Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  The relative de-emphasis on defence also had implications for frontier fortifications. Whereas the Soviet Union possessed a considerable network of these in 1939, expansion by 1941 (as a result of the annexation of the Baltics, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia) had pushed the frontier 150 to 300 kilometres to the west. Work on new lines commenced in 1940, but procrastination and disorganization slowed progress. In February and March 1941 the Soviet command decided to cannibalize existing fortifications in order to build the new ones. The result was that neither set was operational when the war came: only a quarter of the new fortifications had been built on the new borders, while the pillboxes of the 1939 Stalin line were useless, semi-demolished and stripped of their weapons and ammunition.

  Finally, the greatest blame for the ruinous start to the war must rest with Stalin himself. After the signing of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in 1939, Stalin had constructed a foreign policy based on co-operation and collusion with the Nazis, evidently hoping that they would exhaust themselves in a lengthy war of attrition against the French and British. This delusion vanished with the fall of France in 1940. Although Stalin thereafter came to believe that an armed confrontation with Germany was unavoidable, he none the less supposed that Moscow—not Berlin—would determine its timing. After all, it was unlikely that Hitler would turn east while Britain remained unsubdued. In the spring of 1941, although Stalin permitted the mobilization of some of the reserves, he insisted that war with Germany would not come until the following May at the earliest. He therefore saw Hitler’s massive military build-up of 1941 as the prelude to negotiations, not war. From Stalin’s perspective, the only real danger was that war might break out accidentally; it was to guard against this contingency that Stalin was so determined to avoid ‘provoking’ Hitler. That is why Stalin disregarded G. K. Zhukov’s advice (May 1941) to launch an immediate preventive attack to disrupt the concentration of the German army, as well as that of S. K. Timoshenko, whose frantic request to transfer forces from the interior to the border was not approved until June. In a very real sense, Stalin’s miscalculations foreordained the military surprise and devastating consequence of the invasion.

  Once the fact of German invasion was beyond dispute, the authoritarianism and centralization of Stalin’s regime showed only torpidity and inertia in the face of military emergency. For example, Moscow’s order in the evening of 22 June for the west front to destroy the German concentration at Suvalki was useless: the advancing enemy was no longer there. When Stalin personally began to direct the war effort, his command that the Red Army cede no territory and his refusal to countenance withdrawal squandered tons of equipment and material and consigned hundreds of thousands of troops to death or captivity. Fifty-six per cent of all military casualties suffered by the Soviet Union during the Second World War occurred during the first eighteen of its forty-seven months. The Red Army paid dearly for Stalin’s errors in dealing with Hitler.

  Phases of the War

  By early autumn, despite a succession of military disasters, morale in the Red Army had stiffened. Party officials reported to Stalin that ‘flights of military units [from the battlefield] have become rarer’, and wounded soldiers were observed bearing their arms with them to the field hospitals, rather than tossing them away, as formerly. As a result of this, as well as better organization and better generalship, Germany’s string of triumphs in Russia came to an abrupt end with the battle of Moscow. The failure of the second German assault on the city in November enabled Zhukov to counter-attack in early December, forcing the Germans to fall back between 100 and 250 kilometres.

  At this point Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack, not along one or two axes of advance, but along the entire two thousand kilometres of front from the Black Sea to the Baltic. This overambitious offensive had largely spent itself by April 1942. The Soviet General Staff thereupon recommended a strategic defence in order to reinforce the army and build up stocks of equipment. Stalin agreed at first, but then authorized an attack in May designed to liberate Kharkov. It disastrously misfired. The Russians retired behind the northern Donets and the Germans occupied the Crimean peninsula.

  Hitler had a new plan: a south-east advance into the Don, Kuban, and Volga regions as a first step towards the conquest of oil-rich Transcaucasia. Operation Blue began in the spring of 1942. By mid-July 1942 it was evident that the Germans were driving for Stalingrad on the lower reaches of the Volga. In late August, General Friedrich von Paulus’s forces had crossed the Don and attacked Stalingrad. After two weeks of shelling, bombing, and bloody street fighting, the Germans were in possession of most of the city. The Soviets, however, had no intention of capitulating; on 19 November they counter-attacked (‘Operation Uranus’), penetrating and encircling Paulus’s army from both north and south. Now Paulus himself was besieged.

  Time was not on the side of the Germans at Stalingrad. Hitler flatly forbade any attempt at a break-out, even though the Soviets succeeded in stalling F. E. Manstein’s relief columns. As the temperature fell, so too did reserves of food and ammunition; the Luftwaffe’s attempt to supply Paulus’s forces by air failed. Finally, at the end of January and in early February 1943, Paulus and the remnants of his sixth army surrendered. One hundred and fifty thousand of his men were casualties; another hundred thousand were prisoners of war. Although the battle of Stalingrad did not predetermine German defeat in the war, it made a total German victory extremely improbable.

  Emboldened by success at Stalingrad, the Red Army launched a series of offensives in the early months of 1943. These had three important results. First, the Soviets managed to cut a corridor through German lines to relieve beleaguered Leningrad. Second, by April they had effectively demolished Germany’s positions in the northern Caucasus. Finally by February the Red Army had defeated the German second army near Voronezh, forcing it to retreat two hundred miles, creating a bulge in the German lines known as the Kursk salient.

  Hitler saw this salient as a major opportunity: a decisive blow there might shatter Russia’s defences and allow him to regain the initiative. The German plan for ‘Operation Citadel’ entailed two simultaneous thrusts towards Kursk, one south from Orel, the second north from Kharkov. However, Hitler decided to stockpile still more military equipment and postponed Operation Citadel from the spring until the summer of 1943. This delay enabled Soviet intelligence to discover the time and place of the attack and also permitted a massive reinforcement and fortification of the battlefield.

  The German preliminary bombardment that began on 5 July was answered by an even more intense counter-bombardment, indicating just how ready the Soviets were. The battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in world history, with six thousand vehicles engaged on each side. It was also distinguished by an unprecedented scale of carnage and slaughter, even on the eastern front. The upshot was a Soviet victory; by the end of July, Germany had lost half a million soldiers and was forced to retreat another two hundred miles. This battle was a true turning-point in the Second World War, for henceforth the Germans would be largely on the defensive in the east.

  By January 1944 the Red Army had raised the siege of Leningrad and had crossed the old 1939 border. In May it had liberated Ukraine and was driving deep into Poland and Romania. The most significant event of the year, however, was ‘Operation Bagration’, the Russian attack on Army Group Centre, which held a salient in Lithuania and Belorussia that protruded into Soviet lines. At the end of June the Soviets struck into the salient with a series of co-ordinated thrusts, even one staged through the Pripet marshes. Offensive operations continued until the end of the summer, utterly destroying seventeen German divisions, and reducing the combat strength of another fifty divisions by half.

  By the end of 1944, Soviet armies had already overrun Romania and were swinging north towards Budapest. The central group of Soviet fronts were poised to clear Poland of the enemy, before invading Germany itself. The first step in this process was the Vilna–Oder operation in January and February
1945, where the Red Army used its superior numbers and firepower to smash into East Prussia. Indeed, certain units under Zhukov’s command had crossed the Oder and were but forty miles from Berlin. But because Zhukov’s forces were exhausted and had outrun their supply lines, the Soviet High Command decided to defer the battle for Berlin until the spring. In mid-April 1945, some 2.5 million Soviet troops squared off against 1 million Germans, many of them young boys, cripples, or old men. There was little doubt about the outcome. By 25 April Berlin was encircled; two days later Soviet troops had shot their way into the centre of the city; two days after that Adolf Hitler killed himself. The German government’s emissaries travelled to Zhukov’s headquarters and signed the act of unconditional surrender on 9 May 1945.

  With Germany now defeated, Stalin honoured his pledge to the British and American allies to enter the war against Japan. Over the next three months tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers entrained for the Far East. On 9 August (the very day that the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki) Stalin’s forces erupted into Manchuria and rapidly pulverized the Japanese Kwantung army. Within days Tokyo had decided to treat with its enemies. On 2 September 1945 Soviet representatives were present to witness the Japanese surrender on the deck of the American battleship Missouri.

  How the Soviets Won the War

  To understand how the Soviet Union managed to prevail in its war with Nazi Germany it is no less important to consider the reasons for German failure as the reasons for Soviet success. In key respects, the Germans undermined their own war effort.

  In the first place, German strategy for the invasion of the Soviet Union was based on entirely erroneous intelligence. For example, prior to the war the Germans had calculated that the Red Army had only 200 divisions; by early August 1941 they had identified 360. The German intelligence services also under-counted the Soviet tank park (by at least 50 per cent) and grossly underestimated the scale, and productivity of the Soviet war economy. Nazi racist ideology also contributed to this depreciation of the enemy. Regarding the Russian as an Untermensch, Hitler was supremely confident that the Germans could conquer the Soviet Union to the Urals in three months, for the entire rotten structure of the Soviet state would surely collapse ‘as soon as we kick the door in’. The battle of Moscow, however, soon demonstrated that the war was not going to be brief. And Hitler had given no thought to a protracted war in the east, specifically to its economic and logistical dimensions.

  Ideology also dictated German aims in Russia, and this had major implications for the conduct of the war. With one lightning summer campaign, Hitler aimed to reverse thousands of years of Eastern European history: to overthrow the Soviet government, eradicate communism, and annex Soviet territory as far east as the Urals. This newly acquired Lebensraum could then be used to support a population of some 100 million additional Germans or Germanized Scandinavians. In the course of this process, ‘racially undesirable populations’, especially Jews and Gypsies, were to be systematically exterminated. The fate of the Slavs, and the Russians in particular, was not merely slavery but tribalism: denied any future possibility of a state of their own, they were to be confined to squalid villages and maintained in filth and ignorance.

  But the Nazis’ genocidal policies in the occupation zone ultimately detracted from the prosecution of the war, diverting thousands of troops, as well as hundreds of locomotives and wagons, from military operations. The Nazis’ bestial treatment of the Slavs was also ultimately self-defeating, since it alienated them by the millions. Hence the German side failed to capitalize on the anti-communist sentiments of the peasants; not until the very end of the war (and even then with reluctance) did the Nazis authorize the raising of entire Russian military units to fight Stalin. Confiscations of food, fuel, tools, and clothing as well as rape, torture, and shootings undercut German efforts to extract economic benefits from occupied territories. After the harvest of 1942, for instance, the Germans permitted peasants to retain only enough grain for two-thirds of a pound of bread a day. These starvation rations depopulated the countryside and engendered flight or sullen non-co-operation among the survivors. The deportation of almost five million people for work in Germany further exacerbated the labour shortage in the occupied zone. Agricultural output fell by 50 per cent in the areas under Hitler’s control: although his armies in the east could be fed locally, very little in the way of a surplus remained for shipment back to the Reich.

  The Nazi leadership was slow to grasp that the economy of its eastern conquests had to be rebuilt and managed, not merely plundered. By the time it finally did, the expropriations and atrocities had hardened resistance to German rule and fuelled the growth of the partisan movement, which may have enrolled as many as 200,000 people by 1943.

  None the less the Germans were defeated not only by themselves but by their Soviet enemies. Paradoxically the USSR won the war both because of and despite the Stalinist system.

  Although the blunders of the Soviet leadership had enabled a surprise attack and a summer of catastrophic defeat, certain characteristics of the regime helped the country weather those initial shocks. Stalin himself observed in November that ‘any other country that had lost as much as we have would have collapsed’, and there was some truth in his remarks. The upheavals and turbulence of the 1930s had taught the mass of Soviet citizens a healthy respect for the power of the state and had inspired belief in its solidity and permanence. This psychic capital, combined with an immediate tightening of the monopoly on information (all radios in the country were confiscated at the end of June) enabled the regime to insulate the population from knowledge of the military débâcle and to combat rumour and panic.

  Second, the extreme centralization of the Soviet dictatorship, so cumbrous in the opening phase of the war, eventually proved to be an asset; this authoritarianism permitted the state to mobilize the people and the resources necessary to prosecute total war. Mobilization entailed conscripting millions as soldiers, and millions more as labourers. On the very first day of the war Moscow called up almost all classes of reservists born after 1905. At the same time, it issued a new labour law that compelled vast numbers of Soviet civilians, both men and women, to take up war-related work. Industrial absenteeism was soon declared a felony; railways, waterways, and even many factories were placed under martial law. The State Defence Committee (GKO), created in June 1941 to unify the direction of the war effort, accelerated the evacuation of industrial enterprises from the western borderlands to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. By November of that year the regime had dismantled and shipped 1,523 plants east; roughly 1,200 of them were up and operating by mid-1942.

  The management of the Soviet war economy was no easy task, especially in view of the army’s ravenous appetite for fresh manpower. The Soviet Union would eventually draft 16 per cent of its population into the armed forces during the war, thus permitting the Red Army at its height to maintain 11.2 million people under arms. Such unprecedented military conscription stripped the factories and farms of able-bodied men, thereby creating a labour shortage of staggering proportions. The release of prisoners from GULAG (the net outflow was 1.1 million people during the war) provided scant relief. Women, children, and the elderly had to substitute for the absent soldiers. By the end of the summer of 1941 women comprised 70 per cent of the industrial labour force in Moscow.

  Matters were still worse in the countryside, as agriculture was feminized, demechanized, and deprived of draft animals. The proportion of women in the rural labour force increased from 40 per cent on the eve of the war to 70 per cent in 1943 and 82 per cent in 1944. The Red Army also requisitioned machines and horses in vast numbers—some 400,000 by the end of 1942, and almost half the horses from the collective farms by the end of the war. Peasant women experimented with harnessing cows to till the fields; others pulled the ploughs themselves. All of this had dire implications for food production, as agricultural yields in the uninvaded zone plummeted in 1943 to less than 50 per cent of the pre-war level. And t
his paltry stock of food had to sustain a population swollen by twenty-five million refugees.

  Despite the severity of the labour and food problems, and despite clumsy inefficiencies in balancing the needs of the army and the needs of the economy, the Soviet Union was clearly winning the industrial war against Nazi Germany even as early as 1942. Although in that year Russia’s supply of steel and coal was only one-third that of Germany, it nevertheless manufactured twice the number of weapons. Simply put, the Soviets outproduced the Germans. All types of new armaments from aircraft and tanks down to automatic pistols were designed, machined, and delivered to the front. New industrial plants were built from scratch and operated twenty-four hours a day. Some of them were gigantic, such as the tank factory in Cheliabinsk, which boasted sixty-four separate assembly lines. Between 1943 and 1945 Soviet factories turned out over 73,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 82,000 aircraft, and 324,000 artillery pieces.

  The USSR thus acquired the wherewithal to fight, and the government deserves some credit for this achievement. Munitions do not, however, win wars all by themselves: skilful generalship is also necessary. Once the rank incompetence of figures such as S. M. Budennyi and K. E. Voroshilov had been amply demonstrated, Stalin’s regime was in fact successful in identifying and promoting dozens of talented commanders; G. K. Zhukov, I. S. Konev, K. K. Rokos-sovskii, N. F. Vatutin, A. M. Vasilevskii, and B. M. Shaposhnikov—to name but a few—were instrumental in planning campaigns and leading Soviet armies to victory. The Soviet High Command improved throughout the war and in its later phases Soviet generals were responsible for numerous advances in tactics and operational art. Soviet generals also became adept at ‘combined arms’ warfare—that is, the integrated and mutually supportive employment of artillery, armour, infantry, and air power. They evinced brilliance in the use of reconnaissance, camouflage, and deception. And they perfected the mobile force structure that was the hallmark of Soviet offensives from 1943–5.