Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  The grief was genuine enough. The cult of personality had done its work. For ordinary Russians Stalin was their protector, teacher, helper. The hindsight that has made Stalin into one of history's monsters was vouchsafed at the time only to those who had lived in his immediate shadow and survived. Stalin was idolized with a literalness that Westerners find hard to comprehend. To the veterans of Russia's war Stalin was the man who led them to a victory unrivalled in Russian history over an historic enemy. There was a truth there, but it was only a partial truth. Victory was won at an extravagant, colossal cost to the victor and the vanquished, a cost that Stalin's people continued to pay until his death. Like the civil war that grew out of the war of 1914–18, the Soviet war lingered on long after silence cloaked the battlefields in 1945.

  1 Josef Stalin (right) at Lenin's funeral in January 1924. In his testament Lenin warned the Party that Stalin did not know how to use power ‘with sufficient caution’.

  2 Victims of the Ukrainian famine in 1933. The death toll is now estimated at over four million. Roadblocks were set up to prevent food from crossing the frontier into the stricken province.

  3 Ukrainian nationalist prisoners in one of hundreds of labour camps across the Soviet Union. Latest estimates suggest a camp population of 3.5 million by 1939.

  4 The Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, reviews a guard of honour on a visit to Berlin in November 1940 during which the Soviet Union sought a further pact with Hitler over the territories of south-east Europe and the Middle East.

  5 A sombre crowd of Russians listen to the broadcast of Molotov's speech on 22 June 1941 announcing the German attack earlier that morning across the whole western frontier of the Soviet Union.

  6 Ukrainians greet German soldiers on horseback in the summer of 1941. Many hated the Stalinist regime and saw the Germans as liberators. Collaboration was extensive, but unavoidable.

  7 Lorries make their way across the treacherous ‘Ice Road’ to bring much-needed supplies to Leningrad in 1942. 360,000 tons of supplies were brought in over the winter of 1941; without them the whole population might have died.

  8 A worker puts out a German incendiary bomb in Leningrad. Those resting from work formed civil defence units in the factories to repair bomb damage and prevent fires.

  9 A rehearsal of Shostakovich's ‘Leningrad Symphony’ in the beleaguered city. By the time it was performed there, in August 1942, many of the players had died or been killed at the front.

  10 Soviet ski troops in action in the winter of 1941–2. The Soviet soldiers were better supplied with winter equipment than the Germans, and adapted their tactics to exploit that advantage.

  11 A procession passing through a city in Belarus, carrying a banner ‘Hitler-Liberator’. German troops were widely greeted with the traditional gifts of bread and salt, but repaid them by seizing over ten million tons of grain to feed the German army and the home population.

  12 A rare picture of the massacre at Babi Yar, taken from a film shot by a German witness. A total of 33,700 Jews were slaughtered here in two days, and buried in an anti-tank ditch along with Soviet POWs and Soviet officials captured in Kiev.

  13 Jewish children starving in a ghetto set up for Soviet Jews in Belorussia. By the end of December 1942 1.1 million Soviet Jews had been murdered, and hundreds of thousands exposed to famine and disease.

  14 Collaboration with the German occupiers brought a swift retribution. Partisan gangs shot or hanged suspects. When the Red Army recaptured the occupied regions, thousands of collaborators were given summary justice.

  15 A family struggles with a handcart through the ruins of Stalingrad. Many of the civilian population were compelled to stay in the city as German troops approached. An estimated 40,000 were killed in air raids.

  16 A woman carrying guns in a trench in the defence of Stalingrad. Thousands of women saw front-line service in the Red Army and air force. Few concessions were made either by their male companions or by the enemy.

  17 A Soviet soldier snatches a bowl of soup near the front line in 1943. Army life was tough and discipline harsh, but morale improved after Stalingrad as confidence was restored in Soviet commanders and Soviet soldiers tasted victory.

  18 A German soldier captured by a Soviet scouting party before the Battle of Kursk. Soviet forces relied on kidnapped enemy soldiers for much of their information on enemy strengths and dispositions.

  19 The fog of war. Tanks in combat at Prokhorovka during the Battle of Kursk. Driving rain and smoke made visibility atrocious: tanks rammed other tanks in a vast armoured duel which left 700 disabled vehicles on the battlefield.

  20 The Metropolitan of Moscow gives his blessing to the war effort. In 1942 Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church as part of the patriotic rallying of the Soviet people.

  21 Lorries drive Lend-Lease goods away from the docks in Murmansk. Soviet authorities disparaged the contribution made by foreign aid, but in private Stalin confessed that the USSR ‘would not have been able to cope’ without it.

  22 A soldier falls in a frontal attack somewhere on the Ukrainian front in 1944. The liberation of the Ukraine was one of the largest and most successful of all Soviet campaigns, but the cost was over one million casualties.

  23 German soldiers are paraded through the streets of Moscow in 1944. For the first time large numbers of prisoners were taken in battles of encirclement. Their destination was the work camps in the east.

  24 After the Germans were driven through the city, disinfectant trucks were sent to spray the streets as a symbol of the cleansing of the Soviet Union. The enemy were often portrayed as vermin in Soviet cartoons and posters.

  25 As the Red Army approached, German forces perpetrated a final wave of atrocities. Jewish workers in a Lublin tailoring shop lie where they have been shot at their benches and machines. Others were slaughtered in the courtyard outside the workshop.

  26 Accursed Germany! One of many posters on the Red Army's route into German territory. The first towns and villages in the Red Army's path were the victims of a terrible vengeance.

  27 An elderly German watches in an East Prussian town as Red Army soldiers march past him. Millions of Germans fled westward in 1945, an exodus which finally totalled more than 13 million.

  28 Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the most famous Soviet general of the Second World War, stands in a command post during the battle for Berlin. He was a tough-minded leader prepared to act brutally with his own men for any dereliction of duty.

  29 A Soviet cameraman photographs a body that resembled Hitler found in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in early May 1945. Hitler's remains were later found badly charred in the Chancellery gardens.

  30 Millions of homes were destroyed in the western Soviet Union. Many people lived for the first months or years of peace in home-made huts built from sticks and mud, or in caves.

  31 Soviet women working on a reconstruction site. Every citizen in the ruined areas was obliged to perform labour service. In Leningrad workers had to put in thirty hours a month, the rest sixty hours.

  32 A train full of prisoners for the labour camps in Siberia drives past a vast portrait of Stalin on the hillside. The ‘cult of personality’ reached new heights after victory in 1945, but the terror was intensified.

  Epilogue:

  Russia's War: Myth and Reality

  No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten…

  Mikhail Gorbachev, Victory Day, 1990,

  In February 1956, at a closed meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev delivered an extraordinary speech. For the first time the myths constructed around the now-dead Stalin were torn aside. Khrushchev did not mince his words. He accused Stalin of cultivating a grotesque tyranny and presented to his amazed audience a grisly catalogue of the leader's crimes. He spoke for several hours, to a largely silent hall. Only when he began to discuss the war did the delegates become animated.

  Khrushchev left Stalin's military reputation in tatters. He revealed the inco
mpetence that led to the early German victories; he hinted at Stalin's personal cowardice, the failure to visit the front or the ruined cities; he spoke of hundreds of thousands of needless deaths caused by the obstinacy and wilful blindness of the Supreme Commander; he angrily denounced the public lie that Stalin's genius had saved the Soviet Union. Instead, Khrushchev continued, victory was won by ‘the magnificent and heroic deeds of hundreds of millions of people’. It was not Stalin at all, but the Party, the Government, the army, the whole Soviet nation, ‘these are the ones who assured victory in the Great Patriotic War‘. There followed, according to the stenographic report, ‘tempestuous and prolonged applause’.1 It was a remarkable performance. Although it was officially secret, it was soon leaked by foreign delegates to the meeting and was read out to the Party faithful across the Soviet Union. The effect was immediate, as if a colossal weight had been suddenly lifted from the stooped shoulders of the Soviet people.

  Over the next four years much of the Stalin legacy was undone. Over five million prisoners were released from the camps. The thousands of statues and portraits that still cluttered the cities and halls of the Soviet Union were silently removed. Stalingrad, the great symbol of Soviet resistance, became Volgograd. The cult of personality vanished overnight. In October 1961 the Party agreed to the greatest indignity: Stalin's embalmed body was to be removed from the Kremlin Mausoleum and his name erased from its entrance. His body was reburied at night in a grave nearby. Stalin himself had had no illusions about his fate after death. In a speech delivered in April 1941 he surprised his audience with the following morbid reflection:

  People have a bad custom – to commend the living… but to consign the dead to oblivion, as idols, as was said in olden times, or as leaders, as they say now; to commend, to express sympathy for them as long as they have not died, but when they die, to forget them.2

  Stalin was not, of course, forgotten, but he did become a fallen idol.

  De-Stalinization allowed the Soviet public to look back on the war as their war, not as Stalin's. In the ‘year of truth’ that followed Khrushchev's speech it proved possible to peel back some of the layers of Stalinist myth that had smothered the reality of the war. Konstantin Simonov, who as an officially approved writer had helped to perpetuate that myth, was scathing about the system's truth. He quoted the official version of the disastrous defeats: ‘Various unforeseen circumstances arose.’ ‘What sort of wording is that?’ asked Simonov. ‘One can speak thus about a train being late, or about early frosts, but not about the war, the whole course of which from the very outset, to our great misfortune, was an unforeseen circumstance.’3 Glimpses of the real truth were allowed, even hints of the demoralization and defeatism widespread in 1942, of the damage done by the political officials who stared over every commander's shoulder or the cruel fate of the thousands transported across the Soviet Union to the camps.

  The ‘year of truth’ only briefly allowed painful memories of the suffering and anguish of war to surface. The Party was prepared to use the dead Stalin as a scapegoat but not to overturn the entire history of the war. The war was appropriated by the Party, and a new truth, in many ways little distinguishable from the Stalin version, was established by the official historians and the censors. When Vasily Grossman, who, like Simonov, had written for the war effort, tried in 1960 to publish Life and Fate, one of the greatest novels on war in any language and an honest memorial to the reality of the Soviet war effort, the manuscript was rejected. Grossman was told that it could not be published for at least two or three centuries. In February 1961 his apartment was raided and the manuscript, his books, even the typewriter ribbons that carried the offending words, were seized by the KGB. When Anatoli Kuznetsov dared in 1966 to write a novel revealing the truth about Babi Yar and about Stalinist anti-Semitism, it was published only after the censor's pencil had removed everything deemed anti-Soviet. The Soviet version of the war after Stalin was shorn of the cult of personality but remained an arid and distorted truth.4

  The new story of the war was a simple tale of Communist heroism in the face of fascist treachery. The army was happy to endorse Stalin's personal failure, but it did not want to share the blame for military misfortunes. When the journalist Albert Axell interviewed Marshal Sergei Rudenko, a veteran air force commander, in 1985, he was told that ‘everything was done to prepare for the attack’ in 1941, and that ‘both the Government and the nation managed to be masters of the situation' after the initial German blows.5 The official version remained the one mocked by Simonov: a few unanticipated complications before the people, united and disciplined by the Party, drove back the invader with the new Communist strategy of the massive counter-offensive. For the Party the official line was important, not for its own sake, but as a means to cement the regime in the years after Stalin. The shared sacrifices and extravagant courage lauded in hundreds of exemplary war stories showed Party workers pointing the way to victory and to the golden path of socialist reconstruction. Victory was appropriated, not as a military triumph, but as a vindication of the historic path now trodden by the Soviet Union and the fraternal states of Eastern Europe.

  During the 1960s the memory of the war was observed with an almost religious intensity. May 9, Victory Day, became a public occasion. Solemn meetings were held in offices and factories. ‘Victory Day,’ recalled one veteran, ‘was celebrated in a much more spiritual way than November 7 [the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution] or May 1… Everyone recalled memories from the war and was amazed to be alive.’6 Schoolchildren repeated the same liturgy across the Soviet Union: ‘The Soviet nation saved mankind from annihilation and enslavement by German fascism, and preserved world civilization.’ They could read that the war convinced the whole world of the ‘durability and great life force’ at the core of socialist society. Victory made possible the ‘transformation of socialism into a worldwide system’.7 The war – the people's war, not Stalin's – was exploited as a foundation myth for the modern Soviet state, eclipsing the Revolution itself, whose architects were now long dead.

  So intense was the commitment to the war as a just war, courageously fought and faultlessly executed, that the system could not afford the cost of disillusionment. But with the coming of glasnost the floodgates opened. In 1988 Life and Fate was finally published in the Soviet Union. The discovery of the truth was painful for generations brought up on the textbook images; even more painful perhaps for the veterans themselves, a shrinking number, who had kept the real war to themselves. Each of the participating states in the Second World War sustained its own version of the conflict, myths and all, but none has been asked to tear up this version almost entirely and to bear witness to the truth as openly and savagely as the Soviet Union and its successor states. The history of the war is no longer a test of socialist loyalty but a symbol of emancipation from the past.

  It is too soon for a new history to emerge in the former Soviet Union that can do justice to the experience of war. The reaction to the revelations is recriminatory and demoralizing. A population told for years the mythic version of the war has found the truth despairing. ‘I still feel the pain of these memories,’ recalled Khrushchev shortly before his death. ‘I still experience an ache for the people of Russia.’8 The literature on the war focuses now on the extravagant capacity of the Russian people to endure suffering and to keep going. War, no longer just a testament to military triumph, has become a crucible of miserable and incomprehensible revelations.

  The truth about the Soviet war is more than this. It may not turn out to be true that the ‘great exploit’ will ‘never fade from the memory of a grateful mankind’, as generations of Soviet citizens were taught, but the Soviet war effort still remains an incomparable achievement, world-historical in a very real sense. Stalin was right that the conflict was an ‘examination for the entire Soviet system’, and he knew, better than most, how close the state had come to failing it.9 The odds against the Soviet Union prevailing over Hitler's Germany were long even bef
ore the war broke out, longer still after the first months. The German propaganda machine emphasized the primitiveness of Soviet life. The German army taught its soldiers that the Soviet enemy was ‘unsuited for modern warfare’ and ‘incapable of decisive resistance’.10 The conventional view of the Soviet Union abroad, beyond the circle of dazzled enthusiasts, was of a system made inert by a stifling bureaucracy and savage repression. Ranged against it were the world's most dangerous armed forces, which had conquered most of Europe in eighteen months. When the news of Barbarossa arrived in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson reported to Roosevelt the almost unanimous view of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, which he shared: ‘Germany will be thoroughly occupied in beating Russia for a minimum of a month and a possible maximum of three months.’11

  Soviet victory was achieved against almost universal expectation. For all the criticism now levelled in the former Soviet Union against the crass incompetence and meaningless oppression that marked the early years of war, the Soviet system passed its most severe test. This presents historians with a circle difficult to square: the Soviet Union ought by rights to have been defeated in the war, but it prevailed triumphantly and comprehensively. Of course, the Soviet Union was not acting alone. Without the division of German energies prompted by the bombing campaign or the Mediterranean theatre the outcome would have been much less certain, perhaps very different. Nonetheless, the bulk of the damage inflicted on German forces was in the eastern campaign – 80 per cent of their battle casualties – and it was here that the overwhelming weight of the Wehrmacht was concentrated until 1944. Nor can the German dimension be ignored. After the war German generals were quick to argue that Hitler's wayward leadership and shortages of equipment made defeat inevitable: Germany lost the war, the Soviet Union did not win it. This view fits ill with the facts. German generals rode to war in 1941 confident that victory was a matter of weeks (eight to ten at most) against the ‘ill-educated, half-Asiatic’ Russian fighters, and against Soviet commanders ‘even less of a threat than… Tsarist Russian generals’.12 These judgements were almost borne out by events. The defeat of German forces required something German leaders never anticipated: that the Soviet Union would recover its economic strength, reform its armed forces and produce leaders of remarkable quality. Without these, Germany could not have been defeated. The Soviet Union had to win its war.