Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  We come to Stalin himself. What role did his leadership play in the Soviet war effort? That Stalin was a despotic butcher is beyond dispute; he also bears direct responsibility for the catastrophic losses in the first months of the war. Deceived by Hitler, guilty of issuing the inept orders that disorganized the Red Army’s defences, Stalin also sought to divert blame from himself by executing scapegoats. When the western front crumbled under the German onslaught, its commander—General D. G. Pavlov—was arrested in July and shot for treason. (His real crime, it now appears, was to have courageously protested against the military purges in 1938.) Firing-squads claimed the lives of twenty-nine other Soviet generals in 1941 and 1942; Stalin personally signed many of the death warrants.

  Nevertheless, one cannot disregard Stalin’s positive contributions. First, for many Soviet citizens, he became a symbol of national unity, an embodiment of the spirit of resistance. Certain of his speeches and writings, such as his first wartime address (3 July 1941) and the famous ‘not one step back’ order-of-theday (29 July 1942) are said to have rallied the people and given invaluable boosts to their morale. Second, so great was the terror that he inspired at the highest echelons of party and state that a rebuke from him, let alone a threat, could elicit impressive performances from factory managers and generals alike. Finally, although Stalin committed military blunders throughout the war, he improved as a strategist—not least because he became aware of his own professional limitations. Unlike Hitler, he encouraged strategic debate and did not hesitate to solicit or accept advice. Zhukov praised his accomplishments in the strategic arena, as did several allied generals.

  The Stalinist system then did help the USSR win the war. But without the contribution of the Western allies, victory would not have been achieved as quickly as it was. Without the contribution of the peoples of the Soviet Union, victory would not have been achieved at all.

  The Second World War was a war of coalitions, and coalitional warfare typically leads to friction among the alliance partners. Russia’s relationship with her British and American allies was no exception. Thus Stalin held that Roosevelt and Churchill—as leaders of capitalist, imperialist states—were by definition hostile to Soviet interests. The Soviet tyrant worried lest Washington and London collude against him, particularly over the question of the second front. Moscow had been appealing for the opening of a second front to draw German forces away from Russia since late 1941; indeed, Stalin courted his allies with such gestures as abolition of the Communist International in the hope of speeding up their invasion of the continent. Owing to the Pacific war and operations in Africa and Italy, however, D-Day did not come until June 1944. Stalin regarded this as a ‘treacherous delay’, since he had been led to believe that the attack would occur a year earlier. Indeed, his frustration apparently induced him to extend peace feelers to the Germans in 1943.

  From the standpoint of London and Washington, Stalin’s evasiveness and penchant for secrecy were irritants. The spectre of a separate Soviet-German peace was, however, truly petrifying: the Western allies were well aware that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the struggle with Hitler’s legions. Until the Normandy landing, Germany never deployed less than 90 per cent of her best combat troops against the Soviet Union. In the end, 80 per cent of all German casualties in the war would be inflicted on the eastern front. Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill also believed that Soviet participation would be essential for the rapid defeat of Japan. Both of these considerations militated in favour of concessions to Stalin in the interest of keeping the coalition together.

  One such concession was the delivery of crucial supplies to Russia with no strings attached. The British and Americans shipped these stocks to Pacific and White Sea ports, or conveyed them overland through occupied Iran. Ten per cent of all Soviet tanks and 12 per cent of all Soviet combat aircraft came from Stalin’s Western allies. American Lend-Lease also furnished 427,000 motor vehicles, one million miles of telephone wire, a quarter of a million field telephones, and fifteen million pairs of boots. The allies also provided aircraft steel, petroleum, zinc, copper, aluminium, and chemicals. Especially important, given the Soviet food crisis, was the transfer of comestibles. The United States alone gave enough concentrated food to the Soviet Union to have supplied twelve million soldiers with half a pound for every day of the war. The total value of British aid came to £420 million; that of the United States to almost $11 billion.

  Although the Soviet Union could have won the war without allied supplies, their delivery none the less shortened the war. Allied trucks, jeeps, aircraft fuel, and communications equipment made possible the enormous mobile offensives of 1943–5. Western assistance also allowed the Soviet Union to keep millions of people in uniform (eight million by one calculation) whom it otherwise would have had to withdraw from the front to prevent a collapse of the economy.

  In the strictly military arena, the Western allies rendered valuable services to the Soviet Union even before the break-out from Normandy pinned down 105 German divisions. Operations in the Middle East, Sicily, and Italy drained Axis resources. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany was so massive that, in the judgement of some scholars, it constituted a second front all by itself. At the very least, since the German anti-tank gun doubled as an antiaircraft gun, thousands of these weapons were kept trained on British and American aeroplanes, not Soviet tanks. Finally, after November 1943 Hitler’s strategy in Europe was to de-emphasize the Eastern Front and to build up strength to repel the allied invasion that he anticipated in France or Norway. This decision also alleviated the pressure on the USSR.

  None the less the greatest credit for victory in the war surely belongs to the Soviet population itself. It was Soviet men and women who sowed the fields, operated the lathes, stormed enemy positions, and survived siege and occupation. They often did so with signal heroism under conditions of unspeakable deprivation.

  The war exacted appalling sacrifices from Soviet citizens. The USSR lost more soldiers than did any other belligerent. Nor was the civilian population spared. One million people succumbed to famine or disease during the siege of Leningrad alone—more than all combat deaths sustained by the British, Commonwealth, and American armed forces put together. In the urban areas of the country factory labourers put in twelve-to sixteen-hour working days and achieved record outputs. And they did so despite malnutrition: by 1942 official rations provided a caloric consumption nearly a quarter less than the prewar norm. This led to an explosion in black marketeering and grotesquely inflated prices; in 1945 a kilo of butter in Rostov-on-the-Don cost 1,000 roubles. Rural Russia felt hunger and want too. The government’s official rationing system deliberately excluded peasants, and left them to their own provisions. Consumption of bread (the chief staple in the peasant diet) declined to 40 per cent of pre-war levels. Manufactured goods, including such necessities as clothing and medicine, were virtually unavailable.

  What sustained the people through these trials? What kept them working and fighting? Revulsion from the barbarism of the Nazis was certainly one motivation. On a deeper level, however, there was a sense that the war was a national struggle. For millions of people the war was for the survival of Russia, not necessarily for the defence of communism. No doubt for that reason the regime itself chose to sell the war to the population by using symbols and images from pre-revolutionary Russian history, not socialist bromides. Stalin relaxed ideological controls: the poems, novels, and journalism of the early war years were remarkably free from cant. He also initially put some restraints on the activities of the secret police, and in 1943 permitted the Orthodox Church to re-establish the Patriarchate. Such measures of liberalization encouraged the belief that victory would bring still more substantive reforms. Agents in occupied territories fed these expectations by apparently spreading the rumour that Stalin intended to de-collectivize agriculture as soon as Hitler had been beaten. Nevertheless, millions of ardent communists marched off to war; millions more joined the Commu
nist Party during the war. But most of those who waged war did so not because they wanted to preserve the Soviet Union as it was, but in the hope that it would soon evolve into something better. This is yet another sense in which the war was won despite the Soviet regime.

  The Costs of the War

  By the time the war was over 8.6 million Soviet troops and at least 17 million civilians had been killed. Twenty-five million survivors were homeless; zemlianki, or earthen huts, provided the only shelter for hundreds of thousands. The war had destroyed 1,700 towns, 70,000 villages, 30,000 factories, and 65,000 kilometres of railway. It has been estimated that one-third of the national wealth had been obliterated. The gross yield of all foodstuffs produced in the country in 1945 was only 60 per cent of what it had been in 1940. Still worse, severe drought would visit the harvest of 1946, bringing famine and typhus in its train.

  Nevertheless, the Soviet Union had gained power and prestige from the war. Battered at it was, the USSR was the strongest land power left standing on the continent of Europe. In the post-war era, the Soviet Union had to rebuild its economy, while coping with unique opportunities (and dangers) abroad.

  Soviet Domestic Policies after the War

  First on the agenda was economic reconstruction. Rapid demobilization was essential: the armed forces had to release soldiers, sailors, and airmen for work in the factories and farms. Over 11 million men strong in late 1945, the Red (now Soviet) Army numbered just under three million three years later.

  Labour was but one of the factors of production. Another was capital. The state raised money by manipulating its currency, slashing interest rates, and reducing the face value of war bonds. It also showed considerable interest in foreign economic transfers through the continuation of American Lend-Lease, reparations, and exploitation of any territories occupied by the Red Army. In August 1945, however, the Truman administration suspended unconditional Lend-Lease assistance to Russia. Russian expectations for a considerable share of reparations from the western zones of occupied Germany were similarly frustrated (despite the promises that the Soviets felt had been made during the Potsdam Conference in June 1945). In Soviet-held territories matters were different: Soviet authorities openly looted eastern Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary for machinery and equipment (even entire industrial plants were dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union). Indeed, self-collected Soviet reparations are estimated to have provided 3 to 4 per cent of total Soviet budgetary receipts. With regard to Eastern Europe (and eventually Manchuria), the Soviet Union established theoretically ‘bilateral joint-stock companies’, which provided raw materials, machines, and finished goods at rock-bottom prices.

  Because, however, such methods were insufficient to defray the total bill for the recovery, the government resorted to a traditional expedient—squeezing rural society to finance economic expansion. In September 1946 Stalin signed a decree on the ‘liquidation of the abuses of the statute of the agricultural artel and collective farm’. This and supplemental laws reduced the size of private plots and levelled confiscatory taxes on the income that they were supposed to generate. Cash payments for daily labour on the collective farms dwindled; in 1952 collective farmers in Tula earned just one kopeck a day. At the same time, the regime burdened the rural population with enormous state delivery quotas for agricultural goods. Compulsory deliveries amounted to at least half the collective farm output of grain, meat, and milk from 1945 to 1948; the prices that the state deigned to pay were actually less than production costs. These extortionate policies led in the short term to the famine of 1946 and to the impoverishment and immiseration of the villages. The result was a new exodus from country to town that, by Stalin’s death in 1953, had involved nine million people.

  The goal was of course to rebuild the country’s industrial base. The Fourth Five-Year Plan (adopted in March 1946) set the target of matching and exceeding pre-war levels of production by the end of 1950. In fact, the Soviet Union fulfilled this plan in most significant sectors; by 1950 gross industrial output exceeded that of 1940 by 40 per cent.

  If reconstruction of the economy was a matter of the highest importance, the imposition of stricter domestic political controls was also a priority. Indeed, the screws began to tighten in the last years of the war. One major sign of this was the mass deportation of over a million indigenous people of the Crimea, Caucasus, and Caspian steppe to Kazakhstan and Siberia, ostensibly for collaboration with the Nazis or ‘objective characteristics’ that predisposed them to do so.

  The repression might at first seem to make no sense: after all, the war probably expanded the regime’s base of popular support. At the very least, the Soviet government could legitimize its claim on power by pointing to its military victory over Nazism. Certainly the Communist Party had never been healthier. The war years also witnessed an explosion in party recruitment—from 3.8 million members in 1941 to 5.7 million by May 1945. By the war’s end, 69 per cent of party members had joined since 1942.

  But these statistics had to trouble Stalin: the party was his instrument of personal rule. How trustworthy could it be when diluted by hundreds of thousands of new communists admitted under the lax rules and perfunctory screening of wartime? Clearly it would be necessary to purge the party of its slackers and opportunists. Then there was the Soviet military, whose profile at the end of the war was a bit too high for Stalin’s taste. To guard against potential ‘Bonapartism’, Stalin reorganized the High Command, personally assumed the portfolio of Minister of Defence, and conducted a ‘purge of the victors’, i.e. the arrest or demotion of many prominent officers. Insecurity about the reliability of party and army was therefore one reason behind the political and ideological crack-down.

  Another was the civil war on the westernmost borders of the Soviet state. In Ukraine, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army were conducting full-blown military operations to prevent the reintegration of Ukraine into the USSR. The scale of the problem was immense: at the end of 1945 the Red Army had deployed over half a million troops against the Ukrainian partisans. This armed resistance in Ukraine persisted until well into the 1950s.

  Anti-Soviet guerrillas were also active in Estonia, Latvia, and particularly Lithuania. Annexed by Moscow in 1940 and occupied by Germany during the war, the Baltic republics wanted independence, not Soviet communism. Stalin pacified the Baltics by a tradition hallowed in Muscovite history—the forcible exchange of populations. As a result, by 1949 a quarter of the inhabitants of the Baltic states had been ‘resettled’ to the RSFSR, replaced by ethnic Russians.

  Finally, reconstruction on the scale and at the tempo envisioned by Stalin would have been impossible without the reinstitution of the strict pre-war discipline and police controls. The population had to be mobilized, prepared for additional suffering, and shielded from corrupting Western influence. The imperative for stern internal political control produced a massive propaganda campaign, emphasizing sacrifice and vigilance. It was also expressed in the adoption of internal policies of extraordinary and stunning brutality.

  In February 1946 Stalin gave his much quoted ‘electoral speech’. This address, which reiterated the old formula that the internal contradictions of capitalism inevitably gave rise to war, baffled those Western politicians who had predicted an era of cordiality with Russia. For Soviet citizens, however, the speech was an unmistakable signal that good relations with the Western allies would not continue in the post-war era, that they were not to expect cultural or political liberalization.

  One telling indicator of the retrenchment was the labour-camp population, which swelled by millions after the war. The regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and so-called ‘enemy elements’ from the Eastern European and Baltic countries. Axis POWs comprised another major source of prisoners, of whom many remained in captivity until the mid-1950s. German POWs played a conspicuous role in the construction of ‘Stalinist teeth’—the ghastly skyscrapers t
hat blighted the Moscow skyline after the war, including the new building of Moscow State University.

  The fate of Soviet POWs and slave labourers held by the Nazis was particularly cruel. Approximately a million Soviet prisoners survived the final collapse of Hitler’s Reich. Millions of other Soviet citizens, many of them women, were sent to Germany as Ostarbeiter. Many of these people were recaptured by the Red Army; the Western allies deported hundreds of thousands of others back to the Soviet Union. There execution or lengthy terms in the camps typically awaited them.

  Why did they meet such savage treatment? The repatriated did indeed include some collaborators; between five hundred thousand and one million Soviet citizens, including some POWs, had actually served in the Wehrmacht, or in auxiliary or support formations in 1944 and 1945. But Stalin’s definition of guilt was capacious enough to include those whose only crime had been to be taken alive: his Order No. 270 early in the war branded any soldiers who surrendered as traitors. Even before the war was over, the Soviet government sent liberated Russian POWs to special camps for ‘verification’—which usually ended in consignment to the GULAG. As for the Ostarbeiter, Stalin evidently suspected spies to be among them. Even involuntary residence abroad might have left favourable impressions of the West, dangerous if disseminated in Soviet society.

  In the cultural sphere, the Central Committee’s decision of August 1946 on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad marked the beginning of the Zhdanovshchina—a xenophobic campaign to purify Soviet intellectual life of Western, bourgeois influences. The campaign derived its name from its organizer, A. A. Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s most prominent lieutenants. Making examples of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, Zhdanov insisted that formalism, political neutrality, and aestheticism had no place in Soviet literature. The literary establishment scampered to conform with the new party line. Scores of dreary novels celebrated the party’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, taught hostility to the West, and promoted the materialist and professional values that ostensibly appealed to the mid-level managers, engineers, and technicians who were the essential personnel in rebuilding the country. The purpose of fiction and belles-lettres was education and indoctrination, the provision of what Zhdanov woodenly called ‘genuine ideological armament’.