fooled by the mask of ‘courtesy and consideration’, the face to the West. He knew that Stalin was a ‘murderous tyrant’, capable, if he chose, of ‘ghastly cruelty’.6 The other Stalin would have been equally recognizable to his people. Not for nothing was Stalin steeped in Russia's past, or an Asian past more ancient still. His reading betrayed him – books on Genghis Khan, on Ivan the Terrible, on Peter the Great. This was not a very Marxist bookshelf, but as Stalin told the biographer Emil Ludwig, ‘Marxism has never denied the role of heroes.’ Stalin saw his despotism as something necessary for Russia: ‘Somebody else could have been in my place,’ he told Ludwig, ‘for somebody had to occupy it.’7 Stalin seems to have believed that the very nature of Russian life and Russian traditions made such a relationship between ruler and ruled inescapable: ‘The people need a Tsar.’8
The despotic Stalin, coarse and malevolent, ruled over a terrified and sycophantic court. He baited and humiliated those around him. He sensed their fear and played upon it, half-humorous, half-threatening. They inhabited a world in which everything was reduced to what Djilas later called ‘a horrible, unceasing struggle’, avoiding the traps set for them, competing for favours, fawning upon the wisdom and generosity of their master.9 The art of tyrann
y was practised effortlessly in the post-war years. Stalin's dinner-time talk was transformed by his zealous staff into commandments; witnesses watched as Stalin's guests blanched or blushed, trembled or perspired, with every dictatorial snarl or rebuke.
Stalin had one conspicuous vulnerability, which grew more marked in the post-war years. He had an exaggerated fear of dying. There lay in this a sinister paradox. His own morbid fears competed with a studied indifference to the mortality of others. It is not unlikely that they were connected, his own sense of doom exaggerated by the cheapness of Soviet lives under his dictatorship. The source may lie somewhere in his seminary education: a nagging fear of damnation, a seed of anxiety planted in a fertile, superstitious soil. His preoccupation with age and dying was present too often in his private conversations to be merely accidental. At the end of one dinner he raised a toast to the memory of Lenin. The toast was boozily endorsed, but Stalin remained lost in thought, ‘earnest, grave, sombre’. When the guests rose to dance, Stalin tried a few steps before complaining, ‘Age has crept up on me, and I am already an old man! Did he mark down the names of those obsequious courtiers who reportedly flattered him with ‘nonsense’ or ‘you look fine’ or ‘you're holding up’?10 The excessive security measures, the desperate terror of assassination, the grim Hobbesian view of the world in which no mortal, however powerful, could escape from a ceaseless striving against death all of these betray a personality consumed by an intense morbidity. Did he, along some unconscious path, seek to appease the gods with the offering of other deaths than his? As he grew older he became more bitter, more bloodily vindictive. In victory there was none of the proverbial magnanimity. While the Soviet Union rebuilt its economy and established the foundation of its new superpower status, Stalin indulged a capricious lust for post-war retribution.
Some of that thirst for vengeance was rational enough. He agreed at Potsdam that the leading Nazis should be put on trial to answer for their crimes. There was an ironic twist to this decision. The British Government, half-heartedly supported by the American, had favoured a short, sharp end before a firing squad. The object was to avoid a long and complicated legal process, with the prospect of political disagreements and German popular protests. According to Churchill, it was Stalin who insisted on a trial. Stalin argued that a death sentence needed a trial; otherwise the senior Nazi prisoners could only be given lifelong confinement.11 When Truman, too, insisted on due process of international law, the idea of summary execution evaporated. There remained a great deal to argue over. Western politicians found it difficult to sit in judgement on German leaders over ‘crimes against peace’ or ‘crimes against humanity’ side by side with Soviet representatives of a regime they thought just as culpable.
The conduct of the trials, held at Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946, demonstrated two very different approaches to judicial process. The Soviet prosecutors laboured under the disadvantage that confessions had not been wrung from the defendants by weeks of ceaseless torture. They presented a case carefully constructed in Moscow and stuck to it rigidly. There was no mention of the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939 and the division of Poland; no mention of the Soviet-Finnish War. Soviet prosecutors used the language of Communist propaganda as they read out declaratory statements demonstrating the guilt of the ‘fascist criminals’, about which they were in no doubt. For crimes against humanity the Soviet side contributed lengthy accounts read out from prepared scripts allegedly based on eyewitness testimony. The accounts revealed unspeakable, almost incomprehensible atrocities, and were little questioned, despite the absence of the same witnesses in court. They may well have been entirely fabricated; they were almost certainly (but unnecessarily) embellished in order to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was the victim of greater barbarisms than any other state.12
In February 1946 the Soviet team caught their Allied colleagues by surprise by calling to the stand Field Marshal Paulus, who had failed to take Stalingrad, then failed to take his own life. In captivity he chose to support the Free Germany Committee set up in Moscow among German prisoners of war and German Communists, and he became the chief informer against his former comrades in arms. Under cross-examination by General Roman Rudenko, the leading Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, he affirmed that ‘beyond doubt’ the German Government and armed forces had conspired to attack the Soviet Union and turn it into a colony. The Soviet authorities had no doubt either about the guilt of those arraigned at Nuremberg and wanted them all executed. When Vyshinsky arrived at Nuremberg in November 1945, with the Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet Union, General Konstantin Gorshenin, he raised a toast to the defendants at a dinner in his honour: May their paths lead straight from the courthouse to the grave! British and American judges found themselves in the uncomfortable position of endorsing the death sentence for men they were supposed to be trying in the tradition of judicial impartiality.13 Although the International Military Tribunal established to try the German war criminals was supposed to be an independent body, arriving at an independent judgment, Vyshinsky was appointed secretly by Stalin to head a ‘Commission on the Direction of the Nuremberg Trial’, to interfere in the conduct of the Tribunal. Vyshinsky's main task was to ensure that there should be no hint at all at the trial of the Soviet-German agreements made in 1939, nor of any impropriety on the part of the Soviet authorities. Soviet prosecutors were instructed by him to shout down any witnesses whose testimony was ‘anti-Soviet’.14
The orchestration of the trials from Moscow proved remarkably successful. Only one witness touched, briefly, on the Soviet-Finnish War. The rest of the Soviet story remained unexplored, including the most notorious deception of all, the Katyn forest massacre. The Soviet team insisted on including the atrocity as part of the formal indictment on German war crimes. The other prosecutors argued that there remained so much uncertainty about the circumstances surrounding the murder of the Polish officers that in open court the Soviet Union might be compromised by any discussion. The Soviet prosecutors were unmoved, perhaps anxious that silence might be construed by world opinion as an admission of guilt. The opening of the trial itself was postponed for three days while the indictment was changed from the murder of 925 Polish officers to 11,000. This was approximately the figure given by the German authorities in April 1943 when they announced to the world the discovery of the mass grave in the Katyn forest. The official Soviet line in 1943 was to reject ‘Goebbels's slanderers' and ‘Hitlerite liars' and to lay the blame on German troops. In September 1943, when the area of Katyn was retaken by the Red Army, the Soviet Government set up a Special Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating the Circumstances of the Shooting of Polish Officers by the German-Fascist Invaders, thus pre-empting any other conclusion than German responsibility.15
The report of this commission was submitted as Soviet ‘evidence’ at Nuremberg, and Soviet lawyers made crude efforts to prevent any further discussion. The other prosecutors this time refused to co-operate, and three witnesses were heard from each side, giving, as expected, two very different versions of the story. The issue remained unresolved. The tribunal failed to arrive at any conclusion on Katyn. The Soviet authorities refused to countenance anything but their own official report. Indeed some of the Soviet lawyers working at Nuremberg may well have believed that these conclusions, based as they seemed to be on solid forensic evidence, did constitute the truth. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union the files on Katyn remained closed, and German responsibility continued to be the official line. Since the collapse documents have at last been disclosed which prove the responsibility of the NKVD beyond any further questioning. In April 1995 it was publicly admitted by a Russian security spokesman that 21,857 Polish soldiers were murdered at three separate sites by NKVD liquidation squads. In the NKVD files were the names of those decorated for the liquidation of Polish ‘nationalists’ in the Smolensk area in April 1940.16
Katyn was not the only Soviet atrocity blamed on the German invader. In the Kuropa
ty forest in Belorussia roadworkers excavating a new highway in 1957 uncovered human remains. ‘An ancient cemetery’ was the explanation given. In 1987 two schoolboys stumbled across a mass grave. What they had discovered was one of an estimated 500 mass burial sites in the forest areas around Minsk, all of them filled with the victims of NKVD terror. They contained, according to the estimates of those who investigated them, between 150,000 and 200,000 bodies. The official position of the Belorussian Government, which authorized a commission of inquiry, was to blame the Germans, and this position was maintained beyond the collapse of the Soviet Communist system, which had kept the lies alive. The evidence from the exhumations damned the NKVD. The bullets were those used in the official-issue Nagan revolver; death was the usual shot through the back of the skull, exactly as at Katyn. There were witnesses who watched the relentless cycle of killing behind the fenced-off area of forest; who saw the forest roads flattened by the constant traffic of trucks coming in full and returning empty; who recalled the timetables of execution: dawn, two o'clock in the afternoon, dusk.17 To blame the German invader for Katyn was easy in the 1940s, given the unambiguous evidence of German crimes throughout the occupied Soviet area. To sustain the falsehoods for fifty years and to heap on more when the evidence quite literally surfaced in the 1980s is harder to explain. The image of Soviet righteousness, sustained by propaganda after the German invasion, allowed Stalin, and then the entire Soviet system, to erect a curtain of forgetfulness between the pre-war and the post-war world. The post-Stalinist state had no more interest in owning up to atrocities than had Stalin himself. Honesty on such issues was regarded as corrosive.
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