The Soviet Union lost1 between 20 and 25 million people in the Second World War – over 10 per cent of its population. By comparison, Germany had lost some 7 million, Great Britain 500,000 and the United States 300,000; the Soviet Union suffered as many casualties in the fighting at Stalingrad as did the US and the UK in the whole of the war. The huge death toll resulted in a damaging imbalance of women to men, and the birth rate of the post-war generation plummeted. The formerly occupied lands of the Soviet Union had been devastated. The scorched earth tactics of the retreating Red Army had rendered the soil infertile and wrecked agricultural production; when the Germans departed, they flooded mines, destroyed train tracks and blew up factories. Much of western Russia was a wasteland, where homeless millions wandered through the ruins of towns and villages.
Stalin demanded massive reparations. At the Potsdam conference in late July and early August 1945, the Allies divided Germany and Austria, along with their capital cities, into four zones of occupation to be administered by the US, UK, Soviet Union and France. Each of the victors would be awarded a share of German assets, and the Soviets promptly shipped 11,000 tons of industrial equipment to the east. Stalin was the only one of the Big Three leaders still in power at Potsdam. Harry Truman had replaced the recently deceased FDR, while Clement Attlee ousted Winston Churchill as prime minister in elections held during the conference.fn1 Stalin felt he had the measure of his neophyte partners, and his bargaining position was strong. The Red Army’s advances in the final months of the war had established it as the occupying power in the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The division of Europe existed de facto, and at Potsdam Stalin pressed the British and Americans to recognise it de jure. He advanced the age-old argument that Russia must protect its vulnerable borders. To do so, it needed to acquire influence over the territories surrounding it; so the countries of Central and Eastern Europe would become Moscow’s ‘buffer states’, a sphere of influence in which the Western Allies would have little or no say. For nations such as Poland, whose soldiers had fought alongside the Allies for nearly six years – and whose Government in Exile would now play no role in running their newly ‘liberated’ homeland – it was an unspeakable betrayal. For their part, the Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, would lose their statehood altogether and become mere republics in the ‘brotherhood of nations’ that was the Soviet Union.
Men and women of all the Soviet nationalities – not just Russians – had fought bravely to ensure the survival of the USSR; there was a widespread expectation that life would be better now and society freer. Stalin’s public rhetoric was encouraging. In a speech broadcast on 9 February 1946, he went out of his way to praise the manner in which the nationalities had pulled together during the war. ‘The Soviet Union has proved2 to be a model multinational state,’ he claimed, ‘a state organisation in which the national question and the problem of the collaboration of nations have found a better solution than in any other multinational state …’ But the warm words and self-congratulation masked a darker reality. Now that the external enemy had been defeated, Stalin’s attention turned to the (real or imagined) ‘enemy within’.
From the very start of the war, Moscow had embarked on a concerted campaign of ethnic engineering within the borders of the USSR, arresting, expelling and deporting members of national groups that Stalin viewed as potential Nazi collaborators. In August 1941, he had begun with the Volga Germans. These were the descendants of scholars, artists, engineers and military advisers invited to settle in Russia nearly 200 years earlier by the German-born empress Catherine the Great. Their families had been in Russia so long that they were Russian in all but name. In the years since 1930 they had won high praise for being at the forefront of the collectivisation effort. Yet Stalin convinced himself that these people would welcome Hitler’s troops and help destroy the Soviet Union. He ordered the Volga German Autonomous Republic liquidated and its inhabitants deported. Approximately 400,000 people3 were rounded up, evicted from their homes and taken in forced transports to the deserts of Kazakhstan in Central Asia or the Altai Region in Siberia. On arrival, the majority of them were drafted into the Trudarmiya, the Labour Army, effectively a network of work camps designed to boost the war effort.fn2
Stalin seemed to view the war as an excuse to move against any nationality he viewed with suspicion. The Nazi occupation of the Caucasus and the Crimea in 1942 had fuelled his paranoia about the native peoples of the area. In confidential memos, he declared that the local nationalities were not to be trusted and made clear that he expected stern measures to be taken against them.fn3 Just as he had done in the Baltic states in 1939, Stalin decided that the USSR’s southern borders needed to be populated by ‘more reliable’ (Russian or Ukrainian) elements. Beginning in early 1944, hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachai, Kalmyks and Crimean Tartars were deported from their ancestral homelands in the north Caucasus and Crimea, allegedly as punishment for collaborating with the Nazis. In fact, only a small minority had collaborated, not significantly more than in Ukraine or other parts of the Soviet Union.fn4 The vast majority of Caucasian males had been drafted into the Red Army just like everyone else and had fought bravely for its liberation. While they were fighting for the USSR, their families – women, children and the elderly – were piled into cattle trucks and taken off to be ‘resettled indefinitely’ in Siberia, the Urals, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The deportations were carried out at great speed, often with no warning. Those who were ill or who refused to go were shot, as one Chechen deportee recorded in his unpublished diary for February 1944:
The chairman of one of5 the village soviets, 80-year-old Tusha, assisted in the removal of his fellow villagers, his family being shipped off as well. Only his daughter-in-law remained with him, with her child at her breast. Addressing a Georgian officer, Tusha said in his broken Russian, ‘Me born here, me here die. Me no go anywhere!’ Tusha spread his arms out and stood before the gate of his home. The daughter-in-law understood. She cried out and, pressing her child to her breast, took hold of her father-in-law. She pulled him and pulled him towards our group, crying all the while, ‘Daddy, Daddy, come on! They’ll kill you.’ It all happened in an instant. The officer gave an order to a Russian soldier standing with his automatic at the ready. ‘Shoot! All three.’ The soldier blanched and trembled. He said: ‘The man I will shoot but not the woman and the child.’ A pistol flashed in the officer’s hand. Before the soldier had finished his last word he lay on the ground, shot through the head. Within the same instant, the officer had killed Tusha, his daughter-in-law and her child. They drove us in haste down the path to the roadway. There trucks were waiting for us. Those who lagged behind were shot. That is the way it was.
The journey eastwards6 took over a month and many died from starvation and disease. The dead were buried by the side of the road or railway line. Those who survived found little or no preparation had been made for them at their destination. They were confined in ‘special settlements’ in the most primitive conditions, and NKVD figures suggest 20 per cent of them were dead within a year. The Kremlin was punishing those ethnic groups, often Muslims, who had resisted integration into the Soviet way of life. The deportees were banned from using their native languages, and access to education was severely restricted.
Throughout the Soviet Union the question of nationality became one of vital importance. The atmosphere of xenophobia during the war and the rumours of sinister foreign forces at work within Soviet society meant everyone was suspect. Official propaganda denounced individual ethnic groups – Crimean Tartars, Chechens, Germans and, increasingly, Jews – urging Soviet citizens to be on their guard against them. The old rhetoric of class enemies had been replaced by that of ethnic enemies. In Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman highlights how nationality replaced social origin as the most sensitive entry on people’s internal passports:
Point five: ‘Nationality’7… This had been so simple and insignificant before the war; but now it was acquiring a particular resonance. Pressing heavily on his pen, Viktor wrote boldly and distinctly, ‘Jew’. He wasn’t to know what price hundreds of thousands of people would soon pay for answering Kalmyk, Balkar, Chechen, Crimean Tartar or Jew. He wasn’t to know what dark passions would gather year by year around this point. He couldn’t foresee what fear, anger, despair and blood would spill over from the neighbouring sixth point, ‘Social Origin’. He couldn’t foresee how in a few years’ time many people would answer this fifth point with a sense of doom – the same sense of doom with which the children of Cossack officers, priests, landlords and factory owners had once answered the sixth point.
The official media whipped up public anger against ‘foreign’ influences that were said to undermine the people’s sense of their homeland, denouncing the offending ethnic groups as ‘cosmopolitans’. It was a term that came increasingly to be identified with the Jews. There had been a resurgence in anti-Semitism during the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, but it was temporarily submerged in the chaos of war and the sense of common cause against the foe. After 1941, Stalin had given the Kremlin’s blessing to Jewish organisations that rallied opposition to the Nazis. The most influential of them was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), led by the popular actor Solomon Mikhoels. He was the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre and famous throughout the USSR for his role in the 1936 musical Circus, which celebrated the brotherhood of the Soviet nationalities. Mikhoels and other JAC members travelled to the West to drum up support for the Soviet Union amongst the Jewish Diaspora, raising millions for the war effort. But at home there were ominous developments. In 1943, Jews were8 systematically removed from the army’s political apparatus and baseless rumours were spread about Jewish cowardice and desertion. In 1948, the creation of the state of Israel, seen as an ally of the now reviled West, sharpened old prejudices. Those Jews who had survived the war in occupied territories were accused of collaborating with the Nazis. How else could they have survived? Approximately half of the9 Soviet Union’s pre-war Jewish population had been murdered in the Holocaust, more than 1 million people, yet the JAC’s attempts to highlight the tragedy did not please the Kremlin. Like Grossman and Ehrenburg’s ‘Black Book’, the JAC’s focus on Nazi mistreatment of Jews was considered incompatible with the official line that the whole of the Soviet Union suffered equally. Information on the Holocaust was suppressed, and in the heightened nationalism of the post-war years Jews suffered once again.
Once the war ended, the JAC’s propaganda value vanished. The ties its members10 had forged with other Jewish organisations across the world made it an object of official suspicion, and Stalin ordered the JAC to be shut down in 1948 on the pretext that it was a ‘centre of anti-Soviet propaganda’. It was announced that Mikhoels had been run over and killed by a truck in Minsk, and a state funeral was held for him in the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. In reality, he had been beaten to death by the Belorussian security services on the direct orders of the Kremlin. The murder of Mikhoels signalled the start of an intensive period of state-sponsored anti-Semitism that would last until Stalin’s death. In June 1949, 15 other members of the JAC executive committee, prominent actors, poets, writers and doctors, were arrested on Stalin’s orders and taken to the cells of the Lubyanka. For three years they were held in isolation, beaten and tortured. Their interrogation records reveal the extent of the Kremlin’s fury against men and women who just a few years earlier had been praised as loyal allies. ‘The Jews are foul, dirty11 people,’ an investigator named as Colonel Vladimir Komarov yelled at the prisoners. ‘All Jews are worthless scum. The entire opposition to the party is made up of Jews. All Jews throughout the Soviet Union spit on Soviet power. The Jews want to annihilate every Russian.’ One of the arrested men is said to have received over 2,000 blows. In August 1952, the 15 were charged with treason, espionage and bourgeois nationalism. With the state media whipping up a campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, the verdicts were barely in doubt. On 12 August 1952, in what would become known as ‘the night of the murdered poets’, 13 of the defendants were condemned to death and immediately executed.
Anti-Semitism was now a semi-official state policy. Jews were frozen out of many jobs; access to higher education was severely restricted. Textbooks no longer mentioned that Karl Marx was Jewish. Films, including the musical Circus, were re-edited to cut out the appearances of Mikhoels. And further repressions would follow.
If there was one group that might have expected things to improve after the war, it was the ethnic Russians. Since the middle of the 1930s, the Russians had been singled out as the favoured nation amongst the Soviet people. A Pravda editorial in 1936 is typical of the official rhetoric:
All the peoples12 – participants in the great socialist construction – may be proud of the results of their labour; every one of them, from the smallest to the largest, are Soviet patriots. But first among these equals are the Russian people … whose role throughout the whole Great Proletarian Revolution has been exceptionally important, from the first victories to today’s magnificent period of development.
Just as the workers had been praised as the vanguard of the class war, the Russians were now the leading nation of the Soviet Union. Russian teaching was made compulsory in the non-Russian republics, and during the war Russia was held up as the example to inspire and unite the peoples of the Union. In Life and Fate, the decent, courageous Major Yershov, captured by the Nazis, sums up what he and countless others were fighting for:
He was certain that13 he was not only fighting the Germans, but fighting for a free Russia: certain that a victory over Hitler would be a victory over the death camps where his father, his mother and his sisters had perished …
But Stalin had no intention of rewarding the Russian people. He was a student of Russian history and determined to avoid what he saw as the mistakes of his predecessors. Just a few days after the fall of Berlin, Stalin had told the novelist Konstantin Simonov that he did not want a repeat of what had happened after Russia’s victory over Napoleon. ‘Stalin feared a new Decembrist movement14,’ Simonov wrote. ‘He felt he had introduced Ivan to Europe and Europe to Ivan. Just as Alexander I had done in 1813–14 …’
Stalin knew that Alexander I’s troops had been impressed by the freedom and prosperity they encountered during their occupation of Paris, and that this had inspired them to fight for change in their own country. The Decembrists’ desire for reform had its roots in their experience abroad, and that same experience had just been granted to the Red Army. In 1945, Soviet soldiers in Germany had collected as many consumer goods as they could lay their hands on, from wristwatches and radios to carpets. They had come into contact with British and American troops, with Western ways of doing things, and with Western freedoms. In Stalin’s eyes, they had undoubtedly been infected with all the dangerous values he had striven to keep out of the Soviet Union and he resolved not to let this contagion affect his own reign.
Most at risk from the wrath of the dictator were those Red Army soldiers who had been captured by the Germans. The Soviet state maintained its line that surrender was a criminal offence, and all troops taken prisoner were viewed as traitors. The Kremlin had refused to sign the Geneva Convention, effectively disowning its own men and preventing the International Red Cross from protecting them. Of the nearly six million Soviet POWs, less than half survived to the end of the war.
The Nazis had played on their captives’ fear, hunger and desperation, offering them food and clothing if they would switch sides and join the German forces. Some accepted the offer, including most notably General Andrei Vlasov, one of the heroes of the Battle of Moscow. In a major propaganda coup, the Nazis appointed Vlasov to create a ‘Russian Liberation Army’ of former POWs, which he would lead into battle against the Soviet Union. Vlasov said his aim15 was to build ‘a Russia without Bolsheviks and capitalists’, denouncing Communism for its brutal collectivisation measures, repression of the peasants (he was himself the son of a repressed kulak) and what he called the ‘trampling underfoot of everything Russian’. History has regarded Vlasov as a traitor and an opportunist, but his detailed ‘Prague Manifesto’ of November 1944 made clear that his views were anti-Bolshevik, not anti-Russian. He toured the POW camps spreading the message that Germany was waging a war against Communism, not against the motherland, but he failed to gain widespread support. Despite the threat of death from starvation, fewer than one in ten of the POWs signed up. Vlasov’s army never engaged in anything more than a limited skirmish with Soviet forces and ultimately switched sides again to fight against the Nazis.
To Stalin, though, the fact that some Red Army men had betrayed the Soviet Union tarred them all. In his Manichean mind, every returning POW was a potential enemy. NKVD filtration camps were set up to quiz returning POWs about how they had been captured and why they had not fought to the death like real patriots. No one was trusted16: by the end of 1946, millions of Soviet citizens had been through the filtration camps and 300,000 had been sentenced to summary execution or long terms in the Gulag. More than half a million were consigned to hard-labour battalions rebuilding the devastated Soviet Union, and over a million were sent back for further service in the Red Army. All of them, even those released without punishment, would live the rest of their lives under the stigma of having been captured by the Germans.fn5
Many POWs were aware of the possible fate that awaited them in the Soviet Union, and large numbers tried to remain in countries held by the British and Americans. The agreements reached at the Yalta conference, however, included an undertaking that all those designated as Soviet citizens – civilians and soldiers alike – would be forcibly repatriated. In the course of Operation Keelhaul (1946–7), the Allies handed over more than 2 million people to the Soviet authorities. The ominous title of the operation suggests the Allies knew what might happen to them, but they wanted their own citizens back from the USSR. France, for instance17, had nearly 100,000 Soviet citizens on territory it controlled at the end of the war, made up of men who had joined the Wehrmacht, forced labourers and some escaped POWs who had fought with the French resistance. Paris was under pressure to mollify the Soviets as it was pressing for the return of 13,000 French citizens, mainly from the Franco–German border areas of Alsace-Lorraine, who had been captured on the eastern front fighting in the Wehrmacht. As a result, the French made no attempt to distinguish between the categories of Soviet citizens they were holding and simply sent them all back to face whatever destiny awaited them.
Stalin also demanded the return of all Russian émigrés, including those who had lived abroad for many decades.fn6 To his surprise, the Allies agreed to cooperate. The NKVD was allowed18 to set up a detention camp at the Château de Beauregard on the outskirts of Paris, where thousands of POWs and others who refused to return voluntarily were handed over to Soviet control. NKVD agents roamed the streets of Paris forcibly abducting Russians, while the French authorities turned a blind eye. Those who had fled from the revolution and spent the intervening years opposing Bolshevik rule would be returning to certain death in the Soviet Union. Andrei Vlasov, who had surrendered to the Americans, was handed over when Soviet troops surrounded the car in which he was being transported. After a year’s interrogation in the Lubyanka, he and seven other generals were hanged in August 1946. In return for French, British and American cooperation, the Soviets freed Allied prisoners they had liberated from Nazi camps in eastern Germany.
The somewhat unexpected return of so many Soviet POWs caused Moscow problems. The Gulag rapidly filled with Red Army officers and soldiers, as well as prisoners from the re-occupied Baltic states. They all had good reason to detest the Soviet regime. Service in the war, often under desperate conditions, had taught them discipline, independence of thinking and a fierce loyalty to one another. They refused to be broken by Stalin’s camps. They did not inform on one another and they dealt mercilessly with individuals who collaborated with the camp authorities. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, disturbances and uprisings in the Gulag were becoming increasingly common.
Outside the camps, those returning soldiers unaffected by Stalin’s ‘special measures’ were also finding life tough. They found themselves demobilised in a land devastated by war. There were chronic shortages of food and basic goods, and not enough housing or jobs. Many former soldiers were forced to dig temporary shelters in the ground, much as they had done at the front. After four years fighting for the Soviet cause, they returned to find their home towns destroyed, and their wives and children unable to comprehend what they had gone through. The harrowing experiences of those who fought at the front and those who stayed behind often made it impossible to start again where they had left off.fn7
In some ways, former soldiers were perceived as a threat to the regime. These were men whose shared experience had created an emotional bond between them, a bond that the Kremlin feared might outweigh their loyalty to the state. There was a prohibition on the formation of veterans’ groups. Soldiers were actively discouraged from taking part in public life, expressing their opinions or writing their memoirs. The perception that they were being prevented from talking about their experiences – with the veiled suggestion that these experiences were somehow reprehensible – left many of them feeling frustrated and abandoned. The state was now seeking to suppress the very qualities it had encouraged during the years of fighting. Qualities such as courage, initiative and enterprise had been vital during the war; now they were again deemed to be worthless – or, even worse, dangerous – in a society that insisted on conformity, obedience and subservience. Alcohol rates rose alarmingly among ex-soldiers and civilians alike as the sense of disillusionment increased.
For the civilian population, too19, post-war life was full of disappointments. The war seemed to have changed little; there were few improvements in either material standards or citizens’ rights. In 194621, famine struck, as the diminished availability of arable land, the shortage of able-bodied men and the disruption of production left nearly 100 million people hungry. Two million starved to death, including half a million Russians in the traditional agricultural lands of the Volga. The increased religious freedom of the war years ended, and practising Christians once again faced discrimination. The liberalisation in the arts that had done much to inspire patriotism and loyalty was reversed. In August 1946, it was decreed once again that all literature, art and music must serve the purposes of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism, rejecting Western, bourgeois influence. (The crackdown became known by the name of ‘Zhdanovshchina’, after the commissar for culture, Andrei Zhdanov.) Anna Akhmatova, following her brief period of acceptance by the state, was effectively banned from publishing, and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko was heavily criticised. The crime of ‘formalism’ – anything that did not match the state’s recipe for simple, uplifting conformity – was used to reprimand Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Khachaturian. Stalin himself upbraided writers and film directors, including the already terrified Sergei Eisenstein. Hopes were being crushed; the Soviet Union was returning to its old stereotypes.
fn1 Voting in the election took place on 5 July, but the results were not announced until 26 July, partly because the votes of British servicemen still serving overseas needed to be counted. So while Churchill attended the first ten days of the conference, he was replaced by Attlee for the final week.
fn2 As late as the 1980s, I had friends in Moscow whose families were still in exile: the father of one of them was the editor of the Volga German newspaper Vozrozhdenie (Rebirth) which had campaigned for 40 years for the right to return. Oddly, the problem was partly solved in the Gorbachev era when the Volga Germans were allowed to emigrate and the West Germany embassy was suddenly besieged by queues of people with German-sounding names, all of whom were promptly issued with visas. Few questions were asked and no immigration quotas imposed. The West German authorities were acutely sensitive to the plight of their fellow citizens ‘trapped’ in Russia from all periods of history, from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. Their liberal Law of Return opened the way for thousands to make new lives in the West.
fn3 Typical is Stalin’s confidential4 Order Number. 5859ss regarding the Crimean Tartars, which was issued on 11 May 1944: ‘Many Crimean Tartars betrayed the motherland, deserting Red Army units that defended the Crimea and siding with the enemy, joining volunteer army units formed by the Germans to fight against the Red Army; as members of German punitive detachments during the occupation of the Crimea by German fascist troops, the Crimean Tartars particularly were noted for their savage reprisals against Soviet partisans, and also helped the German invaders to organise the violent round-up of Soviet citizens for German enslavement and the mass extermination of the Soviet people. Taking into account the facts cited above: All Tartars are to be banished from the territory of the Crimea and resettled permanently as special settlers in the regions of the Uzbek SSR. The resettlement will be assigned to the Soviet NKVD. The Soviet NKVD (comrade Beria) is to complete the resettlement by 1 June 1944.’
fn4 While it is true that Chechen independence groups had seized on the German invasion as a chance to rise up against Soviet rule, active collaboration had actually been more widespread in other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic states, western Belorussia, western Ukraine and Moldavia all had incipient resistance movements opposed to Soviet rule. When the Germans arrived, some of them volunteered to collaborate in the misguided hope of reasserting their national identities. Nationalist forces in some areas attempted to fight against both sides at once, vainly hoping to free their homeland from both communists and fascists, and even after the Germans had been defeated, resistance to Soviet rule continued. In a little-known episode of history (the Soviet authorities banned all reference to it), the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army continued full-scale military operations long after the end of the war to try to prevent the reintegration of Ukraine into the USSR. The scale of the fighting was remarkable: in 1946, the Red Army had over half a million troops in action against the partisans and it took another wave of mass deportations to end Ukrainian resistance.
fn5 Until the 1980s, the question ‘Have you or your family lived in occupied territory or been taken captive?’ was a routine enquiry on job applications, with the clear implication that a positive response would indicate guilt or the suspicion of guilt.
fn6 Many of them had been born in pre-revolutionary Russia and had never been Soviet citizens, so technically were not covered by the Yalta agreement.
fn7 A grave shortage of hospital beds and doctors made the care of injured soldiers difficult; many were denied both medical treatment and social care. In the 1970s, I was shocked by the number of amputee veterans on the streets of Russian cities. Little had been done to help them after the war and many had been reduced to begging. Most distressing were the so-called samovars, men who had lost both arms and both legs and were wheeled around in crude wooden carts, often with a handwritten sign asking for charity. Instead of making proper20 provision for people who had sacrificed themselves in the Soviet cause, the Kremlin had callously sent many of them to be resettled in the far north, where their abandonment by the state would be less publicly obvious.