Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  Such letters—and there are many in recently opened archives—should not be construed as prima facie evidence of popular support for the terror. But they do suggest that the machinations in the Kremlin were not the whole story. In Belyi Raion of the Smolensk district, the defining political issues were not ‘Trotskyite and fascist wrecking’, but the crop failure of 1936, shortfalls in procurement targets, admission of former kulaks into collective farms, and other local issues. But at a certain point in 1937 local élites responsible for economic failures or bossism could find themselves so labelled.

  As to the number of people arrested and shot by the NKVD, research by Russian and Western scholars in recently opened archives has produced estimates that are considerably lower than those previously posited. According to Viktor Zemskov, slightly less than one million people were confined in NKVD run camps on 1 January 1937, a number that rose to 1.3 million by 1939; another 315,000 people were in ‘corrective labour colonies’ in 1940. These figures are a good deal lower than earlier estimates (for example, Robert Conquest’s number of seven million in the camps by 1938), but they do not include people incarcerated in prisons, special resettlements, or other places of detention. It also remains unclear how many were ‘politicals’, convicted of engaging in ‘propaganda or agitation’ against the Soviet state, a crime punishable by five to eight years in a camp; an archival document indicates that the GULAG population sentenced for ‘counter-revolutionary offences’ was 12.6 per cent in 1936 and 33.1 per cent in 1940. As for executions by order of military tribunals, ‘troikas’, and other special bodies, official figures show 1,118 executions in 1936, 353,074 in 1937, 328,618 in 1938, and 2,552 in 1939. According to information released by the KGB in 1990, the total executed in 1937–8 represented 86.7 per cent of all death sentences carried out ‘for counter-revolutionary and state crimes’ between 1930 and 1953. Mass burial sites, recently uncovered at Kuropaty in Belarus and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, constitute one of the most horrifying relics of the Stalin era.

  Who were the victims? We have long known about the prominent party officials, military officers, and members of the scientific and cultural élites. The publications of Conquest and Roy Medvedev in the early 1970s added more names, notably from the non-Russian republics. More recently, thanks to greater archival access and innovative research, the sociology of victimization has become more precise. It now seems clear that the most vulnerable groups were the party élite, former oppositionists, high-ranking economic officials, and military officers. Contrary to earlier assumptions, Old Bolsheviks—those who joined the party before the October Revolution—and members of the intelligentsia were not disproportionately repressed.

  Several conclusions are in order here. First, vulnerability or risk must be correlated with proportionality: even if the majority of camp inmates were peasants and workers, those in élite positions were at greater risk if the data are compared to their numbers in the population at large. Second, the tragic fate of family members—vividly and movingly described in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Anna Larina (wife of Bukharin), and others—must be taken into account in any overall assessment of the purges. Notwithstanding Stalin’s earlier injunction (‘sins of the fathers should not be visited upon their sons’), said in reference to the offspring of dekulakized peasants, family members—sons, daughters, wives, and even more distant relatives—were frequently subjected to interrogation and incarceration in orphanages and camps. Third, no amount of statistical work is likely to explain why so many individuals were summarily executed in 1937–8 and why this ‘ultimate sentence’ was prescribed more sparingly after Lavrentii Beria became the NKVD’s commissar. Finally, to comprehend the repression of these years, use of a term like ‘the Terror’, with its implication of unitariness, tends to obfuscate the overlapping patterns and cross-currents of repression.

  The Enemy Without/The Enemy Within

  Corresponding to the Great Turn of the late 1920s, the Comintern directed communist parties to expel ‘Right opportunists’ from their ranks and abandon tactical alliances with Social Democrats, henceforth labelled ‘social fascists’. This ‘class war’ strategy, which persisted until the mid-1930s, disorganized working-class opposition to fascism and proved particularly disastrous in Germany. The call by the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) for total disarmament evoked nothing but scepticism in European capitals, but the Soviet Union did succeed in normalizing relations with neighbouring countries and establishing full diplomatic relations with the United States in 1933.

  The triumph of the Nazis in Germany and the consolidation of a Japanese puppet state (Manchukuo) on the Soviet Union’s eastern borders precipitated the Comintern strategy of Popular Fronts with all ‘progressive forces’ and an intensification of Soviet efforts to achieve collective security with the European democracies. These policies bore fruit in the form of mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia (in 1935) and the election of a Popular Front government in France (in 1936). But the great test of the European commitment to contain fascism—the chief aim of the popular fronts—was the Spanish Civil War. Despite Soviet assistance to the Republic—or perhaps because European statesmen feared a ‘red’ Spain more than one ruled by Franco—the Western powers failed the test. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich (September 1938) confirmed Soviet suspicions that neither Britain nor France were unduly concerned about Nazi expansion to the East.

  For the Soviet Union, the decade of the 1930s lasted until the Nazi invasion of 22 June 1941. The increasing likelihood of war in Europe precipitated a radical shift in foreign policy away from seeking collective security with the Western democracies and towards an accommodation with Hitler. Acting on secret provisions of the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, Soviet armed forces occupied eastern Poland, the three Baltic republics, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Finland resisted territorial concessions along its eastern border; in the ensuing ‘Winter War’ (1939–40) the Red Army triumphed, but with difficulty and only because of superior numbers.

  In the mean time, the regime moved to restore the authority, if not security of cadres in state and industrial management—badly shaken by the Great Purges and wary of denunciations from below. Laws stipulating a longer working day and draconian punishment for tardiness and absenteeism put teeth into demands for labour discipline. The Stakhanovite movement continued to celebrate high achievers among workers; but as the regime sought to close ranks with managerial and technical personnel, it now tended to attribute innovations to engineers. A steady diet of Soviet patriotism—psychological preparation for war—accompanied a massive build-up of the armed forces and defence industries.

  Ten years earlier, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin told a conference of economic officials that they could not afford to slacken the pace of industrialization because to do so ‘would mean falling behind. And those who all behind get beaten’. He thereupon recited all the beatings ‘backward’ Russia lad suffered—by ‘Mongol khans’, ‘Turkish beys’, Swedish feudal lords, the Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French capitalists, and ‘Japanese barons’. ‘All beat her—because of her backwardness … military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness’. But, he added, correlating gender with political transformation, ‘Mother Russia’ has since become the socialist fatherland. ‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’.

  Stalin’s forced-pace industrialization undoubtedly contributed mightily to he Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. The tempo of industrialization was literally killing and extremely wasteful, but by 1941 the USSR had closed he gap, militarily and industrially. The greatest spurt occurred during the ‘three good years’ of industrialization (1934–6). By 1937 steel output w
as nearly three times greater than in 1932, coal production had doubled, and electricity generation had risen by 250 per cent. Thereafter, the Great Purges and the channelling of investments into armaments—defence expenditure quadrupled between 1936 and 1940—caused growth rates in these and other branches of industry to subside. But on the eve of the war, Soviet industry was producing 230 tanks, 700 military aircraft, and more than 100,000 rifles every month. However, agriculture still lagged. A major crop failure in 1936—a yield even smaller than the official harvest for 1932—strained the state’s reserves and distribution network; it has even been argued that this crisis contributed to the political events of 1937. Because of increased military expenditure, investments in the collective and state farm system remained woefully minuscule.

  But ‘backwardness’ is qualitative, not merely quantitative. In cultural and political terms, the USSR’s backwardness was perpetuated, even intensified, not because party and state officials tried to do too little, but because they tried to do too much. Browbeating the nation into modernity and socialism—the two were deemed to be synonymous—Stalin and his lieutenants provoked much resistance, but also conjured up demons of their own Manichean imaginings. These they combated with cults, reliance on miracles, and a great deal of force. They thus conformed to what Moshe Lewin has called ‘the contamination effect’, whereby radical and rapid transformation in fact ensures the survival of fundamental continuities, especially in social behaviour and political culture. Hence, the methods employed in ‘building socialism’, derived from previous centuries and combined with twentieth-century technology, actually built something called Stalinism.

  12. The Great Fatherland War and Late Stalinism 1941–1953

  WILLIAM C. FULLER, JR

  Few events loom larger in Russian historical memory than the ‘Great Fatherland War’. Why was Stalin’s Soviet Union so ill-prepared for the conflict and how did it nevertheless manage to prevail? In the aftermath of victory, heedless of the threat of a cold or even thermonuclear war, the ageing tyrant rebuilt Stalinism at home and expanded its reach abroad.

  At four a.m. (Moscow time) on 22 June 1941, several thousand pieces of German ordnance simultaneously thundered into Soviet territory. Operation Barbarossa had begun, initiating four years of the most brutal and destructive war in history. From the very beginning the Soviet–German conflict was waged with a ferocity and savagery that was unparalleled in modern times. When Hitler announced his move against Russia to his highest officers (30 March 1941), he made it absolutely clear that he expected his troops to discard every principle of humanity, chivalry, or international law. This was, he said, to be a war ‘of extermination’.

  The 153 divisions of the invasion force formed three army groups—north, centre, and south. Army Group North was to punch through the Baltic republics in the direction of Leningrad. Army Group Centre was supposed to entrap and destroy Soviet units in the western expanses of the country. And, the third force—Army Group South—to drive south-east of the Pripet marshes and slice Ukraine off from the rest of the Soviet state.

  It was obviously impossible to mask the colossal military preparations for Barbarossa. Since February, Germany had been concentrating forces on the Soviet frontier, ‘explaining’ this as a defence against British air raids. In the months, weeks, and days prior to 22 June, the Soviet government received over eighty discrete warnings of German attack. None the less, the surprise was virtually total. Though aware of the massing of German forces but unwilling to accept the truth, at 1 a.m. Stalin issued orders to Soviet military commanders not to shoot even if the Germans penetrated Soviet territory so as to avoid ‘dangerous provocations’.

  It was in part this ill-conceived order that enabled the Wehrmacht to achieve astonishing results on the very first day of the invasion. By 23 June, for example, elements of Army Group Centre had already advanced sixty miles. Directives from Moscow, commanding Soviet units to launch vigorous counterattacks, only played into German hands. Since most of the Soviet air force had been destroyed on the ground, and since Soviet formations were poorly organized and undermanned, the abortive counter-attacks tore even larger holes in Soviet defensive lines. By mid-July the Germans had conquered Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, and most of right-bank Ukraine. By August Army Group North had put Leningrad under siege, Centre had captured Smolensk, and South was investing Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea.

  At this point Hitler intervened, redirecting offensive operations to achieve the rapid capture of Leningrad and Ukraine. Although Kiev fell in mid-September, Leningrad continued to resist. Hitler changed his strategic emphasis once again, this time detaching over 1.8 million men for ‘Operation Typhoon’—an assault on Moscow. By mid-October the German army was within sixty miles of the capital.

  During these first few dreadful months of war, Germany and her allies—Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Finland—had overrun territory larger than France. They took two-thirds of the pre-war Soviet industries and lands that produced one-third of the country’s total agricultural output. By the end of 1941 the invaders had destroyed almost 84 per cent of the pre-war active Soviet armed forces: 1.5 million Soviet troops were dead while another 3 million were German POWs. Two million of the latter would perish by February.

  Soviet Weakness in 1941

  What accounted for Soviet weakness in June 1941? It clearly did not stem from a neglect of defences. By the late 1930s the Soviet Union was a thoroughly militarized state; Soviet defence outlays in 1941 amounted to over 43 per cent of the country’s GNP. Nor was there a gross imbalance in numbers or technology: in the immediate invasion zone roughly 2.8 million Soviet soldiers confronted about 3 million Germans, supported by twelve Finnish and six Romanian divisions. Similarly, whereas Germany and her allies attacked with 3,600 tanks and 2,500 planes, the Soviet armed forces disposed of over 20,000 tanks (of which 1,862 were modern T-34s or KVs) and at least 10,000 combat aircraft.

  What then were the reasons behind Russia’s dismal military performance that summer? One reason was clearly the quality and skill of its enemy. At the operational and tactical levels of war the German Wehrmacht was then the finest army in the world. Other reasons, however, inhered in a series of self-inflicted wounds—a bitter legacy of the 1930s.

  One of the gravest was the political purge of the Soviet military. It began in June 1937 with the announcement that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii and seven other prominent Soviet soldiers had been convicted of treason and executed. At the same time Stalin delivered a speech in which he called for the discharge of ‘all vacillating army men’ from their posts—a statement taken by the Soviet political police, the NKVD, as a direct order for comprehensive terror against the Soviet officer corps. The pretext here was the putative existence of a ‘Trotskyite conspiracy’ within the Red Army that was scheming to stage a coup and install a military dictator. Although accurate statistics are still lacking, it would appear that some 35,000–40,000 officers were removed from their commands (many of them shot or condemned to hard labour in the camps). In other words, at least 35 per cent of the officer corps was purged. The eliminated included three of the five Soviet marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven of the eighty-seven corps commanders, 110 of the 195 divisional commanders, and all but one fleet commander in the navy.

  The impact of this repression upon the Soviet armed forces cannot be exaggerated. It served to demoralize the Red Army, not only because of the arrests and executions, but also because Stalin upgraded the role of the political commissars and reinstituted dual command. However, those removed possessed invaluable technical knowledge. Tukhachevskii, for example, had been the prophet of mechanization and motorization; yet the purges eliminated not only Tukhachevskii but also some of his closest associates. Repression was a never-ending spiral: arrest was followed by interrogation and torture, which did not end until the accused confessed and named ‘accomplices’. To be minimally plausible, such accusations typically implicated immediate associa
tes; as a result, the purges were most destructive to the more technical branches, especially armour.

  The military purges must be distinguished from other forms of political terror in the 1930s: an investigation by the Party in the Khrushchev era established that the order for the military repression came from the top and used patently fabricated evidence. To this day, the rationale for the military purges remains a mystery. One theory holds that Stalin—misled by what had happened in the Spanish Civil War—had come to believe that Tukhachevskii’s expertise was dispensable. Another is that Stalin sought to check signs of excessive independence within the military, signs that had become visible as far back as the ill-fated Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. And some believe that Stalin feared Tukhachevskii’s popularity, seeing him as a potential rival. In any event, the purges slowed down when the ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 with Finland exposed the weaknesses of the Red Army. Certain officers (including such gifted leaders as K. K. Rokossovskii) were released from the camps and reinstated. None the less, on the very eve of the war, three-quarters of Soviet commanders had been in their posts for less than a year. And at the highest echelons, the Red Army was led by talentless sycophants and overrated cavalry men from the civil war era.

  Another weakness had to do with doctrine and planning. For a variety of reasons, the Soviet leadership believed that a war with Germany would most likely start after an extended period of crisis, which would give the Red Army time to mobilize. Thus a formal declaration of war would be followed by a brief defensive phase, in which Soviet forces would check and repel the invader near the frontier; the Red Army would then open an offensive into Central Europe. Thus, Soviet military and political élites presupposed a short war, largely fought on the enemy’s soil; they paid little attention to the possibility that the war might become protracted, that it might require the USSR to organize a defence in depth.