by Will Podmore
The Yalta Conference and after
At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, the Allies agreed that the peoples of Eastern Europe had the right to build their own societies in peace. The US and British governments knew that they could not defeat Hitler without Soviet forces entering eastern Europe. As Willmott pointed out, “eastern Europe was neither Britain’s nor America’s to abandon and betray: it did not lie within an Anglo-American power of gift.”42 He noted of Yalta, “the Americans had much the better of the bargains struck at this conference. The United States yielded nothing that the Soviet Union did not already have or could take for herself without seeking American agreement …”43 American historian Michael Schaller commented, “Often blamed for the ‘loss’ of Eastern Europe and China to Communism, Yalta did nothing of the kind. The Soviet Red Army already occupied most of Eastern Europe in February 1945 ...”44 Robert Nisbet agreed, “It is not true that Yalta gave Stalin authority to subjugate the Baltics, Balkans, and large parts of Poland and Eastern Europe. Yalta couldn’t have given this permission to the Soviets, for they already had these countries in their possession when the Yalta summit began.”45
On Poland, the Allies agreed to back the provisional government of national unity, based in Lublin and led by Boleslaw Bierut, the president of Poland. As Churchill wrote to Stalin just after Yalta, “We and the Americans agreed, therefore, that there was to be no sweeping away of the Bierut government.”46 US Secretary of State James Byrnes said, “there was no question as to what the spirit of the agreement was. There was no intent that a new government was to be created independent of the Lublin government. The basis was to be the Lublin government.”47 Byrnes acknowledged, “there was no justification under the spirit or letter of the agreement” for insisting on a new government in Poland.48 Roosevelt explained, “we want a Poland that will be thoroughly friendly to the Soviet for years to come.”49 As Churchill had said earlier, “The Russian armies … offer freedom, sovereignty and independence to the Poles. They ask that there should be a Poland friendly to Russia. This seems to me very reasonable considering the injuries which Russia has suffered through the Germans marching across Poland to attack her.”50
On 21 April 1945, the Soviet Union and Poland signed a Treaty of Friendship, Mutual Assistance and Post-war Collaboration. As Stalin said, “The importance of this Treaty consists in the first place in that it signifies the radical turn of relations between the Soviet Union and Poland towards alliance and friendship, a turn which took shape in the course of the present liberation struggle against Germany and which is now being formally consummated in this Treaty. … In the course of the last two World Wars the Germans succeeded in making use of the territory of Poland as a corridor for invasion of the East and as a springboard for attack on the Soviet Union. This became possible because at that time there were no friendly allied relations between our countries. The former rulers of Poland did not want to have relations of alliance with the Soviet Union. They preferred a policy of playing about between Germany and the Soviet Union. And of course they played themselves into trouble. … Poland was occupied, her independence abolished, and as a result of this whole ruinous policy German troops were enabled to appear at the gates of Moscow.” The Treaty pledged the signatories to carry the war against fascism to victory, to preserve and strengthen friendly relations after the war, and to work together on the basis of the principles of mutual respect for independence, sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of states.
The Soviet Union also agreed to declare war on Japan. The US Chiefs of Staff said that this would save 200,000 American lives. The Soviet government advanced the date of its attack on Japan’s Kwantung Army in China, outmanoeuvring the US government, which had hoped to force Japan’s surrender before the Soviet Union entered the war. In August, the Red Army shattered the Kwantung Army in seven days and achieved total victory over Japan in less than three weeks. They killed or wounded 674,000 Japanese troops, losing 12,031 killed and 24,425 wounded.51 As Glantz concluded, “The massive scale of the Soviet attack was matched by the audaciousness, skill, and relentlessness with which it was conducted.”52
‘The greatest military achievement in all history’
World War Two involved 61 countries with a total population of 1.7 billion. 110 million people were mobilised into armed forces. In Europe, the war killed more than twice as many people as had been killed in the wars of the previous 350 years. The Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all Allied military casualties, China 23 per cent, Yugoslavia 3 per cent, Britain and the USA 2 per cent each, and Poland and France 1 per cent each.
The Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazi forces was decisive. From June 1941 to May 1944, it fought virtually alone against the vast majority of Germany’s armed forces; it never faced fewer than 180 German divisions, three quarters of the German army. British Empire forces faced from two to eight German divisions. Even at the height of the US and British forces’ efforts, they engaged just a third of the total Axis forces. In the whole war, the Red Army destroyed 607 Axis divisions, the US and British forces destroyed 176.
As Churchill said, “Russia tore the guts out of the German Army.” Roosevelt noted, “the Russian armies are killing more Axis personnel and destroying more Axis material than all the other twenty-five United Nations put together.”53 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery pointed out, “Russia had to bear, almost unaided, the full onslaught of Germany on land; we British would never forget what Russia went through.”54 US Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall stated in his final report on the war, “It is certain that the refusal of the British and Russian peoples to accept what appeared to be inevitable defeat was the great factor in the salvage of our civilization.”55
US General Douglas MacArthur said, “The hopes of civilization rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Russian army. During my lifetime I have participated in a number of wars and have witnessed others, as well as studying in great detail the campaigns of outstanding leaders of the past. In none have I observed such effective resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a smashing counter-attack which is driving the enemy back to his own land. The scale and grandeur of the effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.”56
Sumner Welles asserted, “The achievements represented by the victorious struggle of the Soviet Union have never been excelled by any other nation. They would not have been possible save through the efforts of a united and selflessly patriotic people.”57 Roosevelt cabled Stalin on 22 February 1943, “On behalf of the people of the United States, I want to express to the Red Army, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, our profound admiration for its magnificent achievements unsurpassed in all history.”58
Many present-day historians agreed. Dunn summed up, “Few nations could have survived such an onslaught. In World War I, Russia had succumbed under much less pressure. Somehow Stalin had convinced the many Soviet nationalities to fight for their country, which the czar had failed to do in 1917.”59 Andrew Roberts wrote, “it was the Eastern Front that annihilated the Nazi dream of Lebensraum (‘living space’) for the ‘master race’. Four in every five German soldiers killed in the Second World War died on the Eastern Front, an inconvenient fact for any historian who wishes to make too much of the Western Allies’ contribution to the victory.”60 Hastings concluded, “It was impossible to dispute, however, that Stalin’s people were overwhelmingly responsible for destroying Hitler’s armies.”61 Fritz agreed, “the Red Army, at the cost of perhaps 12 million dead (or approximately thirty times the number of the Anglo-Americans) broke the back of the Wehrmacht.”62 Willmott judged, “In terms of scale the Nazi-Soviet conflict was unprecedented, and it was infinitely more important in deciding the outcome of the Second World War than any other theatre, perhaps even more important than all others combined.”63 As Geoffrey Roberts noted, the Soviet view was that “the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition had won the war toge
ther, but the greatest contribution had come from the Red Army, which had turned the tide of war in the Allies’ favour a full year before the D-Day landings in France. It was the Soviet Union that had largely liberated Europe from German occupation and thereby saved European civilization.”64 Schuman confirmed, “Defeat would’ve meant not only the enslavement of the Soviet peoples but the ultimate conquest of Britain and China and the reduction of America to helplessness before the unchallenged masters of Eurasia and Africa.”65
Every sector of Soviet society contributed to the victory. The Soviet economy produced what was needed to win the war. As Mawdsley wrote, “the victory was in the end a victory for the Stalinist economic campaigns of the 1930s.”66 Mark Harrison observed, “Stalin proposed that World War II had proved ‘an all-round test’ of the Soviet Union’s ‘material and spiritual forces’. In so far as this idea had a scientific kernel, the Soviet economy passed the test; in fact, judged by historical and comparative criteria, the Soviet success in World War II was very striking.”67 Overy judged, “the Soviet war effort still remains an incomparable achievement, world-historical in a very real sense.”68 It was above all the victory of the Soviet people. The peoples of the world owe them a huge debt.
The victory of socialism in the Soviet Union was the decisive factor in the Allies’ victory. The American people’s contribution was enormously significant. The heroic struggle of the British people, civilians and armed forces alike, should be singled out, for making an impact out of all proportion to their numbers. The whole nation mobilised for war, and planned all their work to defeat Nazism. Soviet planning provided many models for Britain’s war effort. Churchill admitted that Britain’s central planning of production in both world wars ‘constitute the greatest argument for State Socialism that has ever been produced’.69
As Bellamy observed, “the socialist victory in the 1945 general election owed something to the upsurge of pro-Russian, and therefore, at that time, pro-communist – certainly socialist – feeling among the British people during the war. After all, the British people had faced the Germans alone for a year in 1940-41, and the Russians had held them and knocked them back, pretty well alone, apart from the limited support the western Allies could send, in 1941-2.”70 All this was achieved without the City of London, which virtually closed in the world wars.
Schemes for a new world war
Even before the war had finished, some wanted a new world war, against the Soviet Union. The Polish ‘prime-minister-in exile’ said in 1943, “the only thing that will settle Polish relations with the Soviet Union will be a war between the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain, with the latter countries on Poland’s side.”71 Some in the British state wanted war too. Orme Sargent of the Foreign Office called for a ‘showdown’ with the Russians. His friend Robert Bruce Lockhart told him that “the Anglo-American armies in the west could go through the Russian armies quite easily because of their enormous preponderance in armour and air power.” The British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee urged ‘getting tough with the Russians’.
Churchill telegraphed Field Marshal Montgomery ordering him ‘to be careful in collecting German arms, to stack them so that they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued’. Churchill asked the Joint Planning Staff to draw up a plan, known as Operation UNTHINKABLE, for an attack on the Soviet Union.72 Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service [SIS] had carried out operations in the Soviet Union during the war, gathering information for use in such an attack.73
So the Chiefs of Staff drew up a plan for a surprise Anglo-American attack, a two-pronged attack to seize eastern Germany and Poland through Stettin and Poznan, to start on 1 July using 45 British and American divisions plus, among others, 12 Wehrmacht divisions.74 The Chiefs warned, “if we are to embark on war with Russia, we must be prepared to be committed to a total war, which would be both long and costly.”
After the war’s end, the British government allowed Admiral Karl Doenitz’s Nazi government to continue to issue orders to the Wehrmacht. He offered to join the attack on the Soviet Union. Britain kept 700,000 German troops in military formations in its zone until December. On 20 May 1945, Stalin said, “While we have disarmed all the officers and men of the German Army and placed them in prisoner-of-war camps, the British are keeping the German troops in a state of combat readiness and establishing cooperation with them. To this day the headquarters of the German forces headed by their commanding officers are enjoying complete freedom and on Montgomery’s instructions the arms and material of the German troops are being collected and put in order.” Stalin continued, “the British want to retain the German troops so that they can be used later. But this is an outright violation of the agreement between the heads of government of the immediate disbandment of all German forces.”75
As late as 1 January 1947, according to the British Command’s report, there were still 81,358 German soldiers in military units, commanded by German officers. The British and US governments were also maintaining tens of thousands of troops under the command of Polish fascist General Anders in Italy and Colonel Rogozhin’s Russian Whiteguard infantry corps, who had fought in Hitler’s service in Austria.
Churchill knew that the USA now had atomic bombs and told Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, “if Stalin failed to listen to the West’s wishes, the US could target Moscow, Stalingrad and Kiev.” Alanbrooke was appalled and privately described the Prime Minister as a warmonger. But on 29 June, Stalin ordered the Red Army to redeploy and fortify its new positions, thwarting the planned attack. And by 5 July, Churchill was out of a job.
Before dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, the new US President Harry Truman conferred with Britain’s new Prime Minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee, who did not demur. Stalin was not consulted: he denounced the bombing, saying, “It is a wanton act” and “the atomic bomb is to atomic energy what the electric chair is to electricity.” Some claimed that the atomic bombs ended the war, but, as the official British history of the war stated, “The Russian declaration of war was the decisive factor in bringing Japan to accept the Potsdam declaration, for it brought home to all members of the Supreme Council the realisation that the last hope of a negotiated peace had gone and that there was no alternative but to accept the Allied terms sooner or later.”76
Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa agreed that the Soviet declaration of war, not the atomic bombs, induced Japan to surrender. He showed that the Soviet entry into the war shocked the Japanese government even more than the atomic bombs because it ended all hope of a settlement short of surrender.77 Geoffrey Jukes affirmed that Hasegawa proved that the Soviet declaration of war forced Japan to surrender.78
In sum, capitalism started both world wars, and communists ended both. The Soviet Union ended World War One, because its example weakened both the imperialist alliances waging that war. It ended World War Two by defeating the Nazi and Japanese aggressors. It also prevented World War Three.
Chapter 6
The Soviet Union from 1945 to 1986
Still under threat
After the war, the Soviet Union made an extraordinary recovery from unparalleled devastation. In August 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower had flown from Berlin to Moscow and ‘did not see a single house standing intact from the Russian-Polish border to Moscow. Not one’.1 Journalist Edward Crankshaw observed, “To travel, painfully slowly, by train from Moscow to the new frontier at Brest-Litovsk in the days after the war was a nightmare experience. For hundreds of miles, there was not a standing or a living object to be seen. Every town was flat, every city. There were no barns. There was no machinery. There were no stations, no water towers. There was not a solitary telegraph pole left standing in all that vast landscape.”2
The Nazis destroyed 1,700 Soviet cities and towns, 32,000 factories, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, 43,000 pu
blic libraries, 61 major electric power plants, 70,000 villages, 100,000 collective farms, 40,000 miles of railway track and six million homes. 25 million people were homeless. More than a third of the Soviet Union’s wealth had been destroyed. The Extraordinary State Commission estimated Soviet losses at $128 billion. Much of this loss was permanent, because of the lost growth opportunities of the war years.
At the Yalta conference, the US government agreed the figure of $10 billion reparations from Germany as ‘a basis for discussion’. President Roosevelt had promised to aid the Soviet Union’s reconstruction. But the US and British governments broke both the agreement and the promise. In 1945, the US government abruptly ended Lend-Lease. In 1946, under US pressure, UN agencies ended their aid to the Soviet Union, even though the country was suffering its worst drought since 1880, which affected half of its farmland: the grain harvest was less than half 1940’s.
Germany had twice used Poland as a highway to invade Russia, costing Russia about 40 million people. (Yet the US diplomat George Kennan claimed in 1946 that the Soviet belief that Western states would launch ‘wars of intervention’ was ‘baseless and disproven’, ‘simply not true’.3 Didn’t the war of intervention and the Nazi invasion count as evidence?) So it was no surprise that the Soviet Union wanted to close that highway. This was in Poland’s interests too, given how much the Polish people had also suffered in those wars, and it was also in the general interest. The Soviet Union’s alliances with the countries of Eastern Europe enabled them for the first time to develop in peace. On 11 May 1953, Churchill said, “Russia has a right to feel assured as far as human arrangements can reach that the terrible events of the Hitler invasion will never be repeated and that Poland will remain a friendly power and a buffer.”