Russia's War Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  RUSSIA'S WAR

  ‘The great merit of this volume is its judicious, dispassionate quality: Overy goes where the evidence leads him, he does not fit it into an a priori straitjacket, as so many Western historians do… Overy is extremely good on diplomacy and high politics… a book full of plums and accurate research’ Frank McLynn, Herald

  ‘A pacy, broad-brush overview of the Eastern Front… It is only appropriate that one finishes Russia's War pathetically grateful that one has never had to face anything remotely like the Eastern Front and astonished that anyone emerged from it’ Dominick Donald, Guardian

  ‘Russia's War gives a masterly account of the connection between the politics of the Kremlin and the rudimentary conditions of life in the USSR… a vivid, coherent account. No one in Russia has tried to do this… Overy has risen to the challenge’ Robert Service, Independent

  ‘Overy is able to provide the sort of close-up view of the conflict which has never been available before’ Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman

  ‘An excellent synthesis of the political and military situation as well as illuminating the social and economic aspects of the conflict. He also clarifies many of the emotional and moral questions raised by the Nazi–Soviet struggle… an invaluable introduction to the history of the war in the Soviet Union and will be much used by students’ Catherine Andreyev, The Times Higher Education Supplement

  ‘A very useful single-volume history… Overy is admirably balanced in his treatment of Stalin and his regime’ Max Hastings, Evening Standard

  ‘Overy conveys the vast scale of the events brilliantly, using both anecdotes and the staggering statistics: 11 million military losses, 18 million medical casualties, and estimates of civilian losses that range from 16 to 24 million… Until we incorporate the Soviet history of war into our own histories, our knowledge of the 20th century will remain incomplete’ Anne Applebaum, Sunday Telegraph

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Richard Overy is Professor of Modern History at King's College, London. His books include The Penguin Atlas of the Third Reich, The Battle, Interrogations and the widely praised Why the Allies Won. He recently edited the fifth edition of The Times History of the World. He is currently writing a comparison of the Hitler and Stalin dictatorships.

  RICHARD OVERY

  Russia's War

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the USA by TV Books Inc. 1997

  First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1998

  Published in Penguin Books 1999

  14

  Copyright © IBP Films Distribution Ltd, 1997

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192512-7

  Contents

  List of illustrations

  List of Maps and Tables

  Preface

  Introduction

  1 The Darkness Descends: 1917–1937

  2 The Hour Before Midnight: 1937–1941

  3 The Goths Ride East: Barbarossa, 1941

  4 Between Life and Death: Leningrad and Moscow

  5 The Fight from Within: Collaboration, Terror and Resistance

  6 The Cauldron Boils: Stalingrad, 1942–43

  7 The Citadel: Kursk, 1943

  8 False Dawn: 1943–44

  9 Fall of the Swastika: 1945

  10 The Cult of Personality: Stalin and the Legacy of War

  Epilogue: Russia's War: Myth and Reality

  References

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1 Josef Stalin at Lenin's funeral, 1924

  2 Victims of the Ukrainian famine, 1933

  3 Ukrainian nationalist prisoners in a labour camp

  4 Molotov in Berlin, 1941

  5 The morning after: news of the outbreak of war, Moscow, 22 June 1941

  6 Ukrainians greet German cavalrymen, summer 1941

  7 Leningrad: the Ice Road, 1942

  8 Leningrad: civil defence in action

  9 Leningrad: Shostakovich in rehearsal, 1941

  10 Soviet ski troops in action

  11 Ukrainians support ‘Hitler the Liberator’

  12 Babi Yar

  13 The children of the ghetto

  14 Death to the collaborators!

  15 The ruins of Stalingrad

  16 The defence of Stalingrad: women at war

  17 A moment's respite, 1943

  18 The end of one man's war

  19 The fog of war

  20 The blessing of war

  21 Lend-Lease supplies: the vital artery

  22 A soldier falls on the Ukrainian front

  23 German prisoners, Moscow 1944

  24 Disinfecting the Moscow streets after German prisoners had passed through

  25 Massacre in Lublin

  26 ‘Accursed Germany!’

  27 ‘What will it mean for me?’

  28 Marshal Zhukov: the battle for Berlin, 1945

  29 The end of Hitler?

  30 Rebuilding the homes

  31 Rebuilding the city: women at work

  32 ‘Big Brother’ is always watching

  List of Maps and Tables

  MAPS

  1 Operation Barbarossa, JuneSeptember 1941

  2 The Siege of Leningrad

  3 The Moscow Counter-offensive, December 1941–April 1942

  4 Main Partisan Areas in the German-Occupied Soviet Union, Summer 1943

  5 Operation Blue: The German Southern Offensive, June–November 1942

  6 Operation Uranus, November–December 1942

  7 Battle of Kursk, July 1943

  8 From Kursk to Kiev, August–December 1943

  9 Operation Bagration, June–August 1944

  10 The Vistula-Oder Operation, January–May 1945

  11 The Assault on Berlin

  TABLES

  1 Soviet and German wartime production 1941–45

  2 American Lend-Lease supplies to the USSR 1941–45

  3 Soviet Losses in World War Two

  Preface

  The story of the Soviet war effort between 1941 and 1945 is one of the most remarkable, not just in the modern age, but in any age. For a long time it was a story shrouded in secrecy, little known or understood in the West. Over the past decade or so that situation has changed. Few would now contest the view that the Soviet war effort was the most important factor, though not the only one, in the defeat of Germany. The focus of the debate has now shifted to how the Soviet Union achieved that victory, and on this issue there is still no scholarly
consensus. There is now a wealth of evidence not available twenty years ago to help to answer that question. Much of Russia's War draws on that evidence, which is now widely available in the West. It shows both sides of the war: the war against Germany and the war against Soviet society; the military conflict and the terror.

  This book was produced to accompany a television series that has succeeded triumphantly in bringing the Soviet war effort to life. ‘Russia's War’, a series of ten fifty-two minute documentaries produced and financed by IBP Films in London in association with Victory Series in Russia, was inspired by the changing history of the war. The documentaries show all sides of the war, from military defeat and incompetence to military triumph, from simple Soviet patriotism to the terror of the regime against its own people. The films were made using materials made available from hitherto-closed film sources in the former Soviet Union. They are intercut with testimony from survivors of the war. The interviews were conducted in Russia in 1995, with the exception of a number which were made much earlier for Soviet films.

  The inspiration behind the project lay with the executive producer, Judith De Paul, who succeeded in winning the co-operation of five senior Russian film directors and a co-executive producer in Moscow, Alexander Surikov. The films were produced in collaboration over a two-year period in 1994 and 1995. The book was written in 1997 and incorporates further material that became available from Russia in the two preceding years. I am particularly grateful for all the unstinting encouragement that Judith De Paul has given me. I would also like to thank the supervising editor of ‘Russia's War’, Nick Barnard, who has been unfailingly helpful over the six months it took to produce the book. Vladimir Bouilov has translated at a moment's notice anything in Russian that I needed, for which I am more than thankful. My publisher, Peter B. Kaufman, has been patient and long-suffering enough. The usual pre-emptive confession of responsibility for errors and misinterpretations is more than necessary here as I trespass into less familiar territory. A final thanks, as ever, to my family.

  Richard Overy

  London, May 1997

  Introduction

  This book is the direct offspring of a remarkable series of television documentaries that were made in London during 1995 with the co-operation of a number of distinguished Russian film-makers. The film records used in making the series were made available from the KGB film collection and the Presidential Archive, and they are unique in their range and historical quality. The very fact that ‘Russia's War’, the name given to the television series, could be made outside Russia at all reflects the greater openness between Russia and the West following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The objective of the films is to give Western audiences for the first time as full a visual account of the Soviet war effort as the film sources will allow.

  The book follows closely the structure and substance of the films and takes its title from the series. Like the films, the purpose of the book is to bring to a non-Russian readership a history of the Soviet war effort based on the extensive revelations made during the decade after Mikhail Gorbachev declared the age of glasnost. It does not pretend to offer startling new discoveries. It is a summary of the present state of the debate in what has become an extraordinarily unstable historical landscape. Every month brings new discoveries and new publications. The history of the former Soviet Union is in ferment. In twenty years' time it may be possible at last to write something approaching a definitive history. Current writing has a provisional air to it, and this book is no exception. Nonetheless, the history of the Soviet war effort between 1941 and 1945 is well worth writing. The spate of new material has not failed to make the subject more exhilarating and more vivid. None of the human drama has been lost. In many ways the revelations have fortified it.

  The established story of the Soviet war effort, of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as it came to be called, was allowed to solidify in the decade after 1945 and remained remarkably intact down to the 1980s. In official circles the tale of heroic socialist struggle against the fascist demon remained intact down to 1991. Soviet writing on the war was carefully censored, and the central archives of the conflict remained closed or were restricted to only the most privileged of officially favoured historians. To give but one example: in the 1960s Marshal Zhukov, Stalin's Deputy Commander in Chief for much of the war, wrote two volumes of memoirs. They were heavily doctored. The first edition took three years to prepare and was shown, briefly, to Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, for final approval. Zhukov was told to include the fiction that Brezhnev took part in an incident on the southern front. When the first edition was published Zhukov complained, ‘That book, it is not mine.’ Even the smallest changes were insisted upon. Where Zhukov wanted to call the failure in the summer of 1941 a ‘rout’, he was made to write ‘retreat’ instead.1

  Zhukov's memoirs finally appeared in a tenth, and full, version in 1990. Other memoirs have been released for the first time or have been freed from the censor's red pencil. The full version of Khrushchev's taped interviews, many of which were suppressed in the 1960s when his sanitized memoir was published, has now become available.2 Much of the testimony on which it was necessary to rely even ten years ago has turned out to be misleading and distorted, even mendacious. When Zhukov challenged Marshal Yeremenko face-to-face about why he had lied in his memoirs about the role he and Zhukov had played at Stalingrad, Yeremenko replied that Khrushchev had asked him to.3 It may never be possible to penetrate entirely this veil of half-truths and distortions, but there is a genuine will in modern Russia to set the record straight. We now know much more than we did, and we can be more confident that what we do know is closer to historical reality.

  There remain serious gaps, however. Wartime Foreign Ministry archives and the records of the main political and administrative organs remain closed, as do the records of the KGB/NKVD security apparatus and military or technical records regarded as still too sensitive to reveal. Even where greater candour has prevailed – the publication of official casualty statistics, for example – there remain frustrating gaps. The figures published in 1993 by General G. F. Krivosheyev give the fullest account yet available, but they omit three operations that were clear failures. The official figures themselves must be viewed critically, given the difficulty of knowing in the chaos of 1941 and 1942 exactly who had been killed, wounded or even conscripted.4 If the words ‘alleged’ or ‘suggested’ or ‘approximately’ appear with disarming regularity in what follows, this is testament to how much work still needs to be done to provide even an agreed-upon narrative for the war years.

  Stalin remains almost as elusive as ever. The crude popular image of Stalin, the triumphant and omnicompetent warlord, disappeared in 1956 when de-Stalinization began in earnest in the Soviet Union. But the absence of a full private archive, or even one based upon Stalin's extensive public activities, forces historians to speculate on a great many aspects of his wartime leadership. Much more testimony is available now from Stalin's political associates or from his military leaders than ever before, but the inner thoughts, hard to decipher even for those who knew him, remain shrouded. Even the circumstances of his death, discussed at greater length in Chapter 10, cannot be agreed upon among those who claim to have been witnesses.

  This is not the only problem when discussing Stalin. The revelations of the wartime terror and the early military failures make Stalin an easy target in the search for culprits. Yet the concentration of fire on the dictator not only makes it difficult to understand how a man so apparently corrupt and brutalized could have led his country to victory at all, but also fails to take account of the wider system in which Stalin was lodged. The war effort was not the product of one man, nor could it be made to bend entirely to his will. The role of the Party in sustaining popular mobilization, of the apparatus of terror under the grotesque Beria or of the Red Army itself, the largest military force ever assembled, is as much a part of the history of the war as Stalin's personal dictatorship. The mood o
f glasnost history has been one of recrimination and anger. When the dust has settled there will be time to assess Stalin and the system anew, both strengths and weaknesses. Stalin is an easy figure to hate but more difficult to understand, as history must.

  Writing the story of the Soviet war has been a humbling experience. The debt that is owed to the many historians of the conflict, Russian and non-Russian, will quickly be evident. Soviet studies now provide a wealth of imaginative and exciting scholarship, much of it carried out at the very coalface of the subject, where the material is being dug out and shipped to the sunlight for the first time. Two veritable Stakhanovites deserve particular mention. Professor John Erickson and Colonel David Glantz have done more than any other Western scholars to communicate to the non-Russian world the fruits of Soviet and post-Soviet research. The account of the military struggle that follows would have been impossible without the careful reconstruction of the battle history carried out by both historians over the last twenty years.

  The story of the Soviet war is humbling in another sense, too. The conflict was fought on such a gigantic scale and with such an intensity of feeling that conventional historical discourse seems ill-equipped to convey either very satisfactorily. The human cost, now estimated by some Soviet scholars to be as high as 43–47 million people, can only poorly be conveyed by statistics.5 It is surely no accident that poetry meant so much to ordinary Russians and that through poetry, not a mere recital of numbers, the awful reality of war could be expressed: ‘Tired with the last fatigue/ Seized by the death-before-death,/ His great hands limply spread,/ The soldier lies.’6 Even Marshal Zhukov, remembered by those who served him as a coarse and brutal commander, read poetry in the midst of the carnage. A Tolstoy, a Nietzsche, perhaps might convey the essence of the suffering of the vast, tragic canvas on which that suffering was daubed. Little, perhaps nothing, of the experience of most Western historians will have prepared them to account for what they find in the history of Russia's war.