A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

20 War

From the very beginning the Soviet leadership expected an invasion sooner or later. This conviction grew from the actual situation of the Soviet Union since the revolution, the experience of intervention and hostility of almost all other states, and also from their analysis of the world. For they expected not just an attack on their own country but a war among the western powers as well, and thought it likely that the war in the West would come first. Their analysis of the world came from Lenin’s view of the most recent stage of capitalism, which he understood to be the period of imperialism. He believed that the First World War was the result of the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of massive semi-monopolistic corporations and banks, which in turn led to a speeded up competition for markets and resources. The result was the division of the world among great empires, and the desire of the late-comers in that process, Germany in particular, to re-divide the world. Thus, even without the existence of the USSR, another war was inevitable. Stalin and the Soviet elite accepted this conception of the world without any doubts, and their own historic experience in the First World War, as well as their observation of the various rivalries in the world after 1918, only strengthened their conviction. At the same time they realized that the differences (“contradictions”) among the capitalist powers might be temporarily shelved in an anti-Communist alliance or that one or more of the western powers might be strong enough to attack them on its own. Until 1933 the principle threat seemed to come from the British Empire, the apparently hegemonic power of the time. The Red Army constructed its war plans on the assumption that an attack would come from Poland and Rumania with British (and perhaps French) backing or even participation. The de facto military arrangements with Weimar Germany were designed in part to obstruct such an eventuality. When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January of 1933, the Soviets confronted an entirely new situation.

At first the Soviets were not excessively concerned. Since 1928 the Comintern had predicted a new crisis of capitalism, and the Depression seemed to bear out that prediction. The Soviet leadership, like many other observers, was not convinced that the Nazis were really much different from other reactionary German groups that had supported restoration of the Kaiser and suppression of the left parties. Anti-Semitism, the parades, and the uniforms, all seemed to be just trappings to deceive the naïve, not symptoms of a more serious and sinister purpose. Though Hitler eliminated the German Communist Party (and the Socialists) in a matter of months, the Soviets were still convinced that Hitler’s support was limited and his regime unstable. The 1934 purge of the Storm Troopers seemed to confirm this picture, and Soviet propaganda as well as internal discussion stressed the alleged unpopularity of Hitler’s economic and other programs with the German working class. At the same time, the Soviets noted the rearmament of Germany and its increasingly aggressive tone in international affairs. Late in 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, a step both symbolic and practical, especially as Hitler had taken Germany out of the League the year before. Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov used the League as one of his principle stages on which to proclaim the need for the Western powers to make an agreement with the USSR to oppose Hitler.

Talk of opposing Hitler from the Soviets was not merely a gesture, for the Soviet Union now possessed a new army, much more powerful than the old-fashioned Red Army of the 1920s. Two factors were crucial in the transformation of the army. One was the pre-1933 cooperation with the army of the Weimar republic, which provided the Red Army with a complete picture of the most recent developments in military technology and organization. The turn of Western armies toward motorized units, tanks, and aircraft was perfectly clear, yet in 1928 the Red Army still relied on cavalry and infantry armed with rifles and machine guns. Even artillery was inadequate. The second factor was the first five-year plan. The five-year plan originally called for quite considerable increases in military production, but the highly charged atmosphere of world politics (the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931) impelled Stalin to raise the targets for military production even higher. In the next year, the Soviet Union produced four thousand tanks, an immense number by the standards of the time, and they reflected sophisticated designs, both foreign and Soviet. The same enormous effort was put into aircraft production, particularly of heavy bombers. These modern weapons reflected the military doctrine of the Soviet army staff, particularly that of Tukhachevskii, who believed that modern wars would be decided by fast mechanized and armored units as well as long-range aerial bombing. By 1935 the USSR had one of the most advanced armies in the world. Its only limitation was size, for budgetary constraints kept the standing army relatively small.

With this new army in the background, Stalin and the Soviet leaders still had to confront an increasingly dangerous world situation. The most important consequences of the new situation created by Hitler and his allies were the new policies enunciated at Geneva by Litvinov and also a sharp turn in the strategy of the Comintern. At the Seventh Comintern Conference in 1935 the Bulgarian Communist leader Georgii Dimitrov announced the new policy: the Popular Front. The new policy abandoned the attacks on the Socialists as agents of the ruling class and the orientation toward revolution, putting in its place the demand for Communists to make an alliance with the Socialists and indeed any group opposed to fascism for the purpose of preventing the extension of fascist power. At the same time the Soviet state began to try to form alliances with Western powers, signing mutual aid pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in May of 1935. Soviet relations with Britain, however, remained poor, and Hitler was on the march: in 1936 he remilitarized the Rhineland to thundering silence from London and Paris. A few months later the Civil War broke out in Spain with General Francisco Franco’s revolt against the Republic, now governed by a popular front elected by the people. Soviet reaction was initially cautious, as they feared that overt aid to the Republic would provoke intervention by the Western powers on the side of the monarchist-fascist rebels. Hitler and Mussolini soon solved that problem, for their supplies of troops and munitions gave the Soviets an opening. Stalin also sent tanks, aircraft, and many officers to Spain through the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean. In Spain, Stalin and the Comintern followed the popular front strategy, the Spanish Communists being instructed that they were not to make revolution but to continue to ally with the Socialists and Liberals to support the Republic. The Spanish situation revealed the limits of that strategy, for Stalin also wanted the Communists to control things as much as possible and insisted on eliminating the Trotskyists and Anarchists, powerful especially in Barcelona. In the long run, neither the Popular Front strategy nor Soviet aid and interference made much difference. The Spanish Republic succumbed to brute force and was extinguished by the end of 1938.

The defeat of the Republic only increased the danger for the USSR. The lack of enthusiasm on the part of Western powers for the Spanish Republic only revealed – in Stalin’s mind – the increasing chances of his nightmare scenario, a four-power pact that included Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, which would be directed against the Soviet Union. And Hitler continued to move. In 1936–37 Germany, Japan, and Italy signed the “Anti-Comintern Pact,” forming the alliance that came to known as the Axis. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, again causing no reaction from Britain and France, and soon began to make demands on Czechoslovakia, the only power in Eastern Europe with a substantial and modern armed force. For the Soviets as well as Europe as a whole, this was a crisis.

Soviet actions were stymied by two factors. One was the generally pro-German policy of Poland, which controlled the corridors through which any Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia had to pass. The other factor was the suspicion on the part of the Western powers, especially Britain – both of the Soviet Union in general and the capacities of the Red Army in particular. The Soviet mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia hinged on cooperation, which was not forthcoming from Paris. In the days leading up to the final crisis at Munich, the Soviets did actually begin to mobilize the Red Army in secret, but all was in vain. Chamberlain surrendered the Czechs to Hitler in what from the Soviet point of view was a four-power pact. Such a pact, in their view, must be directed against the Soviet Union.

In this situation the Soviet leadership, convinced that war was coming, moved to its other possible strategy, making a deal with Hitler. Off and on since 1933 the Soviets had put out feelers to Berlin, but nothing had come of them. Early in 1939 discussions with the Nazis suddenly became serious, and the attitudes in London and Paris propelled them forward. Though Chamberlain began to realize that Hitler was a threat, he was not willing to discuss a serious agreement with Stalin. In the summer of 1939 a British mission to Moscow explored the possibilities of cooperation, but when Commissar of Defense Voroshilov asked for specifics on military cooperation, the British could reply only that they had no instructions. The result was the German-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939, signed in Moscow by Ribbentrop and Molotov, now Litvinov’s replacement as Commissar of Foreign Affairs.

The pact unleashed Hitler to attack Poland, which brought declarations of war against Germany from Britain and France. The German invasion of Poland was so successful and so quick that Stalin was caught off-guard. He was also preoccupied with the Japanese probing attack on Mongolia at the end of August, thrown back at Khalkhin Gol by some hundred thousand Soviet troops. Though the pact implied a partition of Poland, it had not included any delimitation of frontiers. The Red Army hurriedly marched into the eastern territories of the Polish state inhabited mainly by Belorussians and Ukrainians, annexing the new territories to the respective Soviet republics. The Communists quickly established Soviet institutions and deported the Poles in the area. Most went to camps or as “special settlers” to Siberia and Kazakhstan, but the army officers, police, and other officials were executed in the camp at Katyn forest and elsewhere early in 1940.

The pact also put the Baltic states into the Soviet sphere of influence. Stalin moved quickly to assert control over the area, in the process awarding the city of Vilnius to Lithuania, a city then almost entirely Polish and Jewish in population. By 1940, control was sufficient that the three states were incorporated into the USSR as Soviet republics, after “popular assemblies” went through the ceremony of “requesting” incorporation. Stalin thought his western border was now secure except for one area: Finland.

The Finnish-Soviet border was the result of the internationalization of an internal border of the Russian empire. When Russia annexed Finland in 1809, the Karelian isthmus to the west of St. Petersburg had been part of the Russian Empire for a hundred years, but in a concession to the Finns, was reunited with the rest of Finland. By 1918, at the time of Finnish independence, this meant that the border was only a short tram ride away from the center of Petrograd. The border had been a problem for Soviet military planners ever since, and Stalin decide to fix it. He proposed to the Finnish government a deal, giving the USSR control of strategic islands near the coast and moving the border some kilometers west in return for territory in the far north. The Finns decided that this was a ploy to take control of the country and refused. Thus began the Winter War, in which the small but well-trained and enthusiastic Finnish army held off the Soviets for several months, eliciting support from Britain and other Western powers that allowed them to draw public attention from the “phony war” along Germany’s western boundary. After many setbacks and heavy casualties, the Soviets finally got their army together and defeated the Finns, leaving an impression of incompetence that only encouraged their future enemies in Berlin. In the wake of the war, Stalin replaced the Commissar of Defense, his old Civil War crony Voroshilov, with S. T. Timoshenko, a professional military officer who quickly proceeded to reform the army and speed up its re-equipment.

Thus by 1940 the Soviet western frontier had moved hundreds of miles west, and Stalin and Timoshenko had bought some time to put the armed forces in order. This was a huge task, one that had many complications. In 1935 the Soviets had realized that they had the ability and need to finally turn the Red Army into a mass army with a peacetime strength of one-and-a-half million men; in 1939, Stalin ordered an increase in the size of the army to three million. The expansion followed in short order, but the inevitable result was that the soldiers, and particularly the officers, were poorly trained and inexperienced. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and junior officers were only a step away from the villages. For many soldiers, their rifle was the first really modern piece of equipment that they had ever seen. The army purge of 1937–38 only made things worse, especially at the level of high command. Here lay the explanation of the army’s poor performance in the Winter War. Furthermore, the army’s equipment was no longer up-to-date. After the great push in the early 1930s, Soviet military production had stagnated and new designs were not forthcoming. Thus the appearance of the German Messerschmidt fighter over Spain in 1937 was a great shock to the Red Air Force, for their best planes were no match for it. German tank technology was moving quickly as well, and all this came at just the moment when the Soviet design bureaus and the armed forces were paralyzed by the purges. Starting in 1938, new designs came into being, but they had to be tested and then put into mass production. Thus by the summer of 1941, the USSR had the first of its modern weapons, the Ilushin-2 ground attack fighter, the T-34 and KV tanks, and the Katiusha rocket artillery. The tanks and rockets were way ahead of the German equivalents, but there were not nearly enough of them or of any modern aircraft.

As the Soviet factories furiously put the new weapons into production and the army struggled with the problems created by rapid expansion and new borders, Hitler was planning his assault. In 1940 he had overrun France and the Balkans. He had failed in the Battle of Britain to bring the English to their knees, but the British Empire, dangerously overstretched by the need to defend the Far East and the Mediterranean as well as the home islands, seemed to the Führer doomed. He would turn his attention to Russia.

All through the winter Wehrmacht units moved east into Rumania, Finland, and what had been Poland. Hitler’s tactical intelligence was excellent, for he knew exactly where the Soviet units were stationed, their strength, and their defensive positions. What he did not know, or even care about, was the economic and military potential of the USSR. To Hitler, the Soviet state was simply a Jewish-Mongol horde that would fly apart at the first blows. His generals, who thought in terms of the Russia of 1914, were only slightly less contemptuous of the enemy. Stalin was perfectly aware of the German moves, for his spy network was just as good as Hitler’s. His interpretation of the German moves, however, was completely wrong. Stalin never fully grasped the radicalism of the Nazi regime, still seeing it in the light of older German rightist movements, or perhaps as a German version of Mussolini’s fascism. He also was convinced that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he had defeated Britain, for Stalin could not imagine that Hitler would be stupid enough to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake and fight a war on two fronts at the same time. Thus Stalin interpreted the troop movements as a bluff: he expected that Hitler would hold off for a year or two, and in the meantime perhaps try to bluff the Soviets into delivering much needed raw materials to the Reich. His worst fear was that Soviet troops along the border might provoke Hitler too soon; hence he ordered them to ignore German overflights and other suspicious actions. Soviet military intelligence believed differently, but when their reports reached their top commanders, they were shelved as not consistent with the policy and analysis that emanated from the Kremlin. Nevertheless, in April 1941, Stalin ordered nearly a million additional men mobilized under the cover of large-scale maneuvers and he moved more troops west. The Red Army now had a theoretical strength of some five million men. Only in the last days before the war were orders issued to put some of the troops into a state of greater readiness: the night before the invasion Timoshenko ordered the air force to disperse the planes on the air strips so that they would not make an easy target. Only the Odessa military district obeyed the orders, for even in Stalin’s Russia, commands from the center did not necessarily get through in time or call forth instant obedience.

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, at first light – 3:30 in the morning – Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, named after the medieval German warrior emperor. Some three million German soldiers crossed the border, together with nearly a million allies, Finns, Rumanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Italians, and small volunteer and collaborationist units from nearly every country in Europe, including neutral ones like Sweden (SS Nordland). Hitler’s army was fresh from victory all over the continent, from Norway to Greece, backed by an economic machine greater than that of the USSR (if not by much) and the resources of occupied Europe. Facing them were the five million men in the Soviet armed forces, but almost half of them were either deployed far in the rear or were still only in the process of formation and training. In addition to being caught in the middle of mobilization and learning to use new equipment, the Soviet forces were placed too close to the border and were easy targets for the Luftwaffe and the German armor. The placement was a relic of the long-standing offensive orientation of the Soviet army, which assumed that soon after an attack the Soviet forces would move to make a series of deep incursions into enemy territory to spoil the attack as the Red Army moved to full mobilization. To make things worse, the Soviets erred in predicting the main direction of the German attack. Until 1940 all Soviet war plans had assumed that the German army would attack directly east through Belorussia toward Moscow, as indeed turned out to be the case. In 1940, however, Timoshenko, the new chief of staff general Georgii Zhukov, and Stalin had decided that Hitler would more likely strike south into the Ukraine. Along the central axis there were only farms and large forests, while the Ukraine was still the most important industrial area of the USSR and a major agricultural region to boot. Surely Hitler would go for needed resources. Thousands of troops were moved south into the Ukraine.

Instead the main blow came directly forward the east. German armor repeated its tactics from France and slashed through Soviet defenses along the main roads and rail lines, pushing deep into the country. Lithuania and much of western Belorussia fell in days. The Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force on the ground in the first few days, leaving the army with no air cover and no ability to move without German knowledge. With the weight of the German advance directed toward the center, the Soviet front was overrun within weeks and nearly a million and a half Soviet soldiers found themselves in captivity. Almost none of them survived, for the Germans, as part of their racial policies, chose not to feed them and simply let them die. To the north and south, the Germans advanced almost as swiftly, and by the end of the summer they were at Kiev and the gates of Leningrad.

Conditions on the Soviet side of the front were chaotic as poorly designed communications collapsed under the onslaught, command posts were destroyed, and large bodies of Soviet troops desperately tried to retreat east. The Soviet commander in Belorussia was out of communication with his men as well as with Moscow for days. The orders from Moscow at first followed the old and now utterly irrelevant scheme of counterattack against the invaders. Local commanders were lucky if they never got the orders and just followed their instincts. Some units fought to the end, others until food and ammunition ran out. The next orders from Moscow were to hold on long after the situation was hopeless, and commanders who led their troops out of entrapment found themselves under suspicion or worse for retreating without orders. In July Stalin ordered the trial and execution of a number of the generals whose armies had been destroyed in the first weeks of the war.

Fortunately Stalin and army leadership did more than look for scapegoats. On the second day of the war Stalin set up a State Defense Committee headed by himself, soon replacing Timoshenko with himself also as People’s Commissar of Defense, and additionally he became the head of the High Command and formal supreme commander of the armed forces. Zhukov remained as chief of staff. Stalin thus took personal responsibility for the whole conduct of the war. He learned to work with Zhukov and the other generals, but his was the final decision in all matters. Sometimes his orders led to more defeats, but ultimately they led to victory. He had, more than ever, supreme power. The mobilization of the army continued, and became even more essential with the loss of millions of men over the first summer of war. As the situation at the front deteriorated, the government began to evacuate industry from the Ukraine and Leningrad and other areas threatened by the advancing Nazis. In the short run this meant a fall in military production just as the Wehrmacht was capturing and destroying masses of Soviet equipment. Ultimately it was a crucial and a heroic effort, for tens of thousands of men and machines and their families had to move thousands of miles east to the Urals and Siberia, and then build factory buildings to house the equipment, build housing for themselves, and start production on vital goods as quickly as possible. Not just factories were evacuated: the kolhoz and state farms were ordered to move their cattle and other larger animals to the east as well. Huge herds of thousands of cattle moved through the cities, prodded along by women from the villages heading toward the east.

In September the Germans began the final advance toward Moscow, sure of victory. Hitler even considered that he could soon send troops to help Mussolini in the Mediterranean. As the Nazis advanced, Soviet armies to the west of Moscow were ordered to hold on and hundreds of thousands were encircled and perished, but their deaths bought time. Time was of the essence, for the Germans had no conception of Soviet resources. Their pre-invasion intelligence had underestimated the size of the Red Army at the moment of the attack by nearly a third, by one hundred divisions. Even in the first weeks German commanders in the field were surprised to find that new Soviet units suddenly appeared where they thought that resistance had been smashed. Yet as the autumn advanced, German victory seemed assured: in October the foreign embassies and most of the Soviet government evacuated east to Kuibyshev (Samara) on the Volga. Only the announcement that Stalin was still in Moscow and did not intend to leave staved off panic in the capital. On November 7, he appeared on the Lenin Mauseoleum on Red Square as in previous years to review the parade in honor of the October Revolution, a major Soviet ritual. This time the soldiers marched past in the snow straight to the front. German reconnaissance units began to appear on the outskirts of the city, around and inside the ring highways that encircle it today. The government formed volunteer units of students, older office and factory workers, and sent them to the front to fill the gaps torn by the attackers. Yet the situation was better than it appeared. As the Germans plowed on toward Moscow, the Soviets had formed a substantial strategic reserve, part of which now moved west of the city to meet the Nazis. Now for the first time the Germans were halted, for the apparently seamless advance to the east had in fact cost the Wehrmacht dearly. German casualties were greater than the German losses for all campaigns of the war until the invasion of the USSR. German armor had lost thousands of tanks to enemy fire, and many were inoperable from the wear and tear of Russian conditions or out of ammunition. German engines and automatic weapons froze in the cold. Unlike the Russians they had not thought how to keep them working at night temperatures of forty below freezing. Even the Luftwaffe, which had ruled the skies in the first months, was taking rapidly mounting losses as newly built Soviet aircraft with newly trained pilots filled the gaps left by the massive losses of the summer. In early December, the Red Army counterattacked, pushing the Germans away from Moscow and far to the west, inflicting (and taking) massive casualties. By the end of January 1942, the Nazis had lost nearly a million men and four thousand tanks, half of them in the final battle for Moscow. The Soviets had stopped the Wehrmacht, the first time any army had done so since 1939.

While the Red Army’s losses were horrific, the German losses were ultimately crippling. Germany lacked the population of the Soviet Union, and its superbly functioning industry had not been used to prepare supplies for a war on this scale. The German army at Moscow lacked winter clothes not just because Hitler had assumed a rapid victory but also because he had not counted on the massive expenditure of supplies and the need to fully mobilize to counter Soviet industry. He had no idea that the Soviets could produce far more tanks and aircraft than Germany from a smaller industrial base. By early 1942 the evacuated Soviet industries had come back into production and began to turn out equipment in numbers Germany could not match. This equipment was also superior to the German, especially the tanks, the rocket artillery and many of the aircraft. Now the Soviets had to learn how to use it properly, but they had already inflicted a major strategic defeat from which Germany did not have the resources to recover. Germany could no longer defeat the Soviet Union, although Hitler had no intention of stopping.

The German invasion was not only a military conflict but also a political conflict as well. Stalin saw the war in political terms, as he did everything else, and as in the case of the conduct of war, it took him some time to understand what he was dealing with. He made no statement at first, ordering Molotov to make the formal announcement of war on June 22, several hours after the invasion. Stalin’s first speech came on July 3 and reflected his determination to fight, for he ordered a scorched earth policy in the path of the German invaders and called on Soviet citizens to form partisan units. The old illusions still remained, for he asserted that the Nazis were coming to restore tsarism and the rule of the landed gentry. Though he also stated that the Germans wanted to destroy the culture and statehood of the Soviet peoples, his description of the Nazi aims missed the essential truth. The Wehrmacht and its European allies were paving the way for the extermination of the great majority of the Russian and other Slavic peoples and the colonization of the territory by Germans, the famous “Lebensraum” that Hitler had wanted from the beginning. Yet Stalin concluded with a ringing declaration that the German people, enslaved by the Nazi leaders, would be an ally. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The extermination began in the first days. The orders to the German troops had been that all “representatives of the Soviet way of life” were to be eliminated, and that no food was to be given to soldiers or civilians out of any misguided sense of humanity. These orders applied to Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet citizens and were behind the destruction of Soviet prisoners of war. The extermination of the Jews also followed the first German victories, for Einsatzgruppen began to round up Jews in occupied territory, the first large-scale massacre taking place in Kaunas on June 25, 1941, with the enthusiastic participation of the local Lithuanian population. Ultimately two million of the five million European Jews who perished in the holocaust were Soviet citizens. Contrary to Stalin’s expectations, Hitler did not restore the pre-soviet order, keeping the collective farms since they made it easy for the Germans to extract grain and meat from the population. The remaining factories went to German businessmen, though sabotage by the workers meant that few really went back into production. Any remaining Russians, elite or otherwise, were to become the slaves of the Reich and were to be prepared for that role. Most schools closed and the Germans frequently hanged the teachers as “representatives of the Soviet way of life.”

Figure 20. The Ilyushin 2m3 (Shturmovik). Designed as a ground attack aircraft, the two-seater bomber was the Soviet Union’s most effective warplane.

The thousands of soldiers who had been surrounded by the Germans but escaped captivity formed a new menace to the invaders. In the huge forests of Belorussia, the northern parts of the Ukraine, and western Russia they took refuge, collected food and weapons, and formed partisan units. The partisans began to attract local peasants as well, and to attack German communications and transport. By the fall of 1941, the disruption to the rail network was considerable, seriously reducing the output of the already desperately overstretched German supply routes. By the end of the next year there were nearly a half million partisans under arms, and they controlled substantial areas where the Nazis could not move. The Soviet command established a central partisan staff to supply them by air, sending over old and slow but sturdy and hard to detect biplanes that could land on a dime in forest clearings. Hitler’s army reacted to the partisan attacks with vicious brutality, exterminating village after village – men, women, and children – where they suspected contact with partisan units. Collaborationist units from all over Europe and the western territories of the USSR were often more savage than the Germans in dealing with the population of the partisan areas.

Still in Soviet hands but gripped by the vice of the German and Finnish armies was Leningrad. The Germans and their allies had reached the outskirts of the city in September, and from then on the only road was over Lake Ladoga. Around the city were substantial numbers of Soviet troops, but the Germans lacked the resources to take it by assault, so they hoped instead to starve it out. Hitler planned to have it destroyed when he won, as a place of no use to the new Reich. Without effective means of replacement and further reduced by German bombing, food supplies dropped rapidly and starvation began. By mid-winter ten to twenty thousand people were dying every month. Heat and electricity virtually disappeared, all with continuing German shelling and bombing to make things worse. Only workers in the few remaining factories – almost all now devoted to weapons and other war production – had anything close to adequate rations. Fortunately the lake froze, and some supplies could come in over the “Ice Road.” The authorities had to improvise, opening stations in food stores that served only hot water or tea substitutes just to keep people a bit warmer. During the next summer the improvised transportation across the lake improved, but by the time the Red Army raised the siege in January, 1944, some eight hundred thousand people had starved to death.

In Leningrad many of the factories had been evacuated before the Germans came, and more were evacuated in 1942. They were part of the massive move of Soviet industry to the east, and the population went as well, in the tens of millions all across the country. The Soviets evacuated ordinary people and groups of children as well as officials. Indeed officials were often required to stay behind to form resistance groups, and those who tried to get out ahead of the Germans, as in the Moscow panic of October 1941, found themselves stopped by the NKVD and even the local populace. Virtually everything and everyone in the country was part of the war effort, a degree of mobilization unknown even in Germany. Women not only staffed the hospitals and took care of orphan children, but they also fought in the army. Anti-aircraft regiments were mostly female, pitting young women just out of high school against the Luftwaffe. In the army, radio operators were women as were other auxiliary positions, and women also made up a fighter regiment and two bomber regiments, including a night bomber unit. Altogether over half a million women served in the armed forces. The intelligentsia went to war as well, not only scientists and engineers. The Soviets evacuated the universities, research institutes, and theaters. Artists and writers who had lived in fear through the 1930s found themselves on transport planes coming out of Leningrad with fighter escorts. Moved east to Siberia and Central Asia, they continued to work, producing major works like Eisenstein’s epic movie Ivan the Terrible, filmed in Kakazhstan, or Shostakovich’s Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony, finished at Kuibyshev on the Volga. Their work contributed immensely to the morale of the population, not only by their content but also by the simple fact that something normal was still taking place. In the rear food was spartan if generally unfailing, and housing often meant several families crammed into a school classroom. Workers who had come east with their factories lived in tents in the Siberian winter while they built buildings and barracks in which to live, sometimes starting work in new buildings before the roofs were built. Yet most who remembered the war remembered it as a time of privation and sorrow mixed with enthusiasm and the warmth of solidarity. Stalin had greatly overestimated the extent of discontent among the population, and while his agents read mail and listened in on telephone conversations in search of German sympathizers, most people just went to work to help the army, whatever their views of the ultimate value of the Soviet system.

The victory at Moscow encouraged Stalin and the generals to try to exploit their success, and early in 1942 they mounted a series of attacks from Khar’kov in the south to well north of Moscow. All of these offensives were costly failures. The Germans were pushed back here and there, but with heavy Soviet losses. Again several large units were surrounded and ground to pieces. When the spring ended and the mud season with it, Hitler decided not to move against Moscow again, as Zhukov and Stalin expected, but to go south. His aim was the Caucasus with the oil supplies in Grozny and Baku. The Third Reich was short of oil, and this seemed the way to solve the problem. The Nazis smashed through Soviet defenses, getting all the way to the line of the Caucasus Mountains, but also directly east toward the Volga. To protect his flank and cut off the Russians from Baku, he needed to cut the rail lines at Stalingrad and cross the river itself. Stalingrad was the old Tsaritsyn, where Stalin had first encountered warfare in 1918 and was now the site of an immense tractor factory that was also producing tanks, but its main importance was its location.

By the end of August the Germans were on the edge of the city, sending wave after wave of armor and mechanized infantry against the defenders dug into the ruins of the city. It seemed that the war hung in the balance. Yet the German advance had brought many problems with it. The rail lines back to Germany were now so long that transport was jammed up almost to the German border. Hitler no longer had enough German troops to secure his flanks, so the sides of the German wedge pointed at the city were held by Italian and Rumanian troops. Most important, the defenders just kept fighting. By the end of the year the Russian salients were down to just a few acres, their artillery support coming from batteries on the eastern side of the river. In one place sergeant Iakov Pavlov held out for months with just a few dozen men in the basement of a shattered apartment block. The fighting went from house to house, and many Soviet soldiers decided that the most effective weapons were sharpened trenching shovels and grenades. The Nazis could not cross the river.

Around the burning wreckage of the city the Red Army was preparing its trap. Huge armored forces moved up to the north and south, facing the hapless Italians and Rumanians across the frozen steppe. Then on November 19 they attacked with massive artillery and air support and in four days came together to encircle the six hundred thousand German soldiers in Stalingrad. German attempts to supply the trapped army were futile, and in February the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army surrendered. Berlin radio played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s opera over and over again. Nearly a half a million men had died at Stalingrad on each side, but Soviet victory was now assured.

The German invasion had immense consequences for Soviet foreign policy and for the position of the USSR in the world. The day after the invasion the Soviet leadership was surprised to learn not only that Great Britain wanted an alliance but also that Winston Churchill had spoken on the radio to explain the new alliance. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years, and I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle that is now unfolding…I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial…I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine…” Churchill’s conclusion was that “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.” Until the rise of Hitler the Soviets had always assumed Britain to be their main enemy, and the rapprochement with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935 never extended to the British Empire. The day of the invasion many Russians, including some in the leadership, assumed that Hitler must have made a secret treaty ending the war with Britain, so Churchill’s announcement came as a great relief. In August, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the Lend-Lease program designed to help England and any other power fighting Hitler would be extended to the Soviet Union, and after Pearl Harbor the United States joined the USSR and Britain to fight Germany and Italy as well as Japan. The Soviet Union and Japan, however, did not declare war on each other: both were far too preoccupied elsewhere to risk another front in Eastern Siberia or Manchuria.

Lend-Lease provided significant support to the Soviet war effort, both in equipment and food supplies. The Studebaker trucks went to make up the shortfall in Soviet truck production, crucial to the support of mechanized warfare, and many of them served as launching platforms for the Katyusha rockets. The American Airocobra fighter covered gaps in Soviet aircraft supply in 1942, and Spam filled out the meager wartime diet for millions of Russians. If the scale of American efforts was not decisive, the contribution was real as was the morale effect. The Allied convoys around the North Cape of Norway through winter seas infested with U-Boats and under continuous bombardment from German aircraft were a difficult and dangerous operation, giving the Russians concrete proof that they were not alone against Hitler.

For Stalin and the generals, however, the real issue was not Lend-Lease but the possibility of a second front. After much discussion Roosevelt and Churchill decided to make their first move in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, and then in the 1943 landings in Italy. These moves led to the overthrow of Mussolini and knocked Italy out of the war, though fighting continued against the Germans. Stalin was deeply disappointed that the moves came in the south rather than in France and were limited in scale; he complained bitterly, but to no effect. He never realized the extent of the US commitment in the Pacific theater. Finally he met with Churchill and Roosevelt in Teheran at the end of 1943, where the three allies agreed that they would demand unconditional surrender from Germany, that the USSR would declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated, and that the second front would consist of an allied invasion of northern France in the early summer of 1944. Stalin promised to coordinate a major offensive with the Anglo-American landing. Issues also arose at Teheran about the future of Europe, as Britain and America recognized by now that the Red Army would be the one to liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis and reach Germany first. In October 1944, Churchill came to Moscow and proposed to Stalin a “percentage agreement” on the Balkans: Britain was to have predominant influence (ninety percent) in Greece, while the Soviet Union was to have the same in Rumania. Bulgaria was to be seventy-five percent under Soviet influence, while the two powers would have equal shares in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Stalin agreed, but Eastern Europe was a major issue again at the Yalta conference in February 1945. There the three powers generally agreed on the joint occupation of Germany (for an undefined period), the destruction of the legacy of Nazism, and reparations to the Soviet Union. Stalin agreed to Roosevelt’s proposal to set up the United Nations. Some greater agreement was achieved on the status of Eastern Europe, such as the future Polish-Soviet boundary, and an agreement that the future Polish government would represent both Stalin’s Polish allies and the conservatives. Stalin promised elections after the war. Most of the other issues involving Eastern Europe were not settled. Roosevelt and Churchill did not want simply to cede control of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, but with the Red Army in possession of most of the territory and accounting for three quarters of the Wehrmacht’s losses, there was little that they could do.

The fate of Eastern Europe and Germany were not just issues of Soviet foreign policy. Since 1939 the Comintern had experience dizzying shifts in policy. The pact with Germany implied that fascism was no longer the main enemy: the war was a new “imperialist war” and the Communists were to oppose both Hitler and the Allies equally. The German invasion of the Soviet Union prompted yet another abrupt change in revolutionary strategy, a return to a variant of the Popular Front idea of 1935–1939. Stalin dissolved the Comintern in 1943, but most Communist parties of the world remained oriented toward Moscow. The Communists were ordered once again to make a coalition with anyone who opposed the Nazis, from conservative and aristocratic army officers like the French Gaullists to the Social Democrats. In most of occupied Europe resistance movements acquired this make-up, and even in France many aristocratic Russian émigrés joined the resistance, fighting and dying alongside working-class French Communists. As the Soviet army passed its western borders and came into the lands allied with Hitler or occupied by his troops, decisions had to be made. What sort of government should the Soviets put in place? Many local Communists believed that the time had come to seize power, to make up for the defeats of the interwar era. The Soviet tactic, however, was different. The new slogan was “people’s democracy,” meant to indicate a continuation of the wartime coalition. Land reform and limited nationalization of industry were to be central features of the new order, not “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the Communists were to rule together with Socialists and even anti-fascist liberals and conservatives.

At the moment of the German surrender at Stalingrad, all these issues were barely on the horizon. The task was to begin to drive the Nazis out of the country, and the Red Army moved to the west, pushing the Germans back to their starting points from the previous summer. In the spring of 1943, as the snow melted and the mud dried, Hitler tried for the last time to reverse the tide of defeat. The Wehrmacht planned a massive counter attack into the Soviet salient around Kursk, in the middle of the steppe, ideal ground for armored warfare. It was the German armor, the giant Ferdinand assault guns and the new Tiger tanks that were to carry the weight of the attack. The Red Army, however, fully reequipped and with new skill and confidence, planned its countermeasures without flaw. Though Stalin at first wanted a swift counter-offensive, Zhukov and the generals persuaded him to stay in defense until the Nazis were worn down. The German armor confronted massive fire from artillery, rockets and anti-tank guns as well as the Soviet air force. In a matter of days the offensive stalled and then the Soviet armor pushed the Germans back. The Red Army went on through the rest of the year to take back the eastern parts of the Ukraine, Kiev itself in November, as well as most of Russia proper. Soviet troops lifted the siege of Leningrad in January 1944. In the next months the Red Army surrounded and destroyed some fifty thousand German troops in one battle at Korsun, southwest of Kiev, pounding them to pieces in the snow with artillery and air strikes.

Hitler had now lost the war. All that he could do was feed more men and equipment into the meat grinder in the hope of staving off the inevitable defeat. By the early summer of 1944 the Soviets were ready to launch a huge offensive through Belorussia; the offensive was timed to coincide with the landings at Normandy. In this one operation the Red Army encircled the whole of the German army group Center, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, and moved into Poland. There they faced an unpleasant surprise. Without informing the Soviet command, the Polish Home Army, the main underground resistance group, staged an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw. The Soviet army was at the end of its operational line, on the other bank of the Vistula, with little capacity to help the Poles quickly. Molotov wanted to push on, not to help the Poles but just to exploit the victory. Zhukov was against any new offensive, for the army was exhausted and needed to rest and reequip. In any case, Stalin decided that it was not necessary; he was not going to help his opponents in the Polish Home Army and the Poles were left to fight on alone. In the same summer the Soviets moved south into Rumania, and the pro-German governments in Rumania and Bulgaria collapsed. In Yugoslavia the Red Army linked up with Tito’s partisans and went north toward Hungary. In Budapest the Germans put up furious resistance, but the Soviets were able to crush the resistance and move on to Vienna. Hitler’s coalition continued to collapse. In Finland, Baron Mannerheim, the commander in chief of the army, became the president of the country and immediately took Finland out of the war, signing an armistice in September.

The Red Army was now pounding at the gates of Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi command placed the bulk of their army in Poland and Eastern Germany facing the Soviets, even with the Americans and British moving rapidly to the German western border. The last year of the war brought incredible slaughter, as the now desperate Wehrmacht faced a well-equipped and huge Red Army. The Soviet command had learned how to fight and now had the equipment to do it, and Stalin had learned to work with his generals. The Russians fought their way through Poland, in the process liberating those prisoners of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps who were still alive. Soviet soldiers, many of whom had spent time in Soviet labor camps, had a glimpse of something even more sinister in the gas chambers and crematoria. As they moved into Germany, they found a country in ruins but still showing the signs of pre-war prosperity. As one Soviet soldier said to a Western journalist, “if they had all this, why did they attack us?” As the Soviets approached Berlin, Hitler threw everything he had into battle. Northeast of the Nazi capital stood SS Charlemagne, the French SS brigade, and high school boys were mobilized to fight Soviet tanks with hand-held anti-tank weapons. None such desperate measures nor the persistence of the German army could stand up to the huge barrages by 152-millimeter self-propelled guns, rockets, and masses of heavy Stalin tanks. Even with such overwhelming force, the encirclement of Hitler’s capital and the final assault through the flaming ruins of the city cost the Red Army hundreds of thousands of men. By early May of 1945, they had fought their way into the city and raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. The Red Army had pounded a stake into the heart of the Third Reich.