Russia's War Read online

  The key to understanding that war lies with an understanding of Russia herself. It was not, of course, just ‘Russia's war’. The Russian empire, and after it the Soviet Union, embraced a complex ethnic geography. In 1940 Russians made up only 58 per cent of the population. There were at least twenty other major nationalities, most prominent among them the Ukrainians and Belorussians, on whose territories in the western Soviet Union most of the war was fought out. The nationalities, though dominated by the Russian heartland, provided a rich and diverse set of cultures, steeped in an ancient history. These differences were also shaped by topography. The Soviet Union spanned the whole of northern and central Asia, from almost permanently frozen tundra wasteland in the north to the luxuriant farmlands of Transcaucasia in the south. The Soviet Union inherited a state that was as Asian as it was European.

  It is essential to grasp this diversity to understand what it is that made Russia, and the Soviet Union, different from the Western world. That difference has often been ignored. It is still underestimated by many in the West, who see the region as a backward version of modern industrial society, just as it was played down by Communists and fellow-travellers of the 1930s and 1940s, who thought that Stalin had created a form of the modern Western state that was both more socially efficient and more just. That difference was greater still in the 1940s. ‘Few Western Europeans,’ wrote the German SS General Max Simon, ‘have any idea of the actual habits and mode of life of the Russians…’7 The German attackers were already predisposed to assume that Soviet society was primitive, and, by the standards of the developed economies of the West, much of it was, at least in the countryside. But this was to misunderstand Russian society. It was not so much primitive as alien. The Soviet Union was not like Western Europe, and there is no reason why it should have been.

  The war exposed many of the enduring features of Russian and Soviet culture. Soldiers were brutal because much of their experience of life was brutal and harsh. Their resilience and stubbornness, the toughness of both men and women, were the product of a bitter climate and extreme conditions of work. The coarser side of Russian life was evident in the routine of the labour camps or the discipline of the regiment or the factory. Yet ordinary people could also display a traditional sentimentality, founded in a powerful sense of both history and place. Some idea of how universal was that respect for the past, the feeling of rootedness, of belonging, can be gleaned from one among many stories of the war years told by the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. In the retreat of 1941 before the German onslaught, the curator of the Turgenev Museum in the city of Orel packed up the contents and placed them in a railcar. The centrepiece was a worn sofa upon which the famous writer had thought great thoughts. At every station the curator was faced with an angry crowd of refugees struggling to find space on the train to take them eastward. Each time he explained that the jumble belonged to the great Turgenev, and each time the mob relented.8

  This is a story that can be understood only in the wider context of a popular attachment to art that cuts entirely across boundaries of class or education. It fits ill with any idea of primitiveness. Locked away in the horrors of the Gulag camps, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could still recall a man who sang to him snatches of Schubert.9 The almost universal love of poetry has already been remarked. People were sentimental about the place they came from, about their way of life, even when conditions were grim. Soviet society was still, by the war, shot through with traditional modes of association, through tribe or clan or commune. The modernization imposed by the Communist Party in the 1930s had already begun to break down those ancient patterns of belonging, but not entirely so. The feeling can scarcely be described as nationalism, for there were too many nationalities for that to be coherent. Patriotism conveys it better, but not entirely, for the feeling which brought forth a remarkable endurance from the Soviet people is almost passive, fatalistic. One of the most famous verses to come out of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, from a poem about the comic hero Vasya Tyorkin, exactly captures the mixture of dull stoicism and historical awareness:

  Tiorkin snores. There's no more to it.

  He just takes things as they come.

  ‘I belong, and well I know it.

  Russia needs me. Here I am.’10

  The history of the war cannot be understood if these elements in Soviet life are ignored. Material explanations of Soviet victory are never quite convincing. It is difficult to write the history of the war without recognizing that some idea of a Russian ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ mattered too much to ordinary people to be written off as mere sentimentality, however mundane or banal or brutalizing was the real day-to-day experience of war.

  Other striking aspects of the Soviet war effort are the continuities with an older past, which Stalinist modernization did not eliminate. Much of what is taken to be a product of the Stalinist system was part of Russian tradition, modified, enlarged or transposed, but still recognizable. Some of those continuities are more trivial. The famous Potemkin villages of Catherine the Great's Russia, which were painted and cleaned up for important visitors to demonstrate the cheerful progressiveness of the autocracy, have more-than-faint echoes in the model farms and factories decked out to show Western well-wishers the smiling face of Communism. When the American politician Henry A. Wallace visited the gold-mining centre at Magadan in the Soviet far east in 1944, he saw nothing of the brutal forced-labour regime that kept the mines going. In Irkutsk Wallace gave a speech laden with a terrible irony: ‘Men born in wide, free spaces will not brook injustice and tyranny. They will not live even temporarily in slavery.’11

  Other continuities are more striking and more significant. The regime of forced prison labour, deportations and exile was not a Stalinist invention, not even a Soviet one. For 300 years imperial Russia exploited slave labour. The state used criminals, rebels, even tax-dodgers, to build roads and railways, to man mines in the harsh climate of the northern empire, to construct cities and fortifications. During the nineteenth century thousands were exiled to the sparsely populated reaches of Siberia, where they were left with nothing and died in their thousands. In the early twentieth century political dissidents began to join the criminals in large numbers. Between 1905 and 1914 the numbers sentenced to hard labour (katorga) rose fivefold as the political authority of the Tsarist regime began to crumble.12 The world of the secret policeman and the zek, the hapless slave labourer, long predated the coming of revolution in 1917. Stalin did to his people what Russia's rulers had always done.

  This does not make it any easier to forgive the terror and the atrocities of the 1930s and the 1940s, but it does help to make more comprehensible what otherwise seems inexplicable. Perhaps Western opinion has been more shocked by the revelations of Stalinist oppression because it contrasted so sharply with the romantic image of a young proletarian state struggling to impose social justice, a view that seduced western Communists before the war. Stalin did fight a war against his own people, but not simply because he was a Bolshevik. It would not be an exaggeration to say that every Russian ruler has been at war with the people, partly because the Russian empire was a multinational empire built on conquest, partly because governing Russian society always required some element of terror to hold the vast, peasant-based, anarchic community together.

  The situation was no different in war. The final publication in 1988, after almost half a century of official silence, of Stalin's notorious wartime Orders 270 and 227 (which authorized savage reprisals against those who fell into captivity, and their families, and against those who retreated rather than fight) evoked outrage as a manifestation of Stalinist tyranny at its most irrational and vicious. Yet military life had always been harsh in Russia. Discipline was arbitrary and bloody. The Tsarist war effort between 1914 and 1917 ushered in ‘penal battalions’, punishment units for deserters and criminals which were sent on the worst missions. The army was kept at the front in the First World War with what came to be called ‘blocking units’ in the Second, whose job was
to prevent desertion and banditry. During the civil war that followed the revolution in 1917, military discipline was so difficult to maintain for both sides that methods were adopted which easily stand comparison with Stalin's. A harsh regime produced a brutalized soldiery. The atrocities of the civil war did not cause the atrocities of the later conflict, but many of the Red Army officers who rose to command positions after 1941 had been junior officers in the civil war and had witnessed or perpetrated horrors, against the enemy, against peasant rebels, even against their own men.

  Most of this story lies outside the scope of Russia's War. It is recalled here only in order to put Stalin, Stalinism and the ‘Great Patriotic War’ into the context of Russia's past. The revolutionaries of 1917 inherited that complex legacy, and the state they constructed on the ruins of Tsarism owed more to that inheritance than they would have wished. Modernization continued during the 1920s and 1930s; indeed, without it the war with Germany would have gone very differently. Russia's war between 1941 and 1945 was a rich amalgam of the modern and the ancient. Stalin chose to fight the war not as a simple expression of socialist patriotism. The propaganda war was fought using heroes of the past viewed through red-tinted spectacles. Aleksandr Nevsky, the thirteenth-century Muscovite prince who defeated invasion by the Teutonic Knights, was made at the end of Sergei Eisenstein's film to say words which were reproduced throughout the war: ‘He who comes to us with the sword, shall perish by the sword. On that the Russian land has stood and will stand.’13

  1

  The Darkness Descends:

  1919–1937

  He is the new Genghis Khan. He will slaughter us all.

  Nikolai Bukharin, 1928

  It is October in Russia. Three Army Groups are forcing their way against weak defences towards Petrograd and Moscow. They treat the local population with brutality, burning villages, slaughtering the inhabitants. They capture one city after another: Kiev, Odessa, Voronezh, Orel. By mid-October one Army Group is within striking distance of Moscow, approaching Tula; another is encircling Petrograd, preparing to seize the city. They are harassed by partisan bands. In Moscow the Government panics. Plans are laid to move eastward to a safer haven in the Ural mountains. Local workers are forced into labour battalions to dig trenches and barricades to keep the enemy at bay. In Tula local Communists force the city's population at the point of a gun to prepare primitive fortifications, while their families are held hostage. Improvised forces are gathered together for a last-ditch defence. A successful counter-offensive saves Moscow. The fighting is murderous, high casualties on both sides, little quarter given. The Government stays on in Moscow; the Red Army of workers and peasants, bullied by Communist commissars and security police, finally triumphs over the forces of reaction.

  This is a thoroughly familiar story, but it is not 1941. The year is 1919, and the threat comes not from the three German Army Groups that powered across the Soviet Union after the attack launched on 22 June 1941, but from the armies of the counter-revolutionaries in the long and sanguinary civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. The story is retold here because the civil war was central not only for the establishment of the Soviet state, but in shaping the attitude to war of Soviet leaders and the future commanders of the Red Army that fought Hitler. Fighting among the troops that drove back the threat to Moscow in 1919 was the young Georgi Zhukov, who became the most celebrated soldier of the Second World War. He was a cavalryman in the 1st Red Cavalry Corps, which supplied not only Zhukov, but Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the Commissar of Defence for fifteen years under Stalin; Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, his successor in 1940; and the colourful but incompetent cavalryman, Semyon Budyenny, who became the commander of Soviet cavalry in 1943.1

  Stalin himself was a representative of the Central Committee, the leading organ of the Bolshevik Party and of the fledgling revolutionary state, in the threatened city of Petrograd. Survivors remembered a soft-spoken but arrogant man who was used to getting his own way and who treated his colleagues and subordinates with unusual harshness. He was adept at inventing conspiracies and hunting out treachery. He unearthed a plot in the Western Front command at Petrograd, and the plotters were removed. He helped to organize the defence of the city with threats and force. He had no scruples about punishing deserters or slackers or the hated bourgeoisie, the enemy of the new proletarian order, demonized by Bolshevik propaganda. For his work in Petrograd he shared with Leon Trotsky, Commissar of Defence, the honour of receiving the first award of the Order of the Red Banner. Stalin won a reputation for being both blunt and uncompromising. He characteristically ordered vigorous counter-attacks, whatever the cost in lives, and urged the Central Committee to sack hesitant or more scrupulous commanders. It would be rash to argue that Stalin's behaviour during the civil war anticipated exactly the role he would play as Supreme Commander during the German-Soviet war between 1941 and 1945, but the resemblances are remarkable.

  The civil war played a major part in defining the character of the new Communist state, for the success of the revolution of October 1917 had to be won through three years of cruel and desperate conflict. The civil war defined the enemies that the new society faced and continued to face in Communist demonology thereafter: the club of imperialist capitalist powers, which sent troops and supplies to help the counter-revolutionary forces; the counter-revolutionaries themselves, reactionary ‘bourgeois’ agents who were the mortal class enemies of the worker–peasant alliance; nationalist movements in the many non-Russian areas of the new state, which threatened to undermine the new proletarian commonwealth by promoting a narrow chauvinism. Stalin fought against them all with vigour in 1919 and continued to fight them with relentless terror until his death in 1953.

  He was not alone in seeing the civil war not as a simple military conflict but as a clash of ideologies and social forces. The civil war placed Soviet Communism on a war footing. The new party became an agent of mobilization, in the towns, where workers were forced to join militia or dig defences, and in the villages, where food was seized with a savage disregard for peasant survival and farmers were drafted, often against their will, into the tough regime of the young Red Army. The language of the Party was spiced with military vocabulary; Party activists wore simple military-style uniforms (Stalin retained the habit throughout his life); thousands of new recruits into the Party in 1919 and 1920 came from the ranks of the Red Army. Military service and service to the Communist cause merged as one. The campaigns were undertaken in many cases by former officers of the Tsarist army, but control over strategy and operational decisions lay with local Military Committees or Soviets run by civilian revolutionaries, acting on the orders of the Central Committee. The army came to be viewed not as a professional force with its own institutions and commanders but as an arm of the broad social movement which was building Communism. The ideal of many revolutionaries was to do away with an army altogether and in its place to erect a popular militia of worker-peasant soldiers, the kind of revolutionary levée that Lenin, the architect of Bolshevik success in 1917, had described in State and Revolution, written the same year.

  The effect of the Communist military struggle, which was finally won in 1920, was to create what one historian has described as a ‘militarized socialism’.2 Most of the Soviet élite of the 1920s and 1930s had either fought in or directed the civil war; those who had done neither found themselves at a disadvantage. The veteran mentality of the Party pervaded all areas of its activity. In the 1930s and during the war Stalin promoted to high office numerous men who had worked beside him in the civil war struggles, and also remembered those who had crossed him. That veteran loyalty kept in office many Stalinists who were manifestly inept. What they all shared was a profound belief that war and struggle was part of the order of things, a central characteristic of that stage of historical development in which the crumbling imperialist-capitalist order would give way to movements of social emancipation. They expected further foreign wars because it was in the
nature of imperialism, as Lenin had also argued. They anticipated ceaseless struggles against the domestic enemies of revolution, whether peasant-capitalists or foreign spies. The result was a society that was kept in an almost perennial state of mobilization.

  The cult of ‘struggle’ was not confined to the Soviet Union. It was central to the world-view of Adolf Hitler, who became during the war the greatest of the many enemies that Soviet Communism confronted. The widely shared belief in the necessity of conflict drew its substance from a generation of fin-de-siècle writing whose pessimistic forebodings of cataclysmic war and cultural decline were apparently borne out by the Great War of 1914–1918. The conflict provoked revolutionary upheaval in Russia and laid the foundations for German radical nationalism. The Communist belief that war was the locomotive of history, shunting old societies aside from the line to Utopia, was triumphantly demonstrated in 1917. Hitler's view that war was the proper school of national reawakening and sociobiological reconstruction was predicated on the German defeat. The two versions of struggle were not pre-ordained to meet on the battlefield in 1941, but given Hitler's view, expressed to his inner circle in the autumn of 1936, that since the eighteenth century the world had been rushing headlong towards a final historical reckoning with the tradition of the French Revolution and its bastard offspring, Bolshevism, such an outcome was always likely.3

  The ending of the civil war in 1920 left the Soviet Union a name not formally adopted until 1923 a nominal federation of national republics controlled in practice from the new Russian capital at Moscow. The cost of the civil war was the impoverishment of the country, the decline of industry, a famine that claimed millions of victims in the formerly grain-rich areas of the Ukraine and the loss of a fringe of territories which had belonged to the Tsarist empire – Finland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia (ceded to Romania) and half of Poland. As a result of these losses the new Soviet state was less European and more Asian than its predecessor. Its exclusion from Eastern Europe had been sealed in 1920 during a brief war with Poland, a state recently re-created by the post-war settlement. Polish leaders eager to take advantage of what they perceived to be the exhaustion of the Red Army invaded the Ukraine and occupied Kiev that May. Hatred of the Poles united Soviet society. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the most successful of the younger civil war generals, handsome, forthright and personally courageous, led five armies against the main Polish forces and drove them back into Poland accompanied by some of the most savage fighting of the civil war. Poorly supplied and with tired troops, Tukhachevsky was finally halted in front of Warsaw. A treaty signed at Riga in March 1921 gave Poland a slice of the western Ukraine and pushed the Soviet frontier a hundred miles further to the east.