The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century

14 Suffering and Struggle (1941–1945)

The USSR would not have achieved its military victory if the country had not become one of the world’s great industrial powers by 1941. It outranked Germany in material output and natural resources, and had a population nearly three times greater. Soviet educational attainments and applied technological expertise were impressive. The USSR had institutions, policies and experience that could exploit such advantages in war. Consequently Hitler had taken a risk in attacking the USSR, and he had done this not only as a result of his ideological obsessions but also because he wanted to strike before the Red Army could recover from the Great Terror and the Soviet-Finnish war. It was for this reason that the Russians and the other Untermenschen of the USSR were paid the compliment of having three quarters of Hitler’s divisions concentrated against them.

Yet the human cost of Stalin’s industrial strategy had been huge throughout the 1930s. Deaths occurred in their millions. The diet and health of the surviving population was poor, and popular hostility to the government had been intensified. Nor can it be wholly discounted that the USSR would have been able to achieve about the same volume of output from its factories and mines if the New Economic Policy had been maintained.¹ State violence had not been a prerequisite of the country’s industrialization: such violence was really the product of the wishes and interests of Stalin and his close supporters in the communist party leadership. It is true that Stalin in the 1930s managed to give a priority to the defence sector of industry that had been lacking in the previous decade. But account must also be taken of the fact that Stalin’s blunders in June 1941 threw away a great portion of the USSR’s hard-won military and industrial achievements when Ukraine, Belorussia and western Russia fell under foreign occupation.

Nor was there comprehensive success for the Soviet economy in the remainder of the German-Soviet war. The USSR demonstrated its excellence at producing tanks and aircraft while proving itself woefully inadequate in the feeding of its population. Moscow workers in the hardest manual occupations in 1943 were receiving only 2,914 calories per day; they needed at least 3,500 for mere subsistence.² If the widespread drought of 1946 had occurred three or four years earlier, the result of the war itself might have been different.³ Stalin’s collective farms were the worst imaginable form of wartime food production. The USSR was in some ways at its peak of efficiency in the Second World War; but it was at its lower depths in others.

The regime’s self-inflicted damage was not confined to the economy. In 1941 Stalin ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans from their autonomous republic in the RSFSR. Two years later, as the Wehrmacht was beginning to retreat into the eastern parts of Ukraine and Belorussia, the process was repeated. Karachai, Kalmyks, Ingushi, Chechens, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meshketian Turks and Greeks of Crimea were arrested and deported from their native lands in the North Caucasus and other southern parts of the RSFSR. Men, women and children were crammed into freezing cattle-trucks and transported to inhospitable areas of Kazakhstan, where they were abandoned without the rudimentary means of sustenance. Stalin secretly branded whole nationalities as traitors, and the NKVD was instructed to round them up in a lightning military operation; and Beria was able to report to Stalin on the fulfilment of these instructions by NKVD General I. A. Serov.⁴

Armed groups of Chechens and others had indeed rendered active assistance to the Wehrmacht. But this was not the whole story; for thirty-six Chechens had been decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union for their conspicuous valour as Red Army soldiers.⁵ Moreover, even the Third Reich did not trust the Volga Germans. They had settled in Russia in the eighteenth century and Nazi officials classified them according to four categories of Germanhood — and the fourth category embraced those who were impervious to Nazi ideas and were to be handed over to the Gestapo.⁶ And vastly more Ukrainians than Volga Germans or Chechens had started by warmly greeting the German invasion. Nevertheless the Ukrainian nation was not subsequently deported. Presumably even Stalin blanched at the scale of resources that he would have to divert from the war against Hitler. Probably, too, he was using the maltreatment of small nationalities as a signal to the larger ones to accord the maximum co-operation to the Soviet authorities.

Stalin also caused wholly needless resentment even among Russians.Lieutenant-General A.N. Vlasov, whom the German forces had captured in 1942, was infuriated by Stalin’s refusal to allow him to retreat in time from an unavoidable encirclement. Vlasov the un-questioning Stalinist turned into an anti-Stalin Russian patriot who agreed to organize a Russian Liberation Army out of Soviet POWs. Vlasov was a dupe. His intention was for these armed units to fight on the Eastern front, overthrow Stalin and then turn on the Nazis, driving them out of Russia and installing a government committed to moderate socialist policies; but Hitler foresaw such a trick and restricted Vlasov’s men mainly to guard duties in the Channel Islands. Yet the Russian Liberation Army’s very existence testified to the hatred stirred up by Stalin, and Vlasov’s comrades undertook the most concerted endeavour ever made by Russians to bring him down.⁷

Thus the ultra-authoritarian features of the Soviet regime caused harm to its war effort. Britain and the USA were states which lacked a capacity to enforce their political, social and economic commands before entering the war. This had not impeded them from carrying out the necessary wartime reorganization. Indeed a democratic state probably benefits from needing to secure voluntary acceptance of centralization and discipline. An elected political leadership, buoyed up by popular consent, has small reason to use violence on its own citizens.

Such considerations were odious to Stalin and his cronies. Already having been a highly ‘militarized’ society before 1941, the USSR became co-ordinated as if it were simply a great armed camp wherein the Red Army itself was but the most forward and exposed contingent. ‘Everything for the Front!’ was the state’s rallying slogan. The NKVD unconcernedly reduced the dietary provision in the Gulag system by a further thirty per cent. The new norms for prisoners were far below the level of subsistence, and 622,000 of them are reckoned to have died in the penal-labour camps between 1941 and 1945.⁸ Food distribution had also become a powerful instrument for the control of the free population: urban inhabitants were eligible for official ration-cards, which could be withdrawn for acts of delinquence. For a brief and unique time in Soviet history, factories and mines had dependable work-forces.

The increased compliance did not mean that the previous informal patterns of organization were eliminated. The opposite was the case: both the cliental ‘tails’ and the ‘family circles’ were indispensable to the operation of administrative machinery in wartime, when abrupt movements of the military front could cut off a city, province or whole region from commands from Moscow. The vertical and horizontal linkages which Stalin had tried to uproot in the Great Terror had been replanted in 1939–41; they were crucial to the state’s ability to organize its military effort.

And so committees of defence were formed in all cities, typically involving the leading figures in the party, soviet, police and army command. The precise relationships among institutions behind the front line underwent modification and the further enhancement of the party’s authority was particularly noteworthy. Nikolai Patolichev, who served successively in Yaroslavl and Chelyabinsk as first secretary of the party province committee, later recorded how he had intervened in factories when industrial targets were not being met. He countermanded instructions from military commanders and the local NKVD for the good of the cause. Patolichev knew that, if his judgement was called into question, he could get on the phone to Moscow and seek central political support.⁹ Party committees were not as dominant as they had been in the course of the First Five-Year Plan: they had to share power with other institutions at the local level. Yet the reinforcement of the communist party’s authority was none the less substantial.

Stalin used cunning to restrict the potential for insubordination to himself. He made appointments from rival cliental groups to the most important institutions, localities and fronts. This brought him several advantages. It ensured a lively competition to fulfil his orders. It gave ample opportunity, too, for denunciations of one group by another: the slightest sign of disloyalty to Stalin would be reported to him. He also kept watch over the Red Army through political commissars whose main task was to check on the obedience of military officers.

Yet at the same time he reduced some of the annoyance given to such officers. In November 1942 he decreed that the commissars should become mere deputies to their commanders and no longer be their equals. Moreover, the best-nourished citizens were those on active service. Each soldier, in addition to his daily ration, was given a 100-cc tot of vodka to steady the nerves and keep out the cold.¹⁰ The officers were looked after still more carefully, and the central state organs ensured that their families were given additional privileges.¹¹ Epaulettes were restored to uniforms. The practice of saluting superiors was reintroduced. As wagger returned to the gait of generals. Stalin had little alternative but to treat them better than before 1941. The losses in the officer corps were grievous in the Second World War. According to Red Army records, 1,023,093 commissioned officers were killed and 1,030,721 were invalided out of service.¹²

The plight of the armed forces in summer 1941 was such that thousands of officers convicted as ‘spies’ were recalled from Siberian labour camps, given a couple of square meals and recommissioned to fight against their alleged spymasters. These were the lucky ones. Other inmates who had not been officers before their arrest were also released, but only on condition that they served in the dreaded penal regiments which marched out in front of their own side’s tanks and armoured vehicles, clearing the enemy’s minefields at the high risk of their lives. They were motivated by patriotism as well as by a desire to erase the undeserved shame of a prison sentence: the regulations of the penal regiments allowed them to earn their freedom in reward for acts of conspicuous bravery.¹³ They also saw the frightful dangers as being more tolerable than the living death of Gulag labour on starvation rations.

Not that the Gulag system was dismantled: the great majority of camp prisoners were given no chance to fight Hitler. The exact number of them at the moment of the German invasion and through the war is still uncertain; but probably there was a decline by two fifths in the three years after January 1941. Thereafter the camps were replenished with fresh intakes. By January 1945 the estimated total came to nearly nine tenths of the pre-war one.¹⁴

Slave labour had become a permanent category of Stalin’s thought and a permanent mode of his governance. None of his associates dared to challenge this. The timber still needed felling and the gold mining; the new factory sites still had to be completed in the Urals and Siberia. Confidential official discussions started from the premiss that the economy would be seriously dislocated if the Gulag camps were to be closed and emptied of their prisoners. A certain industrial administrator, when his department had difficulty in hitting its production target, was heard to remark: ‘The fact is that we haven’t yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonments.’¹⁵ It is therefore hardly surprising that many prisoners felt they had nothing to lose by rebelling. In January 1942 an uprising was led by Mark Retyunin in the Vorkuta.¹⁶ The insurgents were put down with exemplary savagery and the terror-regime was reinforced.

Repression continued through the war. Soviet citizens were warned to continue to treat foreigners warily, including citizens of the Allied countries. After December 1941, when the USA entered the war, a new offence was created by the NKVD: the praising of American technology (voskhalenie amerikanskoi tekhniki). An unguarded, admiring comment about an American jeep could lead to someone being consigned to the labour camps.¹⁷ By 1943, as the Red Army reconquered the western USSR, the security police arrested not only those Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Germans but even those who had just been taken prisoner-of-war by them. Victories in battle also encouraged Stalin to resume campaigns for Marxist-Leninist indoctrination in the armed forces themselves. Soldiers had previously been ordered only to fight well. Now they had to think acceptable thoughts too.¹⁸ Evidently Stalin had already decided that the pre-war regime was to be reinstated in all its brutality as soon as was possible.

Nevertheless this was not yet obvious to most people. What many of them preferred to note was that Stalin had introduced several concessions since the beginning of the German-Soviet war. And hopes grew that the regime would become more humane once Germany had been defeated.

This mood was encouraged by the concessions made in culture. Artists were permitted to create what they wanted so long as their works avoided direct criticism of Marxism-Leninism and had a patriotic resonance. The magnificent Leningrad Symphony was written in the city of that name by composer and part-time fire-warden Shostakovich, who had been in trouble with the official authorities before 1941. Writers, too, benefited. One was among the century’s greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova, whose innocent son had died in the NKVD’s custody. She continued to compose without fear, and the following stanza drew forth an ovation from within the Hall of Columns in Moscow:¹⁹

Many ordinary working citizens were attracted to high art as never before, and the link that bound the arts and politics became a source of strength for the state authorities.

Stalin also somewhat moderated his rough approach to the religious faith of most Soviet citizens. At a time when he needed the maximum co-operation in the war effort it made no sense to give unnecessary offence to such believers, and the word was put about that the authorities would no longer persecute the Russian Orthodox Church. In its turn the Church collected money for military needs and its priests blessed tank divisions on their way from the factories to the Eastern front.

The shift in policy towards organized religion was formalized in September 1943, when Metropolitan Sergei was summoned to the Kremlin. To his bemusement, he was given the good news that permission was being given by the Soviet authorities for the Russian Orthodox Church to hold an Assembly and elect the first Patriarch since the death of Tikhon in 1925. Stalin playfully affected surprise that the Metropolitan had so few priests escorting him — and the Metropolitan forbore to mention that tens of thousands of priests would have been available had they not been killed by the NKVD. In fact Metropolitan Sergei died soon after being confirmed as Patriarch and he was succeeded in 1944 by Metropolitan Aleksi of Leningrad. But both Sergei and Aleksi followed a policy of grateful accommodation to Stalin’s wishes.

The Russian Orthodox Church was helpful to Stalin as an instrument whereby he could increase popular acquiescence in his rule. It was also pressed by him into the service of suppressing other Russian Christian sects as well as those Christian denominations associated with other nationalities. As the Red Army moved into Ukraine and Belorussia, nearly all ecclesiastical buildings were put under the authority of Patriarch Aleksi. The Russian Orthodox Church became one of the main beneficiaries of Stalinism. Real authority, it need hardly be added, remained with Stalin, whom Aleksi grotesquely described as a ‘God-given leader’.²⁰

While making manipulative compromises with religion, Stalin extended those he had been offering to Russian national sensitivities. In June 1943 the Internationale was dropped as the state anthem. Stalin ordered the composition of a less internationalist set of verses which began:

Cheap copies of it were reproduced on postcards for soldiers to send back from the front. Stalin also tried to appeal more generally to Slavic peoples, including not only Ukrainians but also Czechs, Serbs and Poles. The bonds between the Slavs were stressed by official Soviet historians. Stalin wanted to increase the Red Army’s popular welcome in eastern Europe as it moved on Berlin. Russia’s role as past protector of the Slav nations was emphasized (and, it must be added, exaggerated).²¹

Special praise was showered upon the Russians for their endurance and commitment to the defeat of Hitler. An unnamed partisan gave an account to Pravda about German atrocities in a provincial city; his conclusion was defiant: ‘Pskov is in chains. Russian history knows that the people have more than once broken the chains welded on to a free town by the enemy.’²²

The Russian nation was encouraged to believe that it was fighting for its Motherland (and Fatherland: propagandists used the terms indiscriminately), and that this included not only Russia but the entire USSR. Political commissars urged troops to charge into action shouting in unison: ‘For the Motherland, for Stalin!’ It is doubtful that most of them really mentioned Stalin in their battle-cries; but certainly the idea of the Motherland was widely and enthusiastically accepted by Russians on active service. They would have taken this attitude even if the regime had not given its encouragement. The German occupation of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic republics in the first two years of the war meant that the great majority of Red Army soldiers perforce originated from the RSFSR and were Russians; and such soldiers needed little convincing that the Russian contribution was uniquely crucial to the struggle against Hitler.²³

Yet the eulogies of the Russians also had to avoid giving offence to other nations whose young men had been conscripted into the Red Army. Multinational harmony was emphasized in the following appeal to the Uzbek people: ‘The home of the Russian is also your home; the home of the Ukrainian and the Belorussian is also your home!’²⁴ Such invocations were not without their positive impact upon several peoples belonging to the USSR. The war induced an unprecedented sense of co-operation among nations.²⁵

But this was very far from meaning that a ‘Soviet people’ was created. Most national and ethnic groups experienced an increase in their sense of distinctness in the heat of the war. The brutal policies before 1941 had induced permanent hatred of Stalin among most non-Russians. Antagonism was especially noticeable both among the deported nationalities but also among peoples living in states which had recently been independent from Moscow. Western Belorussians, for example, were reported as being keen to fight against Hitler but not to swear a military oath of loyalty to the USSR. ‘Why,’ some of them asked, ‘is our nation being trampled upon?’ Romanians from Moldavia took a similar attitude; they especially objected to being prohibited from singing their own patriotic songs on campaign and being forced to learn the officially-approved Russian ones.²⁶ For such conscripts, talk of the Soviet Motherland was a disguised way of advocating Russian imperialism.

Yet still they fought in the ranks of the Red Army; for they judged Hitler’s defeat to be the supreme goal. The Soviet regime exploited this situation and anti-German sentiments were given raucous expression in the mass media. A poem by Konstantin Simonov ended with the words:

Propagandists who had portrayed Germans as honorary Russians during the two years of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty came to treat the entire German people as the enemy; and most citizens of the USSR readily condoned this in the light of the barbarities of the Nazis.

They also approved of certain alterations in economic policy. For example, the authorities earned a degree of popularity by quietly dropping the May 1939 restriction on the size of private plots on kolkhozes: there was recognition that the goodwill of the peasantry was vital to halt the steep decline in agricultural output. In practice, too, peasants were allowed to trade their produce not only in the legal private markets but also illicitly on street corners. The Soviet state continued to bear responsibility for the supply of all kinds of food to the armed forces; but only an extremely small range of products, mainly bread, was guaranteed to urban civilians, who had to supplement their diet in whatever fashion they could. Sanction was given for the marking out of vegetable allotments outside factory buildings and on the outskirts of towns. The potatoes grown on these little patches of ground prevented many families from starving to death.²⁷

Only in Stalin’s USSR could such meagre concessions to cultural, religious, national and economic aspirations be regarded as startling indulgences on the part of the authorities. If conditions had not been so hard for most people, the concessions would also have been discerned as a sign of the inability of the state authorities to exert total, detailed control over society. This inability, which had already been observable before 1941, attained even greater salience during the German-Soviet war: Stalin had learned the need for a dose of pragmatism in his choice of policies.

Urban conditions were appalling. Hunger was incessant for most townspeople in the regions held by the Red Army. There was a very high rate of mortality; and human corpses in some places were used by the living to survive a little longer. Cattle, pigs and poultry had gone first; then dogs, cats and rats, followed by any berries and herbs and then nettles, grass and tree bark. So that dead people were sometimes quite literally a last resort. Geographical factors had a deep and direct influence on things. Leningrad was the city worst supplied with food: the courageous convoys sent over the ice of Lake Ladoga could not always get through the German siege. But malnutrition and disease affected all urban areas; and houses demolished by artillery and bombing from the air were not replaced; sanitation was ruined. Precious few families escaped the loss of loved ones: even Stalin’s son Yakov was killed by the Germans.

In the countryside it was mainly old women and men judged unfit for military conscription who worked on the farms. Most of the twelve million military volunteers and conscripts came from the villages;²⁸ and appeals were made also for able-bodied men and women to enter industrial employment so that the factory labour-force increased by a third between 1942 and 1945.²⁹ The consequence was a further depopulation of the countryside. Not only that: the tractor drivers who were needed for the maintenance of large-scale arable cultivation were among the earliest lads to be pressed into the Red Army. The technical core of collective farms imploded; whole rural areas collapsed to a level of production insufficient to meet the subsistence requirements of the villages. On farms in the vicinity of the military fronts there was usually total devastation. Homes, byres and barns were bombed into oblivion, and it was common for peasants to live out the war sheltering in holes in the ground.³⁰

So whence came this capacity to endure and resist? The answer cannot lie only with the industrial might and organizational efficiency of the regime, even when allowance is made for the informal institutional patterns and the modified policies that enhanced performance. What was crucial was the reaction of countless millions of Soviet citizens to the news of what was going on in the vast area of the USSR currently under German occupation. Above all, they learned that the policies of Hitler were even more ghastly than those of Stalin. They learned that defeat by the German forces would bring about consequences of almost unimaginable horror.

Thus the Gestapo and Wehrmacht had the task of killing every Jew and Gypsy. Captured communist party members were to be summarily executed. There was piteous slaughter at Babi Yar in Ukraine where 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned to death over the edge of a ravine; and around the town of Cherkessk alone there were ‘twenty-four vast pits filled with the corpses of men, women and children tortured and shot by the German monsters’.³¹ Further millions of people — Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians — were deported to labour camps such as Auschwitz where all but very few met their deaths through brutal labour, starvation and beatings. The author of Mein Kampf did not merely despise the Russians and other Slavs: he classified them as sub-human. About eleven million Soviet citizens died under German occupation, and of these roughly five million perished in captivity.³²

Not all governments in the eastern half of Europe were simply victims of German oppression. Hungary and Romania, albeit under pressure from Berlin, provided contingents for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler also gave favoured status to Croats in what had been pre-war Yugoslavia; and the Germans encouraged Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers to form SS units that sought revenge for their sufferings at Stalin’s hands. The Wehrmacht was warmly received, too, further south. Ukrainian peasants offered bread and salt as a traditional sign of welcome to their invaders in the hope that Hitler would break up the collective farms and abolish the state quotas for grain deliveries.

In fact the Ostministerium, which Hitler established to govern the territory seized from the USSR, refused to de-nationalize the collective farms and large industrial enterprises but instead transferred them into the property of the Third Reich.³³ But other concessions were forthcoming. Elections were held to local administrative posts. German officials held such functionaries under ruthless control, but at least a semblance of self-administration existed for some months. In addition, former entrepreneurs could apply for licences to run their workshops and cafés again: small-scale private business was restored to the economy.³⁴ The Ostministerium also authorized the reopening of churches. In contrast to the Soviet authorities, the Germans prevented the re-emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and gave preference to Ukrainian and Belorussian denominations (although these, too, were highly restricted in their public activities).³⁵ Thus the Ostministerium endeavoured to alleviate the tasks of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front.

Initially collaborators were not hard to find. Many deportees and ex-prisoners were persuadable to work for the Nazis. For example, a policeman called Noga from Prokovskoe district in southern Ukraine enthusiastically informed on ‘the people who interested the Germans’. Noga, having served out six years of Siberian exile, eagerly took his chance to beat a captured partisan to death.³⁶ Plenty of such persons volunteered their services to the German occupiers; and inhabitants of the western provinces of Ukraine and Belorussia (which had recently been annexed to the USSR) deserted the Red Army in large numbers.³⁷ In December 1941 Hitler sanctioned the recruitment of volunteer military units from among the non-Slav nationalities. The Turkestani, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Tatar and North Caucasian legions were quickly formed. Even a Cossack unit came into existence since Hitler’s racial theorists rejected the incontrovertible fact that the Cossacks were descended from runaway Russian peasants and from Russian soldiers who had completed their military service.

Most of the conquered peoples soon learned by direct experience that one of three destinies had been planned for them: execution; deportation for forced labour; or starvation. In the kolkhozes the German delivery quotas were raised even above the levels imposed by Stalin before 1941. Field-Marshal Reichenau implacably explained to the Wehrmacht: ‘To supply local inhabitants and prisoners-of-war with food is an act of unnecessary humanity.’³⁸

There was astonishment at the savagery ordered by Hitler. Ferocious conflicts had taken place between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the previous two centuries; but the butchery had by and large been confined to the fields of battle. The last time when Russians confronted an external enemy disposed to take hostages as a normal method of war was in the campaigns against the Chechens in the 1820s and 1830s — and the Chechens were the objects of Russian aggression, not themselves the invaders. In the 1930s it had been the unconscious assumption of Soviet politicians and ordinary citizens alike that if ever war broke out with Germany, the fighting would be no dirtier than in the First World War. They failed to anticipate that an advanced industrial society, even one that had been infected with belligerent racism, could resort to mass inhumanities on Hitler’s scale.

Resistance intensified as Hitler’s intentions became public knowledge, and the German-occupied zone was never free from military conflict. Even in many areas where non-Russians were the majority of the population and where the Wehrmacht had initially been welcomed, there was a spirit of defiance. Groups of armed men formed themselves in the woods and made sporadic attacks on German armed units. By mid-1942 there were 100,000 partisans active against the Wehrmacht.³⁹ German soldiers and airmen could never forget that they were detested by local inhabitants determined to see the back of them and to push a bayonet between their shoulder-blades for good measure. The student Zoya Kosmodeyanskaya was hailed as a national heroine. Captured by the Germans after setting fire to their billets in the village of Petrishchenko, she was tortured and hanged. On the scaffold she called out defiantly: ‘German soldiers, give yourselves up before it’s too late!’⁴⁰

Yet even where the partisans had minor successes, terrible retaliation was effected upon nearby towns and villages. The Wehrmacht and the SS applied a rule that a hundred local inhabitants, usually randomly selected, would be shot in reaction to every killing of a German soldier. The result was that the Soviet partisan groups did not cause decisive damage to German power even when, from 1943, munitions and guidance started to reach them from Moscow.

In practical terms, then, it was the attitude to the war taken by civilians and soldiers in Soviet-held territory that was the crucial component of the USSR’s victory. They had quickly understood what was in store for them if Hitler were to win. They got their information from conversations with refugees, soldiers and partisans as well as from the mass media. Reporters such as Vasili Grossman, who was at double risk as a Jew and a communist party member, travelled to the front areas, and the facts as discovered by them were so terrible that the newspapers were allowed to reveal them without the usual official distortions. The regime, moreover, had the sense not to over-fill the press with eulogies to Stalin, Marxism-Leninism and the October Revolution. Only after the battle of Kursk, when it was already clear that the Red Army was likely to win the war, was the ‘cult’ of the great Stalin resumed in its pre-war devoutness.⁴¹

There was always an abundance of volunteers to join the Red Army. The war gave many people who were deeply dissatisfied with the Soviet regime a reason at last for co-operating with the authorities.⁴² This was especially noticeable among refugees whose minds burned with the ambition to fight their way back to their home towns and villages to rescue their families before it was too late.⁴³ Thus the hostility caused by Stalin’s policies since the late 1920s could, at least to some extent, be put into suspension. The will to beat the Germans had a unifying effect.

Militant patriotism was in the air. Russians in particular acquired a more intense sense of nationhood as millions of them came together as soldiers and factory workers. Many other peoples of the USSR, furthermore, displayed the same toughness and resilience. All drew upon reserves of endurance associated with a life-style that, by the standards of industrial societies in western Europe, was already extraordinarily harsh. The Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror had habituated Soviet citizens to making the best of an extremely bad lot: hunger, disease, low wages, poor shelter and state violence had been recurrent features in the lives of most of them. Their material expectations were low even in the good times. The difference in 1941 was that the torment originated from without rather than within the country. This time it was a foreign Führer, not a Soviet General Secretary, who was the source of their woes.

The genocidal intent of Nazism impelled both Russians and the other peoples living in the regions unoccupied by the Wehrmacht to put up the sternest defence. If it had not been for Hitler’s fanatical racism, the USSR would not have won the struggle on the Eastern front. Stalin’s repressiveness towards his own citizens would have cost him the war against Nazi Germany, and the post-war history of the Soviet Union and the world would have been fundamentally different.