CHAPTER 2
The Origins of Annihilation II
(The Soviet Union and the Soviets 1918–41)
In May 1937, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was to have the honour of representing the Soviet Union at the coronation ceremony of George VI in London. He never arrived. Although the British Embassy was informed that the soldier had been taken ill, the truth was that Tukhachevsky had become a victim of a new phase in the Kremlin’s ‘cleansing operations’. His fate had been sealed in Moscow at a reception held after the May Day Parade when an ebullient Joseph Stalin remarked to his extravagantly moustachioed confidant, Marshal Semyon Budenny, that it was time ‘to finish with our enemies because they are in the army, in the staff, even in the Kremlin . . . We must finish with them, not looking at their faces.’ Budenny had been imploring Stalin to undertake a purge of ‘difficult’ senior officers for several months because he believed that it would remove the final threat to the General Secretary’s power outside the secret police. Those senior officers included 44-year-old Tukhachevsky, the Deputy Commissar for Defence, a bug-eyed womanizer who happened to be the most talented soldier of his generation. Arrested by the secret police (NKVD) along with seven other high-ranking colleagues, the men were driven to Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison where they were tortured.
The officers’ trial was held on 11 June and was overseen by a secret special military tribunal of the Supreme Court, which included Budenny. The fictitious charges levelled against Tukhachevsky and his fellow (grotesquely bruised) accused included involvement in treasonable contact with unfriendly powers, espionage, sabotage and assassination. Proceedings were a mockery. The critical evidence amounted to little more than the blood-spattered confessions extracted while the accused were being beaten. Stalin had already directed that the ‘traitors’ be shot, so there was only one possible outcome and all eight were sentenced to death. Just after midnight the senior executioner, Captain Vasili Blokhin, fed eight rounds into his pistol’s magazine and politely asked his prisoners to kneel on the dirt floor and bow their heads. Then, walking behind his prey, he cocked his pistol and proceeded to shoot each in the back of the neck. Stalin was not present at the trial as he had been attending his mother’s funeral, but he insisted on hearing all the gory details on his return. ‘What were Tukhachevsky’s final words?’ he asked Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD’s sadistic chief. ‘The snake said he was dedicated to the Motherland and Comrade Stalin,’ came the reply. ‘He asked for clemency.’ Stalin was silent for a moment – and then belched.
The circumstances leading to the Soviet military being so savagely treated by a paranoid dictator go back at least as far as 1917. As in Germany, the route to totalitarianism and war started with revolution that had its roots in the Great War. Although pressure for change had been building for decades, the ongoing demands were ignored by the ruling Romanov dynasty, which eschewed modernization as much as it deplored the concept of democracy. The Romanovs presided over a backward nation. An unproductive economy, massive peasant population, pitiable levels of literacy, autocratic political system, corrupt bureaucracy and ineffectual military combined to ensure a poorly motivated and underdeveloped Russia was ill-prepared for the rigours of a protracted total war. Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Leigh was a British liaison officer working in the Russian capital, St Petersburg. Writing to his brother in February 1914, two weeks after taking up his appointment, Leigh remarked:
Russia is a squalid place with a population that cares little for other than scraping a living from the soil. Poverty abounds, government is shambolic and I have quickly learned not to trust any officials . . . An army reflects the society from which it is drawn and the Russian army is disordered and lacking in modern weaponry . . . All of this and the weather is appalling cold!
Three years later Russia was deeply embroiled in the Great War and on the verge of revolution. In February 1917, having suffered months of heavy casualties and military disappointment, cold, hungry workers began to strike and to express their discontent. In the capital, renamed Petrograd in 1914, the police reported that the government’s heavy-handed attempt to quell public meetings arranged to discuss the situation had caused ‘workers, led by the more educated and perhaps the more revolutionary among them [to] adopt an openly hostile attitude to the government and protest against the continuation of the war.’ Some violent unrest followed and Colonel Leigh, now heading an office concerned with the ‘evaluation of Russian operations’, wrote home:
The authorities seem to be losing control. I have heard reports of troops firing on demonstrators in the city . . . Last week I witnessed a march with banners and singing. The Romanovs seem to be the target, but so are factory owners and employers . . . There is a tension in the air which could very well develop into something very nasty indeed.
Leigh was correct. The dissatisfaction did initially focus on the monarchy for the Tsar, Nicholas II, not only led Russia into the war, but in making himself Commander in Chief of the army, he tied himself personally to failure.
The abdication of the Tsar on 15 March 1917 provided the impetus for further change. An indecisive, liberal-socialist provisional government struggled to deal with the myriad problems facing the nation, but the Soviets – workers’ councils comprising delegates elected by the people – began to make progress on some local issues. Increasingly dominated by extreme, left-wing socialists (Bolsheviks), the Soviets agitated for more fundamental changes through a Marxist revolution. One of the loudest Bolshevik voices was that of Vladimir Lenin. He called for ‘peace, bread and land’ and raged, ‘Down with Provisional Government: All Power to the Soviets!’ The Bolsheviks’ virtually bloodless seizure of power in a proletarian-based revolution on 7 November 1917 in Petrograd ousted the provisional government. There followed a series of measures that invested more power in the people. For example, workers’ control was instituted in industry, private ownership of land was abolished and estates were handed over to the peasants. Some pronouncements had international ramifications – non-Russian states were offered self-determination, and in December, Russia dropped out of the war.
However, while superficially dealing in democratic ideals, the Bolsheviks – now officially titled the Communist Party and led by Lenin – broke up the Constituent Assembly when election results were not as favourable to them as had been anticipated. Furthermore, fearing a popular backlash, all other political parties were prohibited by the new Communist dictatorship, and in the early autumn of 1918, the ‘Red Terror’ began. This ‘terror’ struck a heavy blow against counter-revolutionaries and was used by Lenin to announce to the nation that there would be no return to the old Russia and that disloyalty to the regime would not be tolerated. Lenin said: ‘We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.’ The Cheka – the security arm of the regime – immediately executed hundreds of members of the former ruling classes (including the Tsar and his family) and thousands more followed. Lenin justified his actions by saying: ‘How can you make a revolution without executions?’ Some 250,000 people were killed over the next four years. A teacher from Smolensk whose brother was arrested and later executed for ‘seditious literature’ (he wrote romantic poems during his lunch break) later recorded: ‘It was as if the regime would not be satisfied until they had silenced every critical tongue.’
The bloodshed continued during a civil war that lasted until 1923. Beset by non-Russian, anti-Bolshevik forces and internal anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ forces, which sought to destroy the revolution, the mass conscript Red Army struggled on several fronts. In the end, the aggressors were undone by long lines of communication, disunity and half-heartedness in the face of passionate and resolute defence. Poland won its independence from Russia as did Finland and the Baltic states, but the revolution was secure. A thankful Leon Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for War, told an appreciative party audience in October 1923: ‘All the forces of the old world have failed to strangle the revolution in its cot. Now we shall grow and become strong.’ Having suffered over 20 million casualties since 1914 and undergone fundamental political, social and economic change since 1917, it was clear that the nation needed to consolidate, revitalize and modernize. Thus, in the wake of the civil war a new nation was born, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its capital was Moscow and organizational reforms were instituted to ensure its governance. For the first time in a generation the nation could look to the future. But one question remained – with Lenin ailing, who was going to lead the youthful Soviet Union forward?
By the time of his death in January 1924, Lenin was perceived by many as an irreplaceable icon. Although the vastness of the Soviet Union, its poor communications and the limited education of its population meant that national politics were far from an obsession for the peasantry, the reach of the Communist Party was great. Daniel Vogel, a production manager from Berlin who had recently arrived in the country to advise Soviet industry as part of the regime’s new understanding with Germany, wrote in his diary:
The death of Lenin has been announced. People have taken it badly for they seem to view him as a father figure. Petrograd is to be renamed Leningrad in his memory. In the afternoon I travelled to a large farm to see some of our [machinery] at work. Here were people that work 18 hour days just to survive, but even they were talking about Lenin’s passing . . . The peasants like stability and fear the unknown. I am surprised, but the country seems to have plunged into deep mourning.
The struggle to succeed Lenin was already a year old by the time he was laid to rest in a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square. The front runners jostled for position, and carefully manoeuvring himself into position by marginalizing his opponents and gaining allies was Stalin. Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Georgia in 1878, his father was an unsuccessful cobbler prone to drunkenness and violence against his family. Iosif ’s was an unhappy childhood, but as biographer Robert Service points out: ‘Not everyone beaten by parents acquires a murderous personality. Yet some do . . . [and] it is scarcely astounding that he grew up with a strong tendency towards resentment and retaliation.’ At the age of six the young Iosif fell prey to the potentially fatal smallpox virus and later he was knocked down by a horse-drawn trap, which left his left arm permanently shortened and lacking flexibility. After school – where his intelligence and hard work were noted along with his occasionally furious temper – he attended an Orthodox seminary. It was here that the teenager came into contact with socialist ideas, and he eventually became a professional revolutionary. Changing his name to Stalin (which means steel) to convey a certain image, he worked for 15 years to bring down the Tsarist regime, and on several occasions was arrested and exiled. By this time, aged 36, he was described by a fellow revolutionary as ‘thick-set, of medium height, [with] a drooping moustache, thick hair, narrow forehead and rather short legs . . . his speech was dull and dry . . . a narrow-minded, fanatical man.’
Playing a key role in the 1917 seizure of power as part of the inner circle of Bolsheviks, Stalin was rewarded with an appointment as People’s Commissar for Nationalities. He had an active civil war, clashing frequently with Trotsky, organizing the defence of Tsaritsyn (which in 1925 was renamed Stalingrad in his honour) and ordering the executions of former untrustworthy Tsarist officers along with deserters, defectors and other ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Following his elevation to membership of the Politburo (the governing and central policy-making body of the Communist Party) in 1922, Stalin was made the Party’s General Secretary. This was not a significant position at the time, but as it gave him control of the party machinery and appointments – including the NKVD – he could build a base of support. Beginning to promote himself as a future leader, Stalin drew the attention of Lenin, who thought him ‘uncouth’ and was not convinced that he would ‘always manage to use power with sufficient care’. But Stalin was politically astute, robust and highly determined. As other leadership candidates, such as the ‘political simpleton’ Leon Trotsky, dropped out of the demanding race, Stalin’s power grew and by the end of the decade the Party addressed him as vozhd – leader.
Stalin was diligent and hard working. He rarely rose before noon but worked deep into the night. His spacious study in the Kremlin was panelled with stained oak and hung with portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin – minimalist and simply furnished. Alanbrooke, Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, compared it to the ‘waiting room of an English railway station’. Stalin’s desk, however, was piled high with documents that were covered in his trademark blue pencil notes, indicating the long hours he worked and how he exhausted those around him. He was an exacting boss who used his large personality to encourage his staff in their business but would not tolerate substandard work. Possessing a photographic memory, a quick brain and an eye for detail, he expected briefings to be thorough, clear and precise. Listening to reports while strolling around the room smoking his much-loved Dunhill pipe filled with cigarette tobacco, he had the disconcerting habit of standing face to face with a speaker if he wished to put that person under pressure. If he spotted a weak argument or received an inferior briefing, he would not fail to lambast the perpetrator and it was not uncommon for his short temper to burst. Hundreds were given ‘the treatment’ over the years, including one middle-aged propagandist, Pavlo Kulik, who incurred Stalin’s wrath by misinterpreting some figures. Kulik has testified:
It was an experience that I have never forgotten. It is seared into my memory . . . I had muddled two sets of numbers which thoroughly undermined the point that I was trying to make. Stalin approached me, his face ashen, his head jutting forward and his brow furrowed. His dark eyes seemed to reach deep into me and wrench out my stomach. He then exploded into a rage demanding to know why I had made a mistake, but not giving me time to provide an answer . . . It was the first and last time that I met Comrade Stalin.
By the age of 50, Stalin was undisputed leader of the Soviet Union and had cultivated the image of being tough but reasonable, a man to be obeyed, who demanded loyalty but was approachable and fair. In particular, he was seen as a man with the sort of ideas that would modernize the Soviet Union for, as Lenin had said, ‘electrification and literacy equal communism’. It was a commonly held belief that educated, fit and healthy workers would not only be happier, but more productive. Stalin helped to ensure that education was made mandatory for children and supported a universal literacy programme, under which the number of people who could read and write grew from around 25 per cent of the population in 1917 to over 80 per cent in 1939. It was a process that developed the national intellect, but was also used by the Communist Party to ensure that its political message was read and understood by all. In this way, the population was gradually exposed to Marxist-Leninist ideology and learned compliance to the regime’s will.
The young were further moulded by youth groups controlled by the Communist Party, such as the Little Octoberists (for the very young), Young Pioneers (for those aged nine to 14) and Komsomol (for 14- to 28-year-olds). These organizations aimed to fashion hard-working and loyal future generations – a mobile pool of labour that could be dipped into to carry out party projects. Komsomol, for example, provided teachers for the adult literacy programme and organized regional sporting events. The group was also used as the eyes and ears of the regime in remote towns and villages as the Party became increasingly intolerant of opinions that ran contrary to the official point of view. ‘Enemies of the state’ were to be uncovered and imprisoned, while published works and the arts were censored to ensure that they were ‘ideologically safe’.
The Soviet Union’s cultural life, therefore, became a sterile wasteland of the simplistic political settings so redolent of ‘Socialist Realism’. Addressing the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934, writer Yuri Olesha advised that working men and women be placed at the heart of novels where ‘they strove and succeeded’. He recommended characters who revealed the virtues to which all good Communists should aspire for ‘when you depict a negative hero, you yourself become negative’. The aim was to produce art that inspired the population, helped the masses become good socialists, motivated them to defend the revolution and encouraged the rejection of any thoughts and ideas that criticized the regime and its creed. Perhaps the best illustration of the sort of publication that the regime foisted on its people was Pravda (Truth), the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which became a beacon for Communist ideology and could be relied upon to be unfailingly supportive of the government and present an upbeat interpretation of the nation’s achievements.
It is within the pages of Pravda that the Soviet Union’s economic rise was charted in considerable detail. Stories with strap-lines such as ‘Oil Production Figures Soar’ and ‘Leningrad Factory Breaks Construction Record’ were commonplace in the 1930s while strenuous efforts were being made to drag the economy into the twentieth century. However, the wholesale nationalization of industry in the wake of the revolution may have provided the regime with immediate control over proletariat urban workers and manufacturing output, but this would be for nought if the nation starved. Lenin’s land redistribution among the peasantry – which formed 80 per cent of the population – had had a catastrophic effect on food production. Large, efficient farms that had provided a food surplus were carved up into smaller, uneconomical family plots. Moreover, seizure of grain to feed the cities had led to rural famine and a widespread turning against Marxism by the peasantry. The introduction of a New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921, however, encouraged peasants to produce a surplus by allowing them to sell their produce for the best price. It was not a panacea, but the NEP alleviated the immediate threat of a food crisis, and by restoring an element of market economy across the nation also stimulated industry. This was critical for the Soviet Union, because although successful in its defence of the revolution during the civil war years, both Lenin and Stalin believed that, having retired to lick their wounds and regain their strength after years of fighting, the capitalist nations would seek to annihilate the regime.
There is no doubt that the Soviet Union felt vulnerable after its recent experiences – Lenin called the country ‘an oasis in the middle of a raging imperialist sea’ – and, now cast as a pariah state, remained ‘at risk’. In 1924, Mikhail Frunze, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (War Minister), politician, army commander and military theorist, wrote:
In a conflict of first-class opponents, the decision cannot be won by one blow. War will take the character of a long and fierce conflict . . . Expressed in the language of strategy, this means a change from the strategy of lightning blows to a strategy of exhaustion. Thus the bond between the front and the rear in our days must become much more close, direct and decisive. The life and work of the front at any given moment are determined by the work and condition of the rear.
Having studied national performances during the Great War, as well as Russia’s own civil war, Frunze felt impelled to call for the development not only of a strong economy but a nation, society and armed forces fit for the rigours of contemporary conflict. The idea was progressively taken up and the Soviet Union, very slowly but surely, prepared for ‘total war’. There was a grand aspiration to develop significantly the capability of the economy and military while mentally conditioning the population for hostilities. Indeed, the regime saw the creation of an atmosphere of tension and apprehension as a useful means by which to galvanize the population to greater efforts in the work place and to expose traitors. There were regular war scares – often on the merest sliver of a pretext – which kept the nation on its collective toes. Propagandists depicted Stalin as the rock upon which enemy aggression would be broken. He said in 1927 that it was just a matter of time before there was ‘a new imperialist war [aimed] against the Soviet Union in particular’ and in the following year: ‘Comrades, our class enemies do exist. They not only exist but are growing and trying to act against Soviet power.’ By the early 1930s, and clearly pointing to Germany and at the rise of Hitler, Stalin warned: ‘Again, as in 1914, the parties of bellicose imperialism, the parties of war and revenge are coming to the foreground. Quite clearly things are heading for a new war.’ Stalin willingly tied himself to a new militarism just as Hitler did in Germany. As Richard Overy has written in his superb assessment of the two men, The Dictators:
It was not mere accident that both Hitler and Stalin chose to be seen in public wearing simple military-style dress. Stalin’s plain high-collar tunic and knee-length boots were modelled on the uniform of the new Soviet army, unadorned and braidless . . . Wearing uniform was a deliberate choice, indicative of the two men’s differing beliefs that revolutionary war, or the struggle for national existence, was in some sense a permanent state of being.
Thus, Soviet economic and social development programmes should be viewed through the prism of the regime’s need to defend itself. Stalin, meanwhile, worked tirelessly to ensure that the population’s energy was directed solely towards achieving this ambition.
Creating a nation fit for war could not be achieved quickly, but it was given structure under Stalin’s direction in a series of Five Year Plans that covered all aspects of development, including heavy and light industry; communications; agriculture; transportation; the welfare system; health and education reforms. The First Five Year Plan, introduced in 1928, sought to make the nation industrially self-sufficient and militarily stronger. In February 1931, Stalin said in a speech to industrial officials and managers:
The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness . . . For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity . . . We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.
The purpose of the First Plan, therefore, was to ascertain what needed to be produced and then to ensure that the requisite commodities were produced to the necessary quality and in the required quantity and got to where they were needed in time. It was the mother of Soviet mass production and the father of the nation’s internal communications. By 1932, wagon loads of rapidly produced goods were leaving factories in Leningrad and Moscow and efficiently transported by road, rail and canal to distant regions of the country. The Plan was nominally overseen by Vyacheslav Molotov, a loyal supporter of Stalin and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Prime Minister) since December 1930, and to fulfil it the regime put workers under tremendous pressure to work harder and longer than ever before. Posters on canteen notice boards and factory floors proclaimed: ‘We Will Turn the Five Year Plan into a Four Year One’ and ‘Through Production Comes Strength’. Komsomol was mobilized to undertake construction projects, such as the huge Dneiper Dam, and prisoners were routinely worked to death in labour camps. The result was that, although Molotov’s massively ambitious production goals were not met, industry developed markedly in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the nation’s infrastructure dramatically improving and the production of coal and iron quadrupling. This success was not achieved without a price being paid, though, and with increasing numbers of peasants working in factories, that price was the spectre of a crippling food crisis.
The prospect of widespread famine finally forced the government to merge small, inefficient peasant farms in a process called ‘collectivization’, which took place between 1928 and 1935. It destroyed the peasants’ much-cherished independence and rested the long arm of the state on the farm gate. The policy was met with derision in the countryside and its implementation led to great hardship. Government quotas were often unachievable, leading to a significant drop in the peasants’ standard of living and the constant fear of requisitioning. Mikhail Batkin, who worked fields near Kursk with his father, testifies:
We were told what each new farm had to produce. It was a frightening amount, much more than was possible on the land that we had. My father was very worried that whatever food we kept for ourselves would be taken to make up the deficit. There was a feeling that we were worthless . . . that the cities were sucking the life out of the countryside.
The result was not an increase in food production but a decrease in the three years after 1929 as the disincentivized peasantry struggled to produce what the burgeoning cities needed. Stalin blamed the slightly better off Kulaks (around four per cent of the population) for hoarding, resisting the changes and waging a ‘silent war’ against the Soviet state. ‘They need to be taught a lesson,’ he growled to a colleague in February 1932. ‘This situation is undermining all that we have achieved. These people are holding us to ransom and it cannot continue.’ His opportunity came later that year when crop failure led to a widespread famine – the Holodomor – in the major grain-producing regions, which Stalin exacerbated by requisitioning more grain for the cities and increasing its export. Seven million died (including one in eight of the Ukrainian population). Stalin was single-minded and received the figures coldly: ‘Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of our industrialization . . . If there are obstacles, they will be overcome – and then crushed.’
The initial momentum created by the First Five Year Plan was maintained by subsequent schemes. The Second Plan, in 1932, placed a strong emphasis on heavy industry and the development of military hardware while a third, in 1938, pumped resources into developing armaments and ensuring that factories were beyond the reach of an attack from the West. It was a time of significant Soviet manufacturing development hammered out of workers who were expected to produce more each year. The press published stories of remarkable deeds to ‘inspire’ the proletariat. They included news on 31 August 1935 that miner Aleksy Stakhanov had exceeded the norm of 6.5 tons of coal per five-hour shift by producing 102 tons of coal, having worked non-stop through the night – double what a squad would regularly produce. On 19 September it was announced that he had set a new record by mining 227 tons of coal in a single shift. Stakhanov became a national celebrity and appeared on the cover of the December issue of Time magazine in the United States, which reported:
Commissar Ordzhonikidze [Commissar for Heavy Industry] saw to it that Comrade Stakhanov received a motor car and other luxuries unheard of for a Russian miner. After diligent search in other Soviet mines and factories, fresh Heroes of Labor were produced whose feats of ‘Stakhanovism’ as played up by the Soviet Press became more and more stupendous . . . To the galaxy of correspondents and photographers gruff, iron-jawed Communist Party Agent Konstantin Giorgevich Petrov was introduced as ‘the man who discovered Stakhanov.’ Asked reporters of Stakhanov: ‘Do you get many letters? Do people write to you asking about your method of work?’ ‘He gets letters from all over – hundreds of letters!’ cut in The-Man-Who-Discovered-Stakhanov. ‘All women want to know if he has really doubled his wages. All men want to know how he has improved technique. Hundreds of letters!’
Yet while some workers rose to the challenge set for them by the regime in spectacular fashion, others did not. The same Time article that revealed how Stakhanov was being lauded went on to say:
In the Gorky automotive works the Brothers Ivan and Feodor Kriachkov assassinated their fellow worker Ivan Schmerov because he had speeded up his daily output 200%. Tried before a military tribunal, they were sentenced to death. In the coal mine at Stalino two assistant foremen, a check-weigher and an electrician, were arrested for the murder of a fast-working Stakhanovite who had peached on them to the Bolshevik labor boss as ‘opposed to Stakhanovism.’ In a nearby mine a worker shot at his Stakhanovite mine manager, and missed. The most spectacular blow against Stakhanovism is supposed to have been struck by Engineer S. Plotnikov, a member of the Communist Party up to the time of his arrest. According to the Soviet Press, Engineer Plotnikov became so vexed at Chelyabinsk by the boastful uppishness of the local Stakhanov gang that he ordered the fastest speeder-uppers to dig in an extremely dangerous pit of Mine No. 204. Sure enough, the pit caved in on them.
Workers were subjected to appalling day-to-day pressures and, in common with the peasantry, there was a growing sense of paranoia. Show trials in the late 1920s and early 1930s underlined the absolute necessity to conform to government requirements. The poor wretches who stood before the kangaroo courts charged with ‘treason’, ‘sabotage’, ‘espionage’ and the like were most likely merely bad time keepers, drunks and dawdlers.
Collectivization and the show trials reflected an increasing harshness towards the most vulnerable in Soviet society. Unfortunately for the terrorized population, Stalin could justify the excesses by pointing to productivity figures, which grew year on year. Steel output rose from 4.3 million tons in 1928 to 18.1 million tons a decade later, coal production more than trebled from 35 million tons to 133 million and truck production rose from a mere 700 vehicles to 182,000. Moreover, while in 1928 some 60 per cent of Soviet industry was light and 40 per cent was heavy, by 1941 the figures had been reversed. The Soviet Union possessed an economy far better configured for total war by the late 1930s than it had ten years earlier, but at the cost of the hope and liberty of a large proportion of the population. Yet if the population was disillusioned and angered at the situation, Stalin knew the reason for it – they were ‘sworn enemies of Soviet power’. That the situation did not lead to peasants and workers rallying against the regime was testament to the success of the Party’s propaganda and social programmes, which provided a growing ‘mind control’, but was also due to the fear that it engendered in the masses. Arms were manufactured as the standard of living slumped, and terror replaced altruism. In the Soviet leader, Hitler seems to have seen a kindred spirit for he said, ‘That fellow Stalin is a brute, but you really must admit, he’s an extraordinary fellow.’
The arming of the nation took place within the wider strengthening of the armed forces. Increasing funds were pumped into the military as the Soviet Union began its quest to ‘develop a first-class military machine to destroy the forces of capitalist-imperialism’. The Russian military had recently been through a torrid time. The army had peaked at 5.5 million men during the civil war, but demobilization left a rump of just 600,000 men in the mid-1920s, which quickly became little more than an ill-disciplined rabble, unwilling and unable to contend with the demands of modern soldiering. A special commission established in 1924 to examine the nation’s defensive situation concluded that the army was ‘not a reliable fighting force’ and recommended a radical overhaul. Mikhail Frunze attempted to grasp the nettle and instituted reforms linked to the Five Year Plans. These were to have a dramatic impact. He advocated a ‘unitary military doctrine’ under which the army would be trained for offensive operations and united by its resolve to carry out the Communist Party’s aim of promoting world revolution. Compulsory peacetime military service was instituted, formations were reorganized, training improved, equipment improved, leadership strengthened, drills and uniforms standardized. Morale began to seep back into the force, which had previously felt undervalued and neglected. At a time when most other European nations sought to disarm and embrace peace, the Soviet Union rearmed and professionalized. In 1913 real defence expenditure had been about 5.2 per cent of gross national product, by 1933 it had risen to around 12 per cent and by 1940 it was at 18 per cent. At the beginning of 1928 the Soviet Union had 92 tanks and 1,394 military aircraft; by January 1935 the numbers had leapt to 10,180 and 6,672 respectively.
As the army’s body was strengthened by Frunze, so its mind was improved by Tukhachevsky. Appointed in 1925 as Chief of the General Staff, the brilliant 32-year-old Mikhail Tukhachevsky began to examine how the Red Army went about its business and was not impressed with what he found. Assisted by Aleksandr Svechin and Vladimir Triandafillov, two other sparkling Soviet military thinkers, Tukhachevsky rewrote the army’s doctrine. In May 1928 he published Future War, which not only further recommended the desirability of total mobilization of the economy and society for war, but also explored operational fighting methods. Clearly influenced by German theorists, Tukhachevsky advocated deeply penetrating attacks on the enemy with paralyzing, all-arms, offensive action, involving thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft in massive quantities. He argued that recent history showed that modern, industrialized states were too powerful to be overcome in a single battle, and looked to strategic victory through the accumulation of operational success.
Although Tukhachevsky enjoyed political support when he launched into his doctrinal review, his demand for huge resources soon earned him enemies. Neither Stalin nor Frunze’s replacement, the thoroughly underwhelming Kliment Voroshilov, were impressed and, having been removed as Chief of the General Staff, Tukhachevsky was sidelined. His replacement, Boris Shaposhnikov, was a safe pair of hands, but Tukhachevsky continued to lobby for investment in the colossal resources that he believed the Soviet Union required, and in 1930 he forwarded a memo to the Kremlin, pressing the case for ‘40,000 aircraft and 50,000 tanks’. He expanded upon his views in New Questions of War, published in 1932, and four years later wrote:
The nature of modern weapons and battle is that it is an impossible matter to destroy the enemy’s manpower in one blow in a single day. Battle in modern operations stretches out into a series of battles not only along the front but in depth.
By the time he wrote these words, Tukhachevsky’s star was once again in the ascendancy. The foolishness of keeping his undoubted talents under wraps had been recognized and he had been made one of the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union. Moreover, aspects of his concept of ‘Deep Operations’ were refined and incorporated into PU-36, the last completed Soviet Army Field Regulations to be published before the outbreak of the Second World War. Tukhachevsky, however, would not live to witness that event.
Executions, imprisonment and ‘disappearances’ had become a fact of life in the Soviet Union by the 1930s, and Stalin did not hesitate to purge the Party and the armed forces – those closer to the heart of power – in his quest to protect the regime and his place in it. Indeed, Rodric Braithwaite has written: ‘The fears of the Bolshevik leadership were more than a mere obsessive fantasy. But there was paranoia as well. In Stalin it reached the proportion of a monomania.’ This political terror began in 1933 with the expulsion of 790,000 Party members on fabricated charges of corruption, careerism and plots to assassinate Stalin. Show trials were held during the middle of the decade leading, inevitably, to imprisonment and executions. Of the 1,966 delegates to the XVIIth Party Congress in 1934, for example, some 1,108 were executed. In the spring of 1937, Stalin said:
The wrecking and diversionary-spying work of agents of foreign states has touched to one degree or another all or almost all of our organizations, administrative and party as well as economic . . . agents of foreign states, including Trotskyists, have penetrated not only into the lower organization, but even into certain responsible posts . . . Is it not clear that as long as capitalist encirclement exists we will have wreckers, spies, diversionists and murderers sent to the interior by agents of foreign states?
The political purge left the armed forces as the only major area of state to avoid the terror – but only until June 1937. Just at the moment when a new, large, modern, professional force was emerging, freer from political interference, the military leadership was swept away in a purge. It began with the execution of senior officers – including Tukhachevsky – and rolled on through the officer corps. Of the five marshals created in 1935, only two emerged from the cull with their lives, 15 out of 16 army commanders were killed, 50 out of 57 corps commanders, 154 out of 186 divisional commanders and 401 out of 456 colonels. One Russian source suggests that the total number of officers purged between 1936 and 1938 was 41,218, although most were dismissed rather than arrested or executed.
In their place, Stalin oversaw the advancement of young, talented and reliable soldiers, such as Georgi Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had made their names during the civil war. These men found that the glass ceiling previously thwarting their ambitions had been removed – but they were not allowed to forget their powerful political patrons. Stalin underscored this control by reasserting the role of political commissars at divisional level and below, along with their equivalent in army and front formations. These officers were appointed by the government to ensure political correctness and loyalty to the regime. They held a position equal to that of the commander but with the authority to countermand his orders. The commissars had had their wings clipped in the Frunze reforms and suffered heavily in the purges, but now their power returned. Their influence was exaggerated by the impact of the purges, which left the armed forces with inexperienced and compliant officers who were unwilling to show initiative and challenge the system.
Just at a time when threats to the Soviet Union were mounting, Stalin not only cut the heart out of the army, he also gave it brain damage. Fewer than 10 per cent of surviving officers had higher military education, and most had secondary education and nothing more. The military’s cohesion was shattered, its modernization set back, its integration of new weaponry and technology hampered. Yet the impact of the purges must be seen in context, for the military was far from the finished article when the purges began and by 1941 around 80 per cent of the purged officers had been reinstated. Moreover, the armed forces continued to grow and between January 1939 and May 1941, 161 new divisions were activated. Thus, although it is true that 75 per cent of all officers had been in position for less than a year by 1941, that was because of the rapid increase in the creation of military units, not because of the purges. Indeed, it was the time it would take for the massive Red Army to mobilize that forced commanders in 1940 to explore an initial defensive phase in response to an invasion, not the recent decline in its fighting ability. The Soviet Union remained, resolutely, offensive in outlook but its military needed time to prepare itself.
The situation was similar in the field of foreign affairs. While Stalin’s instinct was to act pre-emptively against the German threat to the Soviet Union, the nation needed more time to prepare. The understanding reached between Germany and the Soviet Union was mutually convenient but did not stop either pursuing relationships with other states. Feeling susceptible in the wake of the civil war, and still labelled an outsider in the wake of the revolution, the Soviet Union had a great deal to gain by making friends in Europe. By the end of the 1920s the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, had established friendly relations with most Western powers and acceptance by the international community.
The Soviet Union needed all the friends it could get in 1931 when a rabidly anti-Communist Japan with imperial ambitions moved up to its border, and occupied Manchuria. However, the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany caused Stalin most concern and by 1935 he had overseen the signing of non-aggression pacts with Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, joined the League of Nations and concluded a treaty of mutual assistance with France. Germany responded by signing a pact with Italy and Japan in 1936, which condemned international Communism as a movement that sought to ‘disintegrate and subdue existing States . . . [and] not only endangers their internal peace and social well-being, but is also a menace to the peace of the world . . .’
This Anti-Comintern Pact was built on Hitler’s obvious hatred of the Soviet Union, as stated in Mein Kampf and vocalized in his increasingly bellicose speeches against Moscow, to make armed confrontation increasingly likely. Both nations were militarized and both postured to make clear their willingness to use violence in support of a political cause – Stalin countered Hitler’s 1937 jibe that ‘the conquest of Russia will prove a straight-forward task for our forces’ with ‘German aggression is typical of weak states’ – but Germany had the political, industrial and military momentum to make war first. Despite Stalin’s disinclination to show goodwill towards Hitler, the resultant diminution in the Soviet Union’s military prowess during the purges in 1937 necessitated that he swallow his pride. His overtures, however, were briskly rebuffed by Hitler, which forced Stalin to explore other options. Yet even with the threats to European security mounting, the Soviet Union’s political ideology was not one that sent the West rushing to Stalin’s side. Extremely limited military cooperation was agreed, but there was no integrated plan for defence against Nazi expansion.
The fragility of the relationship was thrown into stark relief during the summer of 1938. Although both the Soviet Union and France had treaty agreements with Czechoslovakia, pledging them to the country’s defence, Stalin stood alone in his advocacy of concerted military action. Furthermore, no Soviet delegation was invited to the Munich conference at which the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany. The Soviet Ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, astutely observed that international relations were entering an ‘era of brute force, savagery and the policy of the mailed fist’. There was no ‘collective security’ in Europe and Hitler could exploit this.
Could it have been that the West used Nazism to keep Communism in check? Stalin thought so for when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, he condemned the appeasers as ‘conniving in aggression, giving free rein to war . . . The policy of non-intervention reveals an eagerness, a desire, not to hinder the aggressors in their nefarious work.’ Yet although exasperated by the West, the Soviet Union was not in a position to give up on some sort of security agreement with it. Thus, on 17 April 1939, the Soviet Union offered Britain and France an alliance that would guarantee the integrity of every state from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and bring all three powers into war if any of the states were attacked by Germany. Despite Stalin’s insistence that there was pressing need for an agreement, an Anglo-French delegation did not arrive in Russia to discuss a military pact until 10 August, and then Moscow was disgusted to find out that its delegates did not have the authority to sign official documents. A frustrated Voroshilov, unclear about whether the West would commit to plans to thwart Germany and apply military force, wrote ‘without clear and unambiguous answers to these questions, further negotiations are pointless’. But Britain and France did not want to ally themselves with the Soviets and risk provoking Hitler. They had deep-seated fears that Stalin could not be trusted and would stand by as Germany made a push for Paris, using the time to mobilize. There is little doubt that Stalin did see the West as drawing at least some of the Wehrmacht’s sting, but only as part of a two-fronted war. With no understanding having been reached, the Soviet Union was facing a precarious isolation.
Considering Berlin’s rejection of his blandishments just months earlier, Stalin received Germany’s reopening of the channels of communication in the spring of 1939 with some surprise. Negotiations began with the highly receptive Vyacheslav Molotov, the new Soviet Foreign Minister. On 19 August an economic agreement was signed in Moscow, which provided for the Soviets to send grain and raw materials to Germany in exchange for industrial machinery and finished products. Then, four days later, a non-aggression pact was sealed, which provided Stalin with the time he needed to make his defensive preparations while, critically, providing the potential to create a buffer against Germany if a large enough portion of Poland could be consolidated after the agreed joint invasion. This remarkable turn of events shocked the world and led Winston Churchill to write later: ‘The sinister news broke upon the world like an explosion.’ Once the necessary documents had been signed the deal was celebrated with a cocktail party. Having toasted the absent German Chancellor, Stalin turned to Ribbentrop and said, ‘The Soviet Union is very serious about the new pact. I give you my word of honour that the Soviet Union will not cheat on its partner.’ Hitler, meanwhile, sipped a glass of champagne and, turning to his private secretary, Martin Bormann, said, ‘Europe is mine!’ The Führer was convinced that the strategic momentum was with him, but Stalin believed that Hitler had slipped up. ‘I know what Hitler’s up to,’ he smirked to Molotov. ‘He thinks he has outsmarted me, but actually it is I who have outsmarted him.’ The true victor of this positional shadow boxing was a matter of conjecture, but what both leaders recognized at the end of August 1939 was that war between Germany and the Soviet Union had been postponed, not cancelled.
The non-aggression pact was signed just days before Germany began its eastern expansion. It marked the beginning of a period during which Stalin increasingly tried to convince himself that Berlin’s actions were reasonable despite evidence to the contrary. Thus, rather than viewing Hitler’s invasion of Poland as a worrying development, he joined in, explaining to a colleague on 7 September that it was to the Soviet Union’s advantage:
A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries . . . for the redivision of the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other . . . Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system . . . We can manoeuvre, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible . . . The annihilation [of Poland] would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with! What would be the harm if as a result of the rout of Poland we were to extend the socialist system onto new territories and populations?
Giving the order for the Soviet troops to begin their part in the offensive, however, must have been difficult for Moscow. How would the purged army perform? Would the Wehrmacht and Red Army make a common border in Poland with equanimity? Stalin did not authorize his one-million-man advance until 17 September, late enough to ensure that the Poles were well beaten, but early enough to make a grab for the spoils. It was a sensible decision. The Red Army faced minimal resistance and, by 24 September, had reached the agreed demarcation line and brought their area under control for the loss of just 3,500 casualties. The successful operation reassured Stalin that his armed forces remained a useful political tool. Indeed, overlooking the many and various weaknesses of the enemy they were fighting, the relative ease with which the Red Army had completed its business may even have given Stalin an overly optimistic perception of what they were capable of achieving. Thus while Moscow reported a ‘convincing performance . . . which revealed that the capabilities of the army were assured’, Polish reports revealed ‘poorly motivated’ troops and officers with a ‘low standard of intelligence and slovenly appearance’. A school report for the Soviet forces might have read: ‘Steady, but with plenty of room for improvement’, but Stalin was not content to allow them the time and space in which to absorb the lessons of the campaign. He threw them into another far more exacting test.
Keen to ensure that Finland could not be used as a launch pad for a German attack against him, Stalin requested that Helsinki allow him to station Soviet troops on Finnish soil. That highly provocative act reflected the confidence he had drawn from the Polish campaign, and from recent success against the Japanese in a border dispute battle at Khalkin Gol. The Finns’ refusal led to an invasion, and although Voroshilov had assured Stalin it would be successful, within a week of being launched on 30 November, it quickly faltered. Attacking on a broad 1000 mile front with some 450,000 men, 2000 tanks and 1000 aircraft, the Soviets’ offensive ability to conduct mobile operations was soon shown to be wanting. Running into well-established Finnish defences in the south, for example, they were stalled. The Soviets were poorly prepared for fighting against static defences in cold weather. Their equipment and weaponry were outdated, their fighting methods looked inappropriate and their political officers proved to be a hindrance. Soviet infantryman Georgy Uritski recalls:
It was a winter that I have tried to erase from my memory. A terrible experience. Many of us had received little training and had only the vaguest idea of what was expected of us. My company was wiped out. Attacking a Finnish position without artillery support, we were cut to tiny pieces. Again and again we attacked until we ran out of men . . . My life was spared, but I lost my right hand . . . The snow was steeped in the blood of the fallen. It was a travesty, a waste of so many young lives.
Stalin had overestimated the abilities of his forces and paid the price during that winter, when there was little forward movement. However, a new and successful offensive was launched by General Semyen Timoshenko on 11 February 1940 after a period of reorganization and a dramatic improvement in firepower. The Finns sued for peace on 6 March, but its acceptance by Stalin reveals what a struggle the campaign had been for the Soviet Union. The Finns suffered around 90,000 casualties, but it cost the Red Army over half a million men and achieved a small fraction of Moscow’s territorial aims. In the first major post-purge campaign, the Soviet Union had revealed to the world a feeble offensive capability, and had been obliged to use brute force finally to overcome the Finnish defences. As Uritski noted:
Looking back – from a soldier’s perspective – we were not prepared for what was to come. Events were moving too fast for us, we were pushed too far, too fast. In military affairs such mistakes are paid for in a very sad way.
The experience in Finland led to a series of military reforms in an attempt to mitigate some of the most obvious failings. Initiated by Timoshenko, the man of the moment, who was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union and replaced Voroshilov as People’s Commissar for Defence, the improvements encompassed practical winter clothing and fighting equipment, more effective all-arms cooperation and enhanced military education. These were essential developments if the colossal Soviet military machine was to rediscover its fighting prowess, but in such a recently retarded organization it would take a couple of years before they bore fruit. Thus, while pursuing the skills and assets required for a more sophisticated way of fighting, the Soviets would endeavour to make the best of what they had and keep things simple. As Voroshilov explained in a memorandum: ‘We must ensure that the tenacity and flexibility of the Soviet soldier is exploited and our frontier defences are strengthened. Together they form a formidable barrier to any aggressor.’ This approach seems commonsensical, but it was founded on flawed logic. Using strong defences close to the new German–Soviet border to defeat enemy skirmishers may have given time for the mass of the peasant-worker army to mobilize before unleashing a massive counterattack, but what if there were no skirmishers? Blitzkrieg had no place for them, and recent events suggested that a Wehrmacht attack against the Soviet Union would open with a full-blooded armoured assault supported by air power.
The building of defences had started in the 1920s with the Stalin Line, which was developed close to the western border. In 1936 efforts were begun to update and strengthen the system by incorporating natural features, such as rivers, marshes and hills, as well as by the construction of camouflaged concrete emplacements, forts, field works, tank traps and killing zones. These improvements were not completed until the summer of 1940, by which time the Stalin Line was no longer on the Soviet Union’s western border. The new Polish territory in the west was a useful defensive cushion but come that summer was not Stalin’s only land-grab. Exploiting the ongoing redefinition of national boundaries, Stalin annexed Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the north along with Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (part of Romania) in the south. In so doing, he provided the Soviet Union with extra width and depth but also denuded his frontier of defences as the Stalin Line was rendered impotent. Indeed, one might argue that Hitler had cleverly drawn the Red Army out of its defences by enticing its leader forward with the prospects of Soviet aggrandisement. If so, then Moscow fell head-first into a brilliant trap for, in June 1940, Stalin demanded the fortification of these newly occupied areas despite the distinct possibility of a German strike before the defences’ completion. The construction of the 800 mile long Molotov Line used resources from the Stalin Line, which became a fallback position, but there was no defence in depth to catch and slow the German thrust. Moreover, the Soviet strategy of static positional warfare followed by counterattack was not dissimilar to that utilized in northwestern Europe and thoroughly defeated by the Wehrmacht even as work on the Molotov Line began.
But in the early summer of 1940 the Soviets had decided on a course of action and the preparation of defences required every week that Stalin could buy them. In such circumstances, Moscow was extremely careful not to antagonize Hitler and went out of its way to ensure that their August 1939 trade agreement was adhered to. Between January 1940 and June 1941, Stalin supplied Hitler with 2 million tons of petroleum products, 648,000 tons of wood, 26,000 tons of chromium, 140,000 tons of manganese ore, 14,000 tons of copper, 100,000 tons of cotton, 1.5 million tons of timber, almost 1.5 million tons of grain and much more besides. The value of these resources to Germany’s war-making capability is difficult to overexaggerate. The High Command’s war economy staff went so far as to say that further campaigning was ‘only possible with continued access to oil and mineral deposits’. Stalin’s assets would allow Germany to fight beyond the summer of 1941 while any further campaigning would have to be sustained by seizing resource-rich territory. Hitler’s timetable for attacking the Soviet Union was, therefore, largely dictated by the rate at which he could accumulate Soviet resources with which to carry out the invasion.
Stalin could not have been anything other than aware that he was strengthening the German threat, but he was caught in another trap and chose to sacrifice the lesser for the greater. Time was the most precious commodity to the Soviet Union and so deliveries were made in full and on time despite the heavy burden this placed on the Soviet system. Moreover, it was done despite increasing German disinclination to fulfil its part of the deal and share its advanced military technologies. Sensing Stalin’s predicament, Hitler did not feel the need to advantage his enemy, particularly as he had his own concerns about a Soviet pre-emptive strike.
Time was running out and with France defeated and the British sidelined, Stalin recognized that the Soviet Union would have to face the ideological and military wrath of Germany alone.
Map 4: Voronezh Front, 4–8 July 1943