Utopia in Power

All this was far from being mere facade. In all institutions connected with foreign affairs the dismissal of people of Jewish origin began—in the commissariats of foreign affairs and foreign trade, the navy, the press agency TASS, and the main Soviet publications. Foreign diplomats and corre­spondents in Moscow took note of this. Jews were also removed from positions of authority in international ports, airlines, and railways. For the first time since the founding of the Soviet state anti-Semitism was becoming official policy; until then it had been camouflaged by talk about interna­tionalism.

On some occasions official approval of the Hitler government's anti- Semitic policy was openly expressed on the local level, especially in the Ukraine and Crimea. Anti-Semitism also increased in the personnel di­rectorates of the Red Army.

An objective analysis of the events preceding the war totally shatters the myth of a well thought out foreign and domestic policy led by the party and the Soviet government. In reality the leadership floundered helplessly, revealing a total inability to assess developments in the complicated in­ternational situation.

We have already mentioned Stalin's mistaken assumptions on how the war between Germany and the Allies would proceed. Another major error was made in regard to the Balkans in the spring of 1941—the USSR overestimated the military capacity of Yugoslavia. Stalin signed a friendship and nonaggression treaty with Yugoslavia on the eve of Germany's invasion of that country, thus repeating his error in regard to Western Europe. He counted on a prolonged war between Germany and Yugoslavia. Under the treaty, if one of the parties was attacked, the other would nevertheless maintain "a policy of friendly relations." But Yugoslavia was defeated after a very short campaign. The Soviet Union did not provide any assistance and could not have done so, for the Soviet government was fully aware of its own unpreparedness for war, and it was badly frightened by Germany's quick defeat of Yugoslavia. The uncertainty of Soviet policy reflected this fear of Germany. The government did its best not to irritate the Germans, going out of its way to show them it was ready to make additional concessions if Germany demanded them.

To the mounting concern of the Soviet government, Germany made no new demands. In April the USSR said it was ready to agree to a final line of demarcation with Germany, extending from the Igorka River to the Baltic Sea. The Soviet government also accepted the proposals made by the Ger­mans on this question.¹⁵⁶ It continued to deliver raw materials and foodstuffs to Germany in the most scrupulous way, delaying its own buildup of strategic materials. German reconnaissance flights over Soviet border territory be­came more and more frequent, but orders were given not to fire on them. The Soviet side limited itself to diplomatic protests. In some instances German planes which landed on Soviet territory were immediately returned to the Germans even though rolls of reconnaissance film were found on board.¹⁵⁷

According to memoirs of Soviet military leaders, Stalin still hoped at that late date to maintain peace with Hitler but feared some provocation by the German generals. Like Hitler, he was extremely suspicious of gen­erals. He continued to regard all warnings from British and American sources as machinations aimed at starting a Soviet—German conflagration, at which the Western powers would warm their hands.

Stalin chose the occasion of Japanese ambassador Matsuoka's departure from Moscow to praise publicly Soviet—German "friendship." He appeared unexpectedly at the departure ceremony and greeted Schulenburg warmly: "We must remain friends and you must do everything for that." To Colonel

Krebs, the German military attach6, he said: "We must remain friends, no matter what happens."¹⁵⁸

On May 5, 1941, Stalin was named chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (a position equivalent to prime minister in Western countries). This appointment put Stalin in a position to negotiate with that other pre­mier, Chancellor Hitler, or at least that is one possible interpretation. That hypothesis is strengthened by the increasingly friendly gestures made to­ward Germany, such as the closing of the Moscow embassies of Belgium, Norway, and Yugoslavia (countries occupied by Germany) and the estab­lishment of diplomatic relations with Iraq, where a profascist coup had recently occurred.

Stalin had made no public speeches since March 1939. He was obliged to show his face at last, to try to raise the morale of the Red Army com­manders, who were discouraged by the events of the preceding few years (the arrests of Red Army leaders, friendship with Nazi Germany, the poor showing in the war with Finland). On May 5 he addressed the graduates of the Red Army military academies. In a forty-minute speech he called for greater mastery of the art of war and an enhanced capability to repel aggression.

Soviet willingness to make further concessions to Germany was under­stood by certain high-ranking officials of the Reich. Schnurre, head of the foreign trade department, expressed the opinion in a confidential memo that the Soviet Union would respond to new economic demands by Germany, thus enabling the Germans to meet their strategic needs for additional food and raw materials.¹⁵⁹

Hitler continued to ignore these overtures, and the disarray in the Soviet government increased, especially after Rudolf Hess's flight to Great Britain on May 10, 1941. Stalin was convinced that this flight was part of a plan Hitler had to reach an understanding with Britain against the Soviet Union. In reality Hess took his action without Hitler's knowledge. For Britain Hess's flight was confirmation that Hitler was determined to invade the Soviet Union but feared having to fight a two-front war. Hess suggested that Europe be divided into two spheres of influence, one for Britain, one for Germany, and that Soviet territory as far as the Urals should go to Germany. Knowing Germany's intentions and understanding that Hess spoke for no one but himself, Britain chose to inform the Soviets of the Hess affair. For Stalin this was one more confirmation of his suspicion that Britain and Germany were intriguing against the USSR; to him the British warnings were nothing but attempts by the British imperialists to provoke a war with Germany.

It was impossible to ignore the real situation, however. Germany was building up its troop concentrations on the Soviet border, as was widely reported by the world press and attested to daily by the commanders of the military districts along the border.

Little by little Stalin was losing hope that Hitler would suggest new talks, and his alarm over the Soviet lack of preparedness for war mounted ac­cordingly. It was under these conditions that on June 14 TASS issued a communique referring to foreign rumors that Germany had made new de­mands on the Soviet Union, that talks were underway aimed at reaching a new and more solid agreement, and that both countries had built up their troops along their common border. TASS denied that Germany had made new demands; hence new talks could not have occurred. The Soviet side had respected the nonaggression pact and would continue to do so. The rumors concerning Soviet preparations for war with Germany were "false and provocative."¹⁶⁰ This communiqu6 seemed to be an overture to Germany to clarify its intentions and initiate new talks, but again there was no German reaction. The TASS communiqu6 had a demoralizing effect on the Soviet military, since it seemed to deny that there was any danger of war.

On June 18 a German sergeant crossed over to the Soviet side with the warning that at 4 am on June 22 German troops would go on the offensive all along the Soviet border. The next day, as if in mockery of this warning, Pravda published an editorial entitled "Summer Vacation for the Toilers."

Stalin was still hoping that Berlin would invite him to the negotiating table. Even as late as the evening of June 21, when more and more alarming reports were coming in, Stalin told Defense Commissar Timoshenko: "We are starting a panic over nothing."

On June 21, at 11 PM another German, Private Alfred Liskof, defected to the Soviet side and warned that his army would attack at four the next morning. At the same time Soviet military intelligence received one more report from Berlin that the invasion was set for June 22. According to some estimates, the Soviet government received as many as eighty-four advance warnings of the German attack.¹⁶¹

Despite the immense resources invested in building fortifications on the western border, these works were in total disarray when the Soviet—German war began. The construction of fortifications along the old border (the one predating September 17, 1939) had begun in 1929 and went on until 1935, creating fortified lines of reinforced concrete to a depth of two to three kilometers. To give an idea of how outdated these fortifications were, it should suffice to say that they were built with redoubts armed with nothing more than machine guns and provided no protection against 155mm or 210mm artillery fire. In 1938 the modernization of these installations and their armaments, which had begun, was postponed in accordance with a decision to alter the entire system of fortified districts and lines of forti­fications. No sooner had construction of new fortifications begun than the border was moved westward. Orders were issued to stop work on the for­tification along the old border. Work began on fortified districts on the new border, but it soon turned out that the most important considerations—the potential strength of the enemy and of Soviet defenses in the fortified districts—had not been taken into account. More time was lost in drawing up new designs and specifications. Then the main effort was put into fortifying the Baltic Military District. The Soviet command wrongly assumed that the main enemy blow would come from East Prussia, aiming at the Baltic region. At the end of March 1941, when it turned out that a major concentration of German troops was concentrated south of Polesye, it was decided to fortify the Kiev Military District. At that point the necessary materials and equipment to strengthen the Kiev district were lacking. Of the 2,500 fortifications built along the new border, only 1,000 were fully equipped with artillery. The rest had machine guns only. The armaments had been removed from the fortifications on the old border and the instal­lations turned into—storage sites for the local kolkhozes. The old border, along which Soviet troops could have established a second line of defense in the event of a retreat, was left bare, while the new border was insuffi­ciently fortified and armed.

Matters were no better in regard to the building of new airfields or new airstrips at existing fields, or new railroads and terminals. A. Zaporozhets, head of the main political directorate of the Red Army, reported to Ti­moshenko: "The majority of the fortified districts along our western border are for the most part inoperative."

Official Soviet historians generally justify these grave shortcomings with the argument that the Soviet Union did not have enough time to prepare for the war. Such statements do not correspond to reality. For many years the officially stated policy was to keep the country in a state of permanent mobilization. The population had been taught for years that it should be ready to make any and all sacrifices in order to strengthen the nation's defenses, and real sacrifices had been made. The Soviet government did have both the time and the resources to prepare the country for war, but owing to the incompetence of the leadership the enormous resources ex­tracted from the population were uselessly squandered and the gigantic investments failed to produce the results they should have.

In 1940 and early 1941 the government issued several decrees on the army's lack of preparedness and the inadequacies in the construction of fortifications and provision of arms and equipment. Only 50 percent of the armored formations and motorized units had new arms and equipment; for the air force in the border districts the figure was only 22 percent.¹⁶²

The military high command also committed serious errors in its assess­ment of how the enemy forces were deployed and what their plans and intentions were. As Marshal Zhukov, the man who became chief of the General Staff in February 1941, later admitted in his memoirs, 'The most dangerous situation strategically was in the Southwestern Direction, that is, the Ukraine, and the Western Direction, that is, Byelorussia, for in June 1941 the Nazi command had concentrated its most important land and air forces in those areas."¹⁶³

The Soviet high command wrongly believed that the main blow would come from East Prussia and would strike at Riga, Kaunas (Polotsk), and Minsk, and from the Brest region, along the Baranovichi—Minsk line. In reality the German high command had decided to strike its main blow just north of the Polesye region in Byelorussia. The Soviet command expected an offensive south of the Polesye. One must conclude that the Soviet leadership totally disregarded all of the information provided by its intel­ligence network, which had provided thoroughgoing details of the German plans.

The defense plan for the western border also had serious flaws. It en­visaged an immediate counteroffensive as soon as the Germans struck. It did not foresee that the enemy would be able to penetrate deep into Soviet territory; yet the high command was well aware of the weakness of its border defense lines. Maneuvers in January 1941 had shown clearly, for example, that Soviet forces would find themselves in great danger if the enemy penetrated as far as Bialystok and Lvov.

In addition to all this, when fighting actually broke out, the commanders of the military districts on the border were paralyzed and deprived of all initiative when orders were issued not to fight back, so as to avoid giving any pretext for armed action by the Germans.

CHAPTER

THE WAR, 1941-1945

TO THE BRINK OF DEFEAT

To the very last, Stalin expected a sign from Hitler. On the evening of June 21, when he heard about the defector Liskof, Stalin reacted in his usual manner. "Haven't the German generals sent this defector over to provoke a conflict?" he asked Timoshenko, the commissar of defense.¹ Stalin ap­parently could not imagine that Hitler would start a war against the Soviet Union. He preferred to believe that the German generals, intoxicated with their military successes, wanted to provoke such a war. Besides, Stalin knew only too well that his country was not ready, that Soviet military plans were geared to the year 1942. Also, Stalin was simply afraid. He grew indecisive; it seems that he desperately yearned to postpone the inevitable. Possibly he was hoping for a miracle.

What about his "comrades-in-arms," the other members of the Politburo? Zhukov states in his memoirs that Stalin briefly informed them of the situation and asked, "'What shall we do?' No answer was forthcoming."² Finally, Timoshenko suggested that an order be issued immediately, placing all troops on full military alert. The draft of the order was read, but Stalin rejected it. He suggested that perhaps everything could still be settled peacefully.

Nevertheless the intelligence information received by the Soviet gov­ernment and military proved to be correct: on June 22 at four in the morning,

Germany and its allies, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia, went on the offensive along the entire German—Soviet border.

From the first hours of the invasion, the commanders of the border regions, disoriented by Moscow's orders, began to lose contact with their troops. It was not until the night of June 21, at 12:30 am, that they re­ceived Timoshenko's order warning them of a possible German offensive on June 22 or 23 along the southwestern and western borders. The order began with the following strange formulation: "The task of our troops is to resist any provocation which could lead to major complications."

This meant that the Kremlin at that point was still hoping for a miracle to avert the war. The commanders of the border regions were to place their troops on a state of full alert, ready to meet any possible offensive by the Germans or their allies, and for this purpose, were to occupy quietly the firing positions in the fortified areas along the borders, order a state of alert for the anti-aircraft defenses, camouflage and disperse aircraft and troops, put the air defense forces on a state of alert, and take measures to black out cities and other targets. The last point of the order said: "No other measures are to be taken without special orders."³

Marshal Malinovsky reported that when he asked whether to open fire on the enemy if he invaded Soviet territory, the answer was, "Do not give in to any provocations and do not open fire."⁴ Once the German offensive had started, Timoshenko warned General Boldin, the deputy commander of the Western Military District, "I am informing you and asking you to inform Pavlov [the district commander] that comrade Stalin has not autho­rized artillery fire against the Germans." Boldin started to shout into the telephone: "How can that be! Our troops are being forced to retreat. Cities are burning and people are dying." He insisted that mechanized units be called into action immediately, as well as artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Timoshenko answered: "Do not take any measures other than reconnais­sance missions into enemy territory, to a depth of no more than sixty kilometers."⁵

It was not until the evening of June 22, when the situation became critical because of the deep penetration by German tanks, that the front­line commanders were issued orders to launch "heavy counterattacks to destroy the enemy's main forces and drive operations back onto enemy territory."⁶ This surrealistic order reflected a complete misunderstanding of the real situation and a total disregard, or ignorance, of the facts on the part of the Soviet military and political leadership.

The facts were as follows: The concentration of German forces and their allies numbered 190 divisions, or 4.6 million soldiers, including 17 tank divisions and 13 motorized divisions, 50,000 cannons and mortars, some 5,000 aircraft, and more than 3,700 tanks. Of these divisions, 153 were German, constituting more than 70 percent of the German army. Counting reinforcement units, the German troop strength alone amounted to 3.3 million.⁷

At the beginning of the war the Soviet armed forces numbered 5 million,⁸ and 170 divisions and 2 brigades were concentrated in the western border regions—that is, 54 percent of the entire Red Army, or about 2.9 million men. The first line of defense consisted of 56 divisions and 2 brigades, dispersed over a depth of up to 50 kilometers from the border. The second line of defense was positioned 50—100 kilometers inside Soviet territory, and the reserves 150—400 kilometers from the border.⁹

In the zones where the Germans concentrated their most devastating blows, their superiority in numbers was considerable, from 1.8 to 2.2 times the Soviet troop strength. Soviet forces had at their disposal 1,800 late model tanks, some 34,700 cannon, 1,540 late model airplanes, and a large number of obsolete aircraft and tanks.¹⁰

Thus, the German army enjoyed an absolute advantage both in number of troops and in armaments. It also had considerable experience in modern warfare and a well-trained officer corps.

At 4:15 am, when Germany launched its offensive, its air force made devastating bombing raids on all Soviet airfields near the border. On the first day of the war, 1,200 Soviet planes were destroyed,¹¹ the vast majority of them not even having a chance to take off. Railroad terminals and lines of communication were put out of commission, arms and ammunition dumps seized or destroyed: for some unknown reasons, these depots were located too close to the border.

While isolating centers of resistance by Soviet troops, the German com­mand developed its offensive toward the east. Toward the end of the first day, the German tanks had advanced as many as sixty kilometers toward Brest and had occupied Kobrin.¹²

On the evening of June 22 Timoshenko ordered the Northwestern, West­ern, and Southwestern fronts to go on the offensive in all main directions, to smash the enemy, and to drive operations back onto enemy territory. Besides not corresponding to the real situation at the front, this order was truly criminal because it forced the commanders to send their troops into certain encirclement, under murderous fire. Similar orders were issued to the troops in the Baltic Military District by their commanding general, F. F. Kuznetsov. Tens of thousands of casualties and hundreds of thousands of prisoners were the price the Soviet people paid for the disarray and incompetence of the military high command, the Politburo, and Stalin himself.

It was not until the fourth day that Soviet General Headquarters (Stavka Glavnogo Komandovaniya) understood the unrealistic nature of its orders to counterattack. At that point, German troops had already penetrated between 130 and 150 kilometers into Soviet territory. On June 28, one week after the war began, Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia, fell, and 319,000 prisoners and huge stocks of armaments fell into enemy hands.

On the Northwestern Front, scattered Red Army units, completely de­prived of command, hastily withdrew toward the Western Dvina. But this natural border could not be held: the columns of German tanks crossed the Western Dvina, took Daugavpils, and on July 9 took Pskov without even stopping.

It was only in the Lutsk-Brody and Rovno region, at the junction of the Southwestern and Southern fronts, that Soviet troops inflicted heavy casu­alties on the Germans in a bloody tank battle; this delayed the German advance for a week, but Soviet forces soon had to pull back to the old border, to the Korosten, Novograd-Volynsky, and Proskurov regions.

On the Western Front, after bitter clashes, Soviet troops were forced to withdraw to the Dnepr. And on the Southwestern Front, in early July, the Germans had taken Berdichev and Zhitomir.

After three weeks of fighting, the German army had penetrated a distance of 300—600 kilometers into Soviet territory. It had occupied Latvia, Lith­uania, Byelorussia, the Ukraine up to the right bank of the Dnepr, and almost the whole of Moldavia. Russia had not experienced such a disaster since the time of Napoleon. During World War I the Russian generals, whom Soviet historians accuse of incompetence, never suffered such dev­astating blows.

The German army's losses were heavy: from June 22 to July 13, they reached approximately 92,000, or 3.68 percent of the German troops on the Soviet front.¹³ But these losses were nothing compared to those of the Red Army.

Through the middle of July a vast and hard-fought battle raged along a front 1,400 kilometers long, between the Polesye region and the mouth of the Danube. On August 8 the Germans succeeded in crossing the Dnepr between Kiev and Kremenchug. Stubborn resistance continued for a month and a half. Budenny, commander of the Southwestern Direction (in Soviet terms, a "direction" included several "fronts," whereas a Soviet "front" was the equivalent of an "army group" in Western military terminology), requested authorization from General Headquarters to abandon Kiev and its fortified region and withdraw his troops from the Dnepr to the Psel river. General Headquarters refused. As a result, the Germans encircled four Soviet armies, most of whose many soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.

According to one account, General M. P. Kirponos, commander of the Southwestern Front, committed suicide, as did some of the members of his headquarters staff.¹⁴

Upon taking Kiev, the German Army Group South launched an offensive aimed at Kharkov, the Donbass, and the Crimea. East of Kiev, the Germans headed toward Bryansk and Orel, with the objective of taking Moscow. By the end of September 1941 the situation was truly critical.

THE GOVERNMENT, THE PEOPLE, AND THE WAR

Eight hours after the German invasion began, at noon on June 22, 1941, Molotov, the deputy premier, went on the radio to inform the Soviet people of the treacherous German attack. Stalin chose not to speak. He had reason enough for that decision, for his policies were now exposed as total failures, in particular his friendship and collaboration with Germany and his failure to prepare the country for war. He was in the habit of associating his name with all Soviet victories and achievements, and he certainly did not want his name identified with defeat. For several days Stalin seems to have been in shock. He secluded himself in his dacha at Kuntsevo outside Moscow and in effect withdrew from the affairs of state. Not until a number of days had passed, and after other members of the Politburo had pressured him (as was made known at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956) did he return to his duties.

It took another week before the Soviet leadership sent its first directive to party and government organizations in the front-line areas and another five days before Stalin went on the radio to announce this program of action to the population, on July 3, 1941. He was obliged to tell the people that the enemy had made deep inroads into the Soviet Union. At this moment of crisis Stalin, who had deprived millions of their homes, property, and rights during collectivization, who had created a system of slave labor camps, who had executed the best military leaders and the cream of the intelligentsia, who had shot or imprisoned millions of Soviet citizens, issued a pleading call to his "brothers and sisters."¹⁵

In this difficult hour the best and noblest instincts were aroused among the people: the spirit of self-sacrifice, the feeling of responsibility for the country, and a sense of patriotic duty. In the threatened areas, entire divisions of popular militia (opolchenie) were formed, as well as special units to guard against German paratroops, and labor battalions to build new lines of fortifications. The recruitment stations were flooded with vol­unteers.

In Leningrad alone ten divisions of popular militia were formed; together with other volunteer formations, they totaled 159,000.¹⁶ In Moscow there were twelve divisions, totaling about 120,000. In Kiev 29,000 joined. It was not only the industrial workers who entered these units, but the in­tellectuals as well—teachers, students, artists, musicians, writers, sci­entists. Most of them had no military training, and there was neither the time nor the necessary weapons and supplies to provide it.

To understand better the situation in which the country found itself by fall of 1941, let us hear the testimony of a major witness, Nikita Khrushchev, who was then the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party:

The situation quickly turned very bad, mostly because there was so little help forthcoming from Moscow. Shortly after the war started, during the German advance on Kiev, there was a great awakening of patriotism among the people. The workers from the "Lenin Forge" and other factories around Kiev came to the Central Committee in droves asking for rifles so that they could fight back against the invaders. I phoned Moscow to arrange for a shipment of weapons with which to arm these citizens who wanted to join the Front in support of Red Power. The only person I could get through to was Malenkov. "Tell me," I said, "where can we get rifles? We've got factory workers here who want to join the ranks of the Red Army to fight the Germans, and we don't have anything to arm them with." "You'd better give up any thought of getting rifles from us. The rifles in the civil defense organization here have all been sent to Leningrad." "Then what are we supposed to fight with?" "I don't know—pikes, swords, homemade weapons, anything you can make in your own factories." "You mean we should fight tanks with spears?" "You'll have to do the best you can. You can make fire bombs out of bottles of gasoline or kerosene and throw them at the tanks."

You can imagine my dismay and indignation when I heard Malenkov talking this way. Here we were, trying to hold back an invasion without rifles and machine guns, not to mention artillery or mechanized weapons! I didn't dare tell anyone what Malenkov had said to me. Who knows what the reaction would have been. I certainly couldn't tell the people how bad the situation was. But the people must have figured out on their own how woefully under- equipped we were. And why were we so badly armed? Because of compla­cency in the Commissariat of Defense and demoralization and defeatism in the leadership. These factors had kept us from building up our munitions industry and fortifying our borders. And now it was too late.¹⁷

(Naturally Khrushchev did not say a word about the fact that in the Ukraine, particularly in the western region, in certain instances the population ac­tually welcomed the Germans as liberators.)

Initially the mobilization affected all men born between 1905 and 1918

and capable of bearing arms; in the last year or two of the war the draft was extended to those born through 1927.

In the regions west of the Yaroslavl—Ryazan—Rostov-on-the-Don line, martial law was decreed and the organizing of popular militias and anti- paratroop units began.

On December 26, 1941, a law decreed the mobilization of all industrial and office workers in the war industry who had not been drafted. Unau­thorized departure from a job in any of these enterprises was equivalent to desertion. Forced overtime was instituted; all holidays were suspended for the duration of the war. The workday was increased to between ten and twelve hours, and in the cities where a state of emergency existed, such as Leningrad and Tula, the workday had no end. Transportation workers and office workers were also mobilized.

The country's human resources were sharply reduced at the very begin­ning of the war, because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was quickly occupied by the enemy. Moreover, in the first few months of war millions of Soviet soldiers were either killed, wounded, or captured.

With a large percentage of the male population called off to war, they were replaced on the job by women aged sixteen to fifty-five, who had to take over the heavy work of men: stoking furnaces, handling hot metal, operating heavy machinery. People over sixty and adolescents of fourteen and older were also brought into the factories.

On June 30, 1941, the State Committee for Defense was formed, an emergency body, which concentrated all power in its hands. Stalin was its chairman, Molotov its vice-chairman, Voroshilov and Malenkov initially its other two members. Later, the committee was filled out with Beria, Bul- ganin, Voznesensky, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan. Local defense committees were also created, each consisting of the first secretary of the local party organization, the chairman of the local soviet, and representatives of the local army and state security units.¹⁸

In the threatened regions, the evacuation of factories and specialists to the eastern parts of the Soviet Union began. Thus, 1,500 factories were relocated to the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia. Some estimates put the evacuated population at 10 million. But the great mass fled eastward without waiting, leaving homes and belongings. In areas farther from the front, evacuation was better organized. The fac­tories moved to the east began producing for the front rather quickly. Workers and engineers toiled under the harshest conditions. The construc­tion of industrial sites took place during the fall of 1941 and the winter of 1941—42, which was very severe. The factories were reconstructed with great speed: four months after being dismantled, many were already pro­ducing at full capacity. The workday was from twelve to fourteen hours long. Workers lived under the most unimaginable conditions, often in mud huts or tents. Food was in short supply.

The reconversion of the economy was basically completed during the first year of war. This was a particularly difficult time. Industrial production was 2.1 times lower than before the war. During the first six months of the war the output of ferrous metals decreased by a factor of 3.1 and that of nonferrous metals by a factor of 430(!). Ball bearing production was twenty- one times less than before the war.¹⁹

Airplane production also dropped sharply. In the last quarter of 1941, it was less than half that of the third quarter. In December 1941, only 35 percent of the plan for aircraft production was completed. At that point, four-fifths of the aeronautics industry was being transferred to the east. The plan for tank production for the second half of 1941 was completed by 61.7 percent. Ammunition production reached only 50—60 percent of that foreseen in the plan.²⁰

During the war, the standard of living of the urban population was very low. The rationing system barely provided the minimum. People had to turn to the black market, where prices were astronomical. Many city dwell­ers went out into the rural areas regularly to exchange clothing or utensils for food. Practically all the earnings of the city dwellers went for food or rent. Industrial workers, especially those in heavy industry, received "first category" rations: 800 to 1,000 or 1,200 grams of bread per day (bread being the staple of the diet). Workers in other branches of industry were assigned to the second category: 500 grams. Office workers were allotted between 400 and 450; children up to twelve years of age, housewives, and other dependents received 300—400 grams. The usual monthly allowances of meat or fish were 1,800 grams; fats, 400 grams; macaroni or groats, 1,300 grams; sugar or sweets, 400 grams. There were also the categories of "higher rations" and "special higher" rations. Many industrial and office workers turned their ration cards over to the dining halls at their places of employment and had all their meals there. The privileged stratum (the party and government officials) had their own system of provisioning, which was very different from that of ordinary mortals, both qualitatively and quan­titatively.

Many offices and firms were assigned collective farm lands as subsidiary enterprises that could be drawn upon to help feed their staffs. Industrial and office workers in the cities had received small private plots, to grow potatoes and other vegetables for their personal needs. During the war these gardens became the primary source of food for hundreds of thousands of families. Basic items like shoes, clothing, and textiles also became rare luxuries during the war. From time to time, some factories paid their workers with coupons usable for the purchase of shoes and clothing; these coupons, as well as the items they were supposed to buy, became the object of black market speculation.

The already critical housing situation was greatly complicated by the war, especially in Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Uzbekistan, and the other Central Asian republics, where many evacuees went. The refugees concentrated in cities and regions where they could find industrial work and public services. The situation for those who did not find work in their field and were forced to perform agricultural tasks was even worse. Unfamiliar with the work, their productivity was far below that of the collective farmers; their earnings and living standards were accordingly quite low.

Almost half the cultivated land in the Soviet Union fell to the Germans, who soon controlled areas that had produced more than half the country's grain and animal products. The Germans were able to seize crops that had been harvested but not yet shipped, as well as tractors, combines, and other agricultural machinery. In the areas not reached by the Germans, livestock were removed, and tractors, trucks, and horses were mobilized for the war effort. Agriculture was thus deprived of hauling power. Almost all able-bodied men were either at the front, in German captivity, or in Soviet prison camps. Only the very young or the very old, the women, and the sick remained in the villages. Cows were used to till the land, and when there were none, women would harness themselves to the plow. Many farming tasks were done by hand. Virtually the entire harvest was turned over to the state in the form of obligatory deliveries. The amount to be delivered was frequently determined on the basis not of the actual harvest but of an imaginary "projected harvest," approximately 25 percent higher. Failure to meet these obligations was severely punished; people could even be sent to jail, as though they had been found guilty of sabotage. Often no seed grain was left for the next season's planting. The situation was par­ticularly bad in Central Russia, where even before the war the peasants had had trouble making ends meet. The war put the finishing touches on the ruination of the collective farmers. The only hope was the small private plot each peasant household was allowed to cultivate. The produce from this could be used for personal consumption or profitably sold to city dwellers or exchanged for needed items. The peasants in the wanner regions of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, where they had some livestock, vege­tables, fruit crops, and oil-producing crops, were better off.

All around the country, collections were taken for the Red Army. Objects of value, money, jewels, government bonds, all poured into the national defense fund. Money was also raised for particular projects, such as tank columns or airplanes. Often, in areas far from the front, enormous sums were contributed by individual "collective farmers" (100,000, 200,000 rubles). Where did this money come from? From the astronomical prices charged for food on the black market, where speculators built up enormous fortunes during the war. They contributed a tiny portion of their gains to the national defense fund. Thus, a part of the money cruelly extorted from the population, especially the evacuees, was placed at the disposal of the state. These donors were trumpeted as exemplary patriots, written about in the newspapers, and extolled over the radio.

No sooner had the war begun than the system of "socialist national relations" began to shake apart. The first fissures appeared in the newly acquired regions, the Baltic states and the western parts of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The policy of "purges" and deportations of nationals, among the first measures carried out by the new Soviet authorities in 1939— 1940, had aroused sufficient fear and hatred among the population for them to welcome the Germans as liberators. The situation was not much better in the regions of the interior, a fact which can be blamed on the regime, with its policy of repression.

In August 1941 the autonomous republic of the Volga Germans was abolished. These were German settlers who had come to the Volga region two centuries earlier. The Volga Germans were accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany, when in fact they were among the most loyal inhabitants of Russia. They were deported to the East and the Far North.

Thus, the first blows against harmonious relations among nationalities in the Soviet Union were dealt by the Soviet state itself, not the invading enemy.

In late 1943 and early 1944, several nationalities of the Northern Cau­casus region were deported, also on charges of collaborating with the enemy: the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, and Karachai. They were followed soon after by the Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars. At the same time, other non- Russian peoples were removed from the shores of the Black Sea: Greeks, Bulgarians, and Krymchaks. Their fate was soon shared by the Kurds and the Khemshins. Plans were made to deport the Abkhazians, too. In all cases where a deported nationality had its own autonomous region, that administrative structure was abolished. The deportations affected over 1 million people, most of them Muslims.²¹ They were crowded into cattlecars and shipped off to Siberia, the Urals, and Central Asia. The aim of the deportations was essentially to have a more "reliable" (i.e., Russian) pop­ulation along the Soviet borders and in areas where there was tension.

Russians and Ukrainians were brought in to replace the deported popu­lations in the towns and villages of the Northern Caucasus, the Stavropol region, and the Crimea.

The deportees lived under very crowded conditions and in great depri­vation. Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease while being de­ported or in the first years of adjustment to their new status and location. They were restricted to "special settlements," where they existed under constant close surveillance, not allowed to move about as they pleased. No books, magazines, or newspapers in their native languages were published, and teaching the mother tongue in the schools was forbidden. They no longer had access to university education.

In Transcaucasia, despite the fact that German troops reached the Greater Caucasus Range in the fall of 1942, the situation was relatively stable among the non-Russian nationalities, although in the mountains there were armed groups hostile to Soviet rule. The large concentration of NKVD troops and Red Army units in the region was one of the most powerful arguments against any attempt to revolt. Moreover, the nationalities of Transcaucasia saw no practical way to protect themselves other than by loyal support to the Soviet state. The entry of Soviet troops into Iran at the beginning of the war, the alliance between the USSR, England, and the United States, and the traditional enmity toward Turkey (especially on the part of Armenians) were also contributing factors.

In the republics of Central Asia, the nationalities situation during the war was complicated by the influx of refugees, evacuees, and deportees. The war effort required the creation of a new economic infrastructure in the region, an increase in the production of cotton and nonferrous metals, exploration for and exploitation of new sources of raw materials, and the exploitation of such sources when found. The influx of Russians, Ukrai­nians, and others substantially changed the economy and culture of Central Asia, particularly in relation to urban growth and development, for it was in the cities that the bulk of the new Russian population concentrated. According to an Uzbek demographer,

Before the 1950s, and particularly in the years before and during the Great Patriotic War, the industrialization of the peripheral national regions, in­cluding the republics of Central Asia, and the strong migration of Russians into these regions (as well as Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and some other nationalities), brought as a consequence a noticeable decrease in the pro­portion of the population constituted by the nationalities originally inhabiting the union republics of Central Asia, as well as the autonomous republics and regions of the area.²²

The weight and influence of Russians in the local administration and, above all, in local industry rose in proportion to the influx of Russians, while the Russian language and Soviet Russian culture penetrated more deeply into the native milieu. This had the political side effect of height­ening the interdependence of the local elite and the "all-union" bureau­cracy.

During the war, the population of the Culag was sharply increased by the deportees from the Baltic states, western Poland, Moldavia, and the Caucasus, as well as by Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, "defeatist ele­ments," "okruzhentsy" (troops who had been encircled by the Germans), and other unfortunates. The detainees were put to work building airports, landing strips, and roads in the Far North. It was they, not enthusiastic Communist youth, as tourist guides today claim, who built Magadan, the capital of the Kolyma region. It was also they who built the underground hangars near Kuibyshev and the airports and landing strips at Soroka, Onega, Kargopol, on the northern Dvina, and in the northern Urals and Pechora regions. The slave labor of prisoners was used in war plants, the expansion of port facilities on the Arctic Ocean, and the construction of roads in Siberia and Transcaucasia. Prisoners died by the thousands from undernourishment and fatigue and from the inhuman treatment meted out by the guards and administrators, by the entire NKVD system, which was aimed at breaking and destroying the human personality. The loss of life among camp inmates proceeded at a preplanned rate. Those assigned to heavy labor lived no more than three years as a rule. New prisoners were brought in to replace the dead; and the process went on without end.

As we have said, the camps were swelled with the victims of the "purges" in the newly annexed territories of western Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. From 1939 to 1941, 1,060,000 Polish citizens were deported to Siberia and the Urals. This deportation began with the Soviet—German pact ushering in a new partition of Poland.²³

Estimates vary on the number of Poles sent to "corrective labor camps." According to information at the time, there were 200,000; but more recent information compiled by Robert Conquest suggests there were 440,000 in the labor camps; the remaining 620,000 were sent either to prisoner of war camps or enforced settlements in remote areas.

Two hundred thousand people were deported from the Baltic countries, that is, 4 percent of the combined total population of 5 million. Of these, between 50,000 and 60,000 ended up in the labor camps. Two hundred thousand were also deported from Bessarabia. Many Volga Germans, rep­resentatives of an "enemy nationality," likewise were sent to the camps;

later some of the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, and peoples of the Northern Caucausus deported in 1943—1944 also ended up in the camps.

The slave labor force was also replenished with inmates convicted under a law prohibiting theft of state property, which dated from August 1932. Usually this meant the culprit had stolen a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes, or, often, had picked some leftover potatoes or ears of grain from an already harvested field.

There were new categories as well: those convicted of "spreading rumors" or "sowing panic," and those who had failed to bring in their radios. (At the beginning of the war a government decree ordered that all citizens surrender their radio sets to be kept in state storage until the end of the war.) By the late summer of 1941, the okruzhentsy began to arrive in the camps, soldiers who had been encircled by the Germans because of the errors of their commanders or the conditions of war and who had miraculously escaped. As a general rule, all these categories were sen­tenced to ten years in the camps. After the Battle of Moscow, those suspected of having stayed in the city, rather than fleeing or being evacuated, were rounded up. It was said they had planned to welcome the Germans in Moscow.

Later additions to the camps were those who had collaborated with the enemy: the German-appointed Biirgermeisters and village elders, those who had served in the German-sponsored police in occupied areas (the so-called Polizei), members of nationalist organizations, "Vlasovites" (supporters of General Vlasov, discussed later in this chapter), and German and Japanese war criminals. A 1943 law providing for death by hanging or condemnation to hard labor was applied to the last several categories.²⁴

Prisoners in all these categories were sent to Mine No. 17 at Vorkuta, later to Norilsk and Dzhezkazgan. These in effect were death camps where existence was so dreadful that many preferred to throw themselves under the wheels of the railcars carrying ore or coal.

Researchers estimate that between 1939 and 1941 alone, 1.8 million prisoners died in the camps.

Stalin, who was interested in creating the impression in the West that the Soviet Union was a humanitarian state, authorized a visit to Magadan in 1944 by the American vice-president, Henry Wallace, who was accom­panied by Owen Lattimore, the noted Far Eastern expert. Wallace was very enthusiastic about what he saw. And he was shown very impressive things: a dairy farm, greenhouses where vegetables were grown, needlework pro­duced by prisoners. Under orders from Moscow, the notoriously cruel Ni- kishov, director of Dalstroi (the Far Northern Construction Project, the euphemistic official name for the vast and deadly prison labor system in the Kolyma region), gave his important visitors a grand reception. Prisoners were shut up in their barracks; watch towers were taken down; male and female NKVD personnel masqueraded as prisoners, impressing the Amer­icans with their health and vigor. On their return to the United States, Wallace and Lattimore wrote quite favorably about Nikishov, the NKVD, and the Soviet system.²⁵ Later, when Wallace ran against Truman in the presidential elections, the Soviet press spoke of Wallace in glowing terms.

VICTORY AT MOSCOW

On September 24, 1941, the German high command adopted a new plan for an offensive aimed at Moscow; it was given the code name Typhoon. The German strategic idea was to launch an uninterrupted offensive from Smolensk to Moscow and take the capital by storm. The operation was entrusted to Army Group Center, under the command of General von Bock. At his disposal he had over 1 million soldiers: 44 infantry divisions, 8 motorized infantry divisions, 24 tank divisions (1,700 tanks), over 14,000 guns and mortars, and 950 fighter planes. The Soviet forces in front of Moscow had 95 divisions, 6,800 guns and mortars, 780 tanks, and 545 planes. Thus, the Germans had twice as many tanks and guns as the Russians, and almost twice as many planes.²⁶

The German offensive began on September 30 and by October 2 had broken through Soviet lines at several places. As a result the main forces of the Soviet Western Front and "Reserve Front" were encircled in the Vyazma region. "At the moment when the German tank units pierced the Vyazma defense lines, no intermediate lines of defense were left be­tween Vyazma and the Mozhaisk line, nor were there any troops capable of slowing the enemy tank units in their rush toward Moscow," says the official Soviet history of the war.²⁷

By October 14 resistance by Soviet troops in the Vyazma pocket had been broken. The cream of the Moscow intelligentsia, who had volunteered for the people's militia divisions (opolchenie), were killed in this battle. Many had not even learned how to fire a rifle. It was not a battle but a slaughter. The fate of Jewish volunteers who were taken prisoner was par­ticularly tragic; almost all of them were exterminated. The destruction of the Moscow volunteer corps, which went into battle totally untrained, sent by the command to ward off the blow of the professional German army, remains one of the most tragic pages in the history of the Nazi—Soviet war.

According to German statistics (Soviet sources do not mention the losses), the German army captured 663,000 prisoners, 1,242 tanks, and 5,412 guns at Vyazma.²⁸

During the morning of October 15, rumors of the defeat at Vyazma spread through Moscow. Orders were given for the immediate evacuation of offices and staffs, both military and civilian. It was considered possible that the Germans might reach Moscow within twenty-four hours. Train stations were filled with people being evacuated to accompany their enterprises to new locations in the East. But there was also an "unorganized" population fleeing from the Germans. All roads east were crowded with vehicles and pedes­trians. Many took nothing but a few possessions in knapsacks on their backs. It was a veritable exodus. The authorities in Moscow seemed par­alyzed. Here and there, looting occurred in the suburbs. The panic reached its climax on October 16. There were cases of military personnel hastily changing into civilian clothes. Religious people prayed. Some people were convinced that all was lost, that the end of human civilization had come. Not until twenty-five years after the war, however, was acknowledgment made in an official publication that Moscow had been seized with panic.²⁹ Nevertheless, the majority did not lose faith in the nation's ability to resist. During those difficult October days tens of thousands of Muscovites went out to build defense lines, and many of them were killed.

On October 19 a state of siege was declared in Moscow. The defense of the capital was entrusted to General Zhukov, commander of the Western Front. On the eve of the renewed German thrust Zhukov hastily brought reserves to the capital. The attack began on November 15—16. The forces of the German army maintained their superiority over the Soviet army in terms of artillery (2.5 to 1) and tanks (1.5 to 1), but this time, the Soviet air force outnumbered the German (1.5 to 1). The British and Americans had sent a large number of airplanes, tanks, and other arms.

Extremely bitter fighting ensued. In spite of their heavy losses, the Germans kept advancing toward Moscow. The Soviet troops fought tena­ciously, defending every inch of soil. An example of the heroism of those defending the approaches to Moscow was the feat of thirty-three soldiers of General Panfilov's division who stopped the advance of German tanks at the Dubosekovo crossroads at the price of their lives.

Soon the German offensive showed signs of running out of steam. Tula, one of Russia's most important industrial centers, 182 kilometers southwest of Moscow, was encircled, but did not fall. Nevertheless, the main German tank forces were stopped only 29 kilometers from Moscow. Reconnaissance elements of some German tank units reached Moscow's western outskirts. But by then the German offensive had petered out. German losses had been heavy: 155,000 killed, wounded, or frozen; 800 tanks and 300 heavy guns lost.³⁰

The German high command did not have enough reserves to continue the offensive. The freezing weather also helped to bring the Germans to a stop.

During those first six months of war, the Soviet armed forces and their leadership had acquired considerable military expertise; for the first time the Germans encountered serious opposition. The Soviet soldiers were fighting for their homeland, and that gave them added strength.

On December 5—6 the Soviet army launched a counteroffensive in the western strategic sector. The operation lasted one month, but it failed to reach its objectives, because of insufficient strength. Nevertheless, Soviet troops did advance westward some 100—250 kilometers from Moscow, re­lieving the capital of any immediate danger. On December 8 Hitler signed orders placing the German eastern front on the defensive.³¹

The Battle of Moscow was a major event. For two years the German armies had gone from victory to victory, conquering all of Europe. Now for the first time they had been stopped and made to suffer heavy losses. Their hopes for a quick and easy victory had been shattered. The rulers of the Third Reich had to face the prospect of a protracted war on two fronts. The victory at Moscow completely eliminated the danger of a German invasion of Britain, gave renewed strength to the European resistance, and fostered a crisis in the coalition of fascist powers.

The beginning of the Soviet offensive coincided with two other events of major importance. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States; and on December 11, Germany declared war on the United States.

In December 1941 and January 1942, Hitler removed thirty-five of his generals, among them von Brauchitsch, commander of all land forces, von Rundstedt, and Guderian. A number of SS divisions were sent to the eastern front.

At the beginning of the Soviet counteroffensive, Stalin hoped that it would develop into a victorious general offensive on all fronts. But his hopes were soon deceived.

LOST BATTLES AND LOST LIVES

The Battle of Moscow brought the total liberation of three provinces (ob- lasts)—those of Moscow, Tula, and Ryazan—while those of Leningrad, Kalinin, Smolensk, Orel, Kursk, Kharkov, and Stalingrad were partially cleared. Heroic resistance continued at Sevastopol.

Despite heavy German losses at Moscow (almost fifty divisions), the German high command managed to reorganize its forces in a brief period and immediately began preparations for a new offensive.

The Soviet high command had overestimated the capacities of its own forces and had launched incautious offensives in different directions, with the result that by April 1942 its strength had run out. All the painstakingly accumulated reserves were expended. Stalin did not appraise the new strategic situation correctly. In his orders to the military councils of the various fronts, he said it would be possible to drive the Germans westward without stopping and force them to exhaust their reserves before the spring of 1942, "in this way assuring the total destruction of Hitler's armies in 1942." This assessment drew no objections from the Stavka or the General Staff, but Stalin's predictions proved unfounded.³²

One of the first defeats of the Red Army in 1942 was its attempt to break the blockade of Leningrad. The armies on the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts were to pierce the German lines from opposite directions and link up after making a breakthrough. The attempt was doomed from the start—because of delays in the concentration of a sufficient number of troops, inadequate training, and shortages of supplies and material. At the request of Me- retskov, commander of the Volkhov Front, who realized that his troops were not prepared for the offensive, the Stavka (Stalin and Vassilevsky) autho­rized a postponement, but only for a short time, when in Meretskov's words, "at a minimum... fifteen to twenty more days were needed."³³ German intelligence detected the preparations for the offensive and determined fairly accurately where the blow would fall, so that the German high com­mand was prepared to repel the attack. According to Meretskov, the forces of the Volkhov Front, which had been given orders to advance, had been severely weakened in previous combat and had not been properly rein­forced, certain divisions having only two-thirds or half of their regular strength. Artillery, mortars, and automatic weapons were also lacking. The Second Shock Army, for example, had the troops of a regular army corps.

"The only reserves the front had," Meretskov reports, "were two very weak cavalry divisions and four ski battalions. The front did not even have a second line of defense. We did not have the means to build on an initial successful attack so as to expand in the enemy's rear and deal him a final blow."³⁴ The front commander was gambling on the promise from General Headquarters that reserves would be sent as soon as the army crossed the Volkhov.

The offensive was begun several times, but each time it foundered. The Second Shock Army found its progress slowed by the forests and marshes on the right bank of the Volkhov and was unable to reach its objective,

Lyuban. The troops from the Leningrad Front were also unable to fulfill their mission of breaking the German encirclement from the inside. These exhausting battles, which went on for four months, led to the needless loss of tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers, achieving nothing. During these operations the Stavka repeatedly made unconsidered decisions, abolishing the Volkhov Front at one moment and restoring it again at the next. As a result of the incompetence and poor leadership of the Stavka, in demanding the continuation of this senseless offensive, and of M. S. Khozin, the commander of the Leningrad Front, the Second Shock Army was literally driven into a trap. Not until the middle of June did the Soviet side manage, after fierce fighting, to break a hole in the German encirclement through which a few units and individual officers and soldiers of the Second Shock Army were able to escape.

The Northwestern Front also suffered heavy losses. Not only were the Soviets unable to smash the German troops they had encircled in the Demyansk region; in the end they were defeated in their attempt to stop the Germans from breaking through the Soviet encirclement to relieve the German Sixteenth Army in the Demyansk salient and reunite it with the main German forces in that area.

But the situation in the German-held Rzhevsk—Vyazma salient was even worse. Here a trap was laid for the Soviet forces. They were allowed to break through the German defenses only to have the trap sprung and find themselves encircled. They were forced to fight their way back, with terrible losses. Entire Soviet divisions and corps perished.

The calculations of the Soviet high command were in error—they as­sumed it was possible to remain on the defensive and simultaneously go on the offensive in several directions. This defective approach had been proposed by the General Staff and approved by Stalin in March 1942.

The Soviet command made several attempts to retake the Crimea by amphibious landings at Theodosia and Eupatoria. Each time they were repelled with heavy losses, in spite of Soviet superiority in troop strength (2 to 1) and equipment (1.5 to 1). These defeats were due to the incom­petence of the local commanders, Lieutenant General Kozlov and Lev Mekhlis, the Stavka representative. The enemy's strength and intentions were not discovered in time; thus the German offensive against Kerch, on May 8, 1942, was a disaster for the Soviets, whose troops beat a disorderly retreat across the Kerch straits to the Taman peninsula. According to Soviet sources, 176,000 were killed.³⁵ According to German figures, 150,000 Soviet troops were captured, along with great quantities of equipment.³⁶ Kozlov and Mekhlis were merely given a slap on the wrist, in the form of a demotion.

Stalin and his generals did not have a clear understanding of their army's capabilities. They made an adventurist decision to launch an offensive in the Kharkov region, with troops of the Southwestern and Southern fronts. Their objective was to destroy the German army in the southern sector of the Soviet—German front. The General Staff had some objections to the plan of operations, which involved heavy risks, because the Germans out­numbered the Soviets on both flanks, threatening to encircle them. Stalin, however, ordered the General Staff not to interfere, and he approved the plan submitted by Timoshenko, commander of the Southwestern Direc­tion.³⁷

The offensive started on May 12, with Timoshenko commanding the Southwestern Front and Malinovsky the Southern. The Soviets had the advantage in terms of men, tanks, and aircraft. The Germans had superiority in artillery.

At first the Soviet forces made a successful breakthrough toward Bar- venkovo, but by May 17 it was obvious that the offensive of the Southwestern Front had to be stopped immediately, so that troops could be shifted to the Kramatorsk region to stop the threat from German forces that had broken through the defenses of the Southern front. Stalin decided to continue the offensive regardless.³⁸

During the evening of May 18 Khrushchev, who was a member of the Southwestern Front's Military Council, reported to the head of the General Staff, Vassilevsky, that the situation had worsened in the Barvenkovo bulge and that Stalin had refused the request of the Southwestern Front that the offensive be broken off. He asked Vassilevsky to present the Southwestern Front's request again to Stalin. Vassilevsky says he advised Khrushchev to speak with Stalin directly.³⁹ According to Khrushchev, Vassilevsky, fearing Stalin's rage, refused to intercede. Stalin refused even to discuss the subject with Khrushchev. He had Malenkov pass on the message that the operation must proceed.⁴⁰ Zhukov gives a different version of these events. According to him, on May 18 Khrushchev still himself favored continuing the cam­paign.⁴¹

Catastrophe was becoming more and more unavoidable. German divisions attacking from the north and south had joined forces south of Balakleia. The concentrations of Soviet troops were surrounded and destroyed. Be­tween May 24 and 29, according to German sources, 240,000 Soviet sol­diers and officers were taken prisoner.⁴² Tens of thousands of others lost their lives. The Soviet Informburo, however, announced only that there had been 5,000 killed and 70,000 missing in action. It was thus that the command attempted to hide the slaughter at Kharkov from the people.

During the initial six months of war, the Red Army suffered staggering losses, in terms of soldiers killed and captured, and the figures increased as the Germany army advanced eastward. At the end of June and the beginning of July 1941, the Germans captured 329,000 soldiers at Bialystok and Minsk. At the end of July they captured 310,000 in Smolensk; at the beginning of August, 103,000 at Uman. But it was not until the last ten days of September that the number of casualties reached its all-time high, with 665,000 taken prisoner in the vicinity of Kiev, this being followed in mid-October by the capture of 663,000 near Bryansk and Vyazma.⁴³ At the end of the first seven months of war the total number of Soviet prisoners in German hands had reached 3.9 million.⁴⁴

A sorry fate awaited them. A month before the attack on the Soviet Union, the high command of the German land forces had issued a directive under which all captured Red Army political commissars were to be exe­cuted immediately; it likewise authorized the shooting of Red Army pris­oners "without any formalities." German soldiers and officers were not to be held responsible in cases of the murder of Soviet prisoners. Often they were killed as a pastime.

An order from the German army dated October 1941 instructed that prisoners and the civilian population in the occupied regions be left to starve and no supplies be given to them at the expense of the German army. K. Kromiadi, who later became a collaborator of General Vlasov, described the situation of the Soviet prisoners in the fall of 1941 as follows:

The prisoners were half-naked, dirty, exhausted; none had shaved for a long time; worst of all, they were in the throes of utter despair. Nobody cared about them; their government had placed them outside the law. ... And conditions in the camps were unimaginable. Prisoners were dying. The way these people—half-insane from their situation—were treated by the camp administration was revolting. Brutality, including the use of weapons, was a daily occurrence. But most terrible of all was the fact that the feeding of the prisoners was merely a "formality." The people had reached the point of complete exhaustion and were barely able to stand on their feet. ... That winter, 80 percent of them starved to death or froze.⁴⁵

Given these conditions, the prisoners were ready to do anything to escape from the death camps. Their situation was made even more tragic by the fact that their government had abandoned them. Many of them were labeled traitors to the homeland simply because they had been taken prisoner. Although in November 1941 the Soviet government protested the mistreat­ment of the prisoners, it rejected the services of the International Red Cross, which had proposed to exchange lists of prisoners of war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Theoretically, this would have given some guarantee of security to the one and the other. The Red Cross also wanted to help provide material aid to the prisoners. The Soviet government con­sistently rejected such proposals. It is not very likely that the Red Cross would have succeeded in stopping Hitler, who had sanctioned the exter­mination of Soviet prisoners, but it was no less criminal for the Soviet government to neglect any possibility of saving its citizens' lives.

For the Soviet government these prisoners did not exist. They had already been scratched off the list, erased from official memory. For example, at the Teheran conference in 1943 Stalin confided to Churchill that in the Soviet Union all soldiers wished to become heroes; those who did not had been killed.

All hope lost, they died by the hundreds of thousands. According to official German documents of May 1, 1944, 5,754,000 Soviet soldiers had been captured since June 1941. At least 3,220,000 of them died. As to those who survived, a sad fate awaited them on their return to the Soviet Union, as will be seen later. Beginning in the middle of 1942 the strongest and most skilled were forcibly employed in German industry. In December 1944 over 630,000 Soviet prisoners of war were doing forced labor for the Germans.⁴⁶

THE DRIVE TO THE VOLGA

The Soviet winter offensive lasted on various fronts until April 1942. Three months later, the Germans launched a new offensive which was very well prepared. Their goal was to smash the Soviet forces in Central Russia. They were hoping to reach the Volga, take the Caucasus, and force a Soviet surrender.

On the German—Soviet front in the summer of 1942, the Germans had an advantage over the Soviets in terms of men (6,200,000 to 5,500,000) and in fighter planes (3,400 to 3,160). The Soviets had more artillery (43,640 guns and mortars and 1,220 katyusha rocket launchers to 43,000 guns and mortars) and tanks (4,065 to 3,230 tanks and motorized howit­zers).⁴⁷

The Soviet high command presumed that the main thrust would be di­rected at the center of the front. Kursk-Voronezh was the direction thought second most likely to fall under German attack, with the same aim— outflanking Moscow, but from the southeast. In fact, the German high command had decided to make its main thrust to the south.

The offensive began on June 28, 1942, from the area east of Kursk. At the same time, Voronezh was attacked from Volchansk. Five German armies and three from its allies—Italy, Hungary, and Romania—took part in the attack. Their objective was to surround and destroy the Soviet forces of the Bryansk Front, commanded by F. I. Golikov, and later those of the South­western and Southern fronts, thereby gaining free access to the Volga and the Caucasus. On July 2 the German armies broke through the Soviet defenses at the junction of the Bryansk and Southwestern fronts, to a depth of eighty kilometers. On July 7 the fighting reached the outskirts of Vo­ronezh. Rokossovsky replaced Golikov at the command of the Bryansk Front, and Vatutin was named commander of the new Voronezh Front. The Soviet command threw its reserves into the battle, but these reinforcements arrived too late. The Germans continued their offensive.

On July 15 the Soviet defenses were breached between the Don and the northern Donets rivers. At that point the German offensive extended along a front 500—600 kilometers long. Soviet troops abandoned Rostov on July 24 and crossed the Don in retreat. By July 27 fighting was taking place in the direction of Stalingrad.

One consequence of the Soviet defeats was a severe erosion of discipline, with an increasing incidence of desertion to the enemy and unauthorized withdrawal. Many units were retreating in disorder, abandoning arms, am­munition, and equipment. The number of self-inflicted wounds was on the rise, especially among soldiers of non-Russian nationality. Cases of indis­cipline, cowardice, and panic reached such proportions that the high com­mand was greatly alarmed. Punitive and disciplinary units were strengthened: their orders were to fire at will on all units or soldiers withdrawing without proper orders. On July 28 Stalin issued Order No. 227, which stated the following: "It is time to put an end to retreats. ... Not a single step back­wards! ... Each position, each meter of Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!"⁴⁸

This order also condemned the widespread belief that Russia after all was a huge country and there was plenty of room to retreat, and it stressed the need to reestablish iron discipline in the army, to punish without pity all who displayed cowardice or committed acts of indiscipline. The political directors of the Red Army were given especially great authority. Measures were also taken to strengthen military counterintelligence (SMERSH). Com­manders and commissars of retreating units were threatened with demotion and court martial.

By August 19 the fighting had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. Mean­while on the Southern Front, after breaking through Soviet defenses in the Tsimlyansk region on July 29, the Germans drove toward the Caucasus. On August 5 they took Stavropol, and on August 11, Krasnodar. They reached the gates of Maikop and occupied Beloreshenskaya, but were unable to break through to Tuapse. Meanwhile, south of Rostov, they reached Mozdok on August 8 and Pyatigorsk the following day. Continuing their offensive, the German vanguard units reached the Greater Caucasus Range and occupied several mountain passes, reaching as far as the pass on Mount Klukhori. On August 21, 1942, the iron cross was waving from the peak of Mount Elbruz. It was not removed by Soviet soldiers until February 17, 1943. Near Grozny, the eastward drive of the Germans was stopped, and they were forced to assume defensive positions. They were also unable to reach Transcaucasia.

Thus, by the fall of 1942 the German armies had penetrated deeper into Russia than any invading army from the west had ever done.

In the Caucasus the Germans were able to create a local government with the assistance of collaborators, including many former emigr6s such as Ali-Khan Kantemir and the Dagestani General Bicherakhov. In Berlin, at the Ministry for the Eastern Countries, a National Committee of the Northern Caucasus was set up. Kantemir was formally in charge, but the Germans actually controlled it. It proclaimed its willingness to collaborate with Germany, having as its objective the separation of the Caucasus from the Soviet Union. The committee recruited Soviet prisoners of war from the Northern Caucasus into the armies of the Reich, mainly the Caucasian Legion. The German government, however, was no less alien to the moun­tain peoples of the Caucasus than the Soviet government. If the Caucasians had a dream, it was to free themselves of both governments, not replace one with the other.

Armed groups had been active in the mountains since the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, and their activities increased as the German offensive approached. Major Soviet units were withdrawn from the front and used against these groups. The bulk of the population, however, re­mained loyal to the Soviet government.

The German offensive in the summer of 1942 spurred a new wave of evacuations of urban populations. Once again Central Russia and the Volga region were covered with hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them heading for Central Asia. Trains followed trains, filled with machinery, engines, raw materials, and fuels. Huge amounts of industrial equipment fell to the invaders, but the Soviets managed in spite of everything to save some equipment. New factories arose in the eastern part of the country, in Central Asia and Siberia, but on the whole industrial production decreased during the second half of 1942.

In 1941 and 1942, during the German offensive, many towns and villages were abandoned to their fate by the local authorities, both party and gov­ernment. In some cases, the Germans would arrive only a few days after the officials' departure. They would find and take factories, stores, agri­cultural and industrial products, livestock, and fuel. And also important archives, such as those of Smolensk, which afterward came into the hands of the United States and still serve as an invaluable source of knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.

The local authorities never failed, however, to execute political prisoners before the arrival of the Germans. From June 28 on, mass arrests began in the Baltic nations and eastern Poland. NKVD troops arrested and shot people in the cells and yards of the prisons of Lvov, Rovno, and Tallin. In Tartu 192 corpses were thrown into a pit. Prisoners were also killed during evacuation at prisons in Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk, and Orel. At a molybdenum mining complex near Nalchik, where prison inmates were working, all prisoners were executed by machine gun fire. As the Germans neared the Olginskaya camp, the NKVD released those who had been condemned to less than five years; all the rest (thou­sands upon thousands) were shot on October 31, 1941.⁴⁹ These were not isolated incidents: the full history of the executions of prisoners during the Soviet retreat has yet to be written.

THE GERMAN OCCUPATION

In 1941 and 1942 the German armies occupied 1,926,000 square kilo­meters of Soviet territory: the Baltic states, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, a significant part of Russia, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Moldavia. These regions were economically the most highly developed in the USSR; before the war their populations had reached 85 million, that is, 40 percent of the total Soviet population.⁵⁰ This area produced 63 percent of the country's coal, 68 percent of its cast iron, 58 percent of its steel, 60 percent of its aluminum, 38 percent of its grain, and 84 percent of its sugar. This was also one of the principal centers of livestock breeding in the Soviet Union (38 percent of its sheep and 60 percent of its hogs). Moreover, hundreds of military plants and facilities were located in the occupied areas.⁵¹

The Nazi leadership had worked out a set policy toward the inhabitants of the USSR well in advance of the invasion. As official German documents make clear, the extermination of a major part of the population was planned for Poland and European Russia. Plan Ost called for the deportation of 31 million people from these territories, with colonization by German settlers over a thirty-year period. The plan called for the starvation of millions of Poles and Russians. Goering, speaking in August 1942 at a conference of

Reich representatives in the occupied eastern territories, cynically de­clared: "In the past, this was called robbery. ... Still, I'm ready for some robbing, some efficient robbing."⁵² Alfred Rosenberg, one of the original Nazi theoreticians and later the Reich's minister of the occupied eastern territories, predicted that "very difficult years certainly lie ahead for the Russians."⁵³

The Nazis wanted to destroy all state structures in the occupied territories and enslave the population at the lowest possible cultural level. "Our guiding principle," said Hitler, "is that the existence of these people is justified only by their economic exploitation for our benefit."⁵⁴

The Soviet-occupied territories were divided into two main Reich com­missariats: Ostland and "Ukraina." Ostland comprised Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Byelorussia. "Ukraina" included the regions of Volynia and Podolia (with Rovno as regional center), Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolaev, Dne­propetrovsk, and Taurida (with Melitopol as the center). These territories were under "civilian" administration. All other occupied territories were under direct military rule as combat zones. In the southwest the region between the Dniestr and the Bug and to the north of Odessa was placed under Romanian rule and called Transniestria. Each major administrative unit was divided into smaller units (Kriegsgebiete, Stadtskomissare, etc.). In rural zones volosts, the prerevolutionary administrative units, were rein- stituted. In the cities nominal authority was exercised by Вiirgermeisters, appointed by the Germans; in the villages they appointed "elders" (starosty). Everywhere, collaborators were recruited to serve in local police bodies; they were feared and hated by the population, who called them Polizei.

The Nazis' main aims were first to exploit the occupied territories economically and second to guarantee a secure rear area and safe lines of communication for the troops advancing into Central Russia and the foothills of the Caucasus. The Nazis' entire policy was subordinated to these ends, and the methods they used corresponded to them: extermi­nation of all Jews and members of other "inferior" nationalities; elimi­nation of Communists and their families; pillage of the occupied territories; pitiless exploitation of the population; and elimination of the few rights they had enjoyed under the Soviet regime.

On the eve of the invasion Hitler had ordered the formation of Einsatz- gruppen, special detachments under Himmler's command, whose purpose was to seek out and destroy all Jews, Communists, and other "antisocial" elements. These units were later reinforced by units of Ukrainians and Baits, who served as rural and urban police. The extermination of Jews began immediately after the invasion and continued throughout the occu­pation. More than 7,000 Jews were killed in Lvov immediately after it was taken by German troops. Criminal elements among the "Banderaite" Ukrainian nationalists participated in hunting down and murdering Jews.⁵⁵ Ghettoes were established for the Jews in many Ukrainian and Byelorussian cities, and afterward those who had been driven into the ghettoes were pitilessly annihilated. No mercy was shown to anyone—neither women nor children nor the elderly. They were shot, buried alive, burned alive, or killed in gas chambers. Tens of thousands of Jews, including Soviet citizens, were liquidated by the Nazis in such death camps as Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka. According to the estimates of a special Anglo—American committee in 1946, the Germans killed 1,050,000 Soviet Jews.⁵⁶

Very unhappy with the Soviet regime after twenty years, part of the population undoubtedly had some illusions concerning improvements in their conditions under the Germans. In certain parts of the Ukraine the German army was welcomed with flowers. These illusions were soon shat­tered. The German government was even more brutal than its Soviet coun­terpart. In other words, however bad it was, the Soviet government was their own, whereas the Germans were strangers who despised the population and not only robbed them but humiliated them at every turn.

On the other hand, almost all families in the occupied territories had children, fathers, or brothers in the Red Army. Patriotism, the feeling of belonging to a common land and a common cause, a sentiment that had been lost or completely uprooted, was reborn as a reaction to the invaders' cruelty. This was fertile ground for active and passive resistance toward the invaders. The Germans deported 4,258,000 Soviet citizens to Germany to work in industry and agriculture.⁵⁷ Most of them were mistreated and exploited mercilessly. They had to wear special badges that said Ostarbeiter (worker from the East) and were segregated from Western workers. Any contact with the local population was strictly forbidden.

An exception was made to this general policy in the case of the Kuban Cossacks. In mid-April 1942 Hitler authorized the formation of Cossack volunteer units to be used against the Red Army and the partisans. Hitler had been informed that the Kuban Cossacks constituted an independent nation whose ancestry was traceable to the Ostgoths. They were therefore counted as friends of the Reich. They were allowed to set up an autonomous government and granted freedom of religion, culture, and education. On October 1, 1942, a Cossack district consisting of six subdivisions was formed with a population of 160,000 inhabitants. The Cossacks were au­thorized to return to private landownership, under the condition that they serve in the German army. The Germans expected to increase their Cossack legions to 25,000. Nevertheless, the Germans had to withdraw from these areas in January 1943, and the main cities of the region, Rostov and

Novocherkassk, were retaken by the Red Army. Over 20,000 Cossacks joined the German army in its retreat. They were commanded by the German general von Pannowitz.

The Germans pursued a "special" policy in the Northern Caucasus, where they succeeded in forming several units of local mountaineers. The reason for this policy was their desire to use the Caucasus to supply their needs for oil. Their plans called for the formation of a General Commissariat of the Caucasus, which was to include the Northern Caucasus and Transcau­casia.

The occupied parts of the Caucasus were put under military rule. Unlike the rest of the occupied territories, where kolkhozes had been maintained as useful economic units to provide the food and raw materials Germany needed, the Caucasian mountain tribes were allowed to dissolve theirs if they so desired. Nevertheless, whenever the needs of the German army were at stake, the invaders acted just as harshly as in the other occupied regions, imposing forced requisitions, severe punishments, and collective responsibility for any sabotage against the German army.

The policy of employing non-Russians in the war against the Soviet Union was also used in the case of the Crimean Tatars, who were allowed to set up their own national institutions, and the Kalmyks, who were encouraged by the Germans to revive their nomadic traditions. But everywhere the Germans would crush the slightest attempt to attain any real national in­dependence. The nationalist organizations were always strictly controlled by the authorities. Thus, the Germans suppressed attempts by the Crimean Tatars to use Muslim committees to create a national movement. Punitive expeditions by the Germans against partisans in the Crimea did not spare the Tatar villages, many of which were burned down.

Part of the population in the Caucasus, in the Crimea, and in Kalmykia collaborated with the Germans—on a very small scale. Some were guilty of atrocities and war crimes. We lack detailed information on this topic, since Soviet sources remain silent. According to some Western researchers, of the 134,000 Kalmyks who lived in the Soviet Union in 1939, 5,000 became active collaborators.⁵⁸ For the Crimean Tatars, the figure was be­tween 12,000 and 20,000 collaborators out of a population estimated at 250,000 in 1939.⁵⁹

The German political and military command set itself three tasks when it planned the war against the Soviet Union: to eliminate bolshevism; to destroy any trace of a non-German state on Soviet territory; and to exploit the population and transform the occupied zones into German colonies. These objectives were based on the theory of the inferiority of the Slavic race and the superiority of the Aryan race over all others. The German political doctrine rejected in advance all collaboration with the peoples of the Soviet Union. The only relations it permitted were those of slavemaster to slave. This point of view, often expressed by Hitler, determined all policies in the occupied territories and even governed attitudes toward the anti-Communist forces willing to collaborate with the Germans.

Those forces included various Russian emigr6s, Ukrainian, Byelorus­sian, Polish, and Caucasian nationalists, as well as members of various anti-Soviet organizations. The German authorities used them as interpret­ers, technical personnel, sometimes as advisers, but never granted them political representation of any kind. The emigr6 organizations were torn by internal conflicts, each rival group seeking to win Germany's exclusive support, and they were hampered by the vagueness or absurdity of their political programs. As long as Germany held the initiative in the war, the Nazi leaders kept a tight rein on the anti-Soviet organizations, cutting short all their attempts at political action in the occupied territories.

For example, in the Ukraine, when the Organization of Ukrainian Na­tionalists (OUN) proclaimed the creation of a Ukrainian state in Lvov on June 30, 1941, their leaders Stetsko and Bandera were simply arrested by the German authorities, along with many of their supporters. Likewise, when another leader, Melnik, attempted to set up a government in Kiev, he was also arrested. This policy of repression led to a declaration of war on two fronts by the OUN, against the Red Army and against the Germans, but in reality they never attacked the Germans. In 1944 Bandera and Melnik were freed and allowed to lead the armed struggle of the Ukrainian nationalists against the Red Army, which at that time was on the offensive. Many exiled Ukrainian nationalists served in the SS Galichina division and in the Nachtigall regiment.

Erich Koch, Gauleiter of the occupied Ukraine, said in August 1942: 'The attitude of the Germans in the [Ukraine] must be governed by the fact that we are dealing with a people which is inferior in every respect. ... No social contact whatsoever with the Ukrainians. ... This people must be governed by iron force, so as to help us win the war now."⁶⁰

The same policy was implemented with minor deviations in Byelorussia. In mid-1942, when Byelorussia became the scene of a massive partisan movement, the Germans attempted to change tactics and tried to use western Byelorussian emigres. In October 1941 the legal existence of the nationalist organization Samopomoshch was authorized. Ivan Ermachenko, its leader, an exile who had fought in Wrangel's army, was named to head a Council on Byelorussian Affairs, working under the general commissar of Byelo­russia, Wilhelm Kube. But the Byelorussian population refused to collab­orate with this organization, seeing it as a German puppet.

As the military situation on the battlefronts deteriorated, Kube attempted more and more to use the Byelorussian nationalists against the partisans, who had the support of the population. The Byelorussian resistance at that point had over 100,000 men. In June 1943 the Germans set up a 'Trust Rada" (Rada Doveriya), an advisory body with which the general commissar was to consult on local matters. But the population remained hostile. At the beginning of September 1943 the resistance blew up a German office in Minsk. In reprisal the SD (Security Service) shot 300 people without regard for age or sex. On September 24, 1943, Kube was killed when a bomb, planted by a partisan, exploded in his house. On the eve of the recapture of Minsk by the Red Army the Germans held a "congress" of Byelorussian nationalists, who declared themselves the heirs of the Bye­lorussian Rada of 1918. But this was the sole action the congress took, for its leaders hastily fled to Berlin to escape the advancing Red Army.

From about the fall of 1941 on, groups of partisans sprang up in many places. Their nuclei were Red Army soldiers who had successfully broken out of German encirclement, local party and government officials, and a small number of local inhabitants. At first there was no central unified command, and many of the groups operated on their own, attempting to reach the front lines. Later, diversionary units especially trained for guer­rilla warfare were sent behind German lines, equipped with weapons and radios. Legend has it that from the beginning the partisan units were led by the Central Committee and the underground local party leaderships. But the reality was different. The partisan war, largely spontaneous, was an outgrowth of the repression and atrocities of the invaders. It was only after the first Red Army counteroffensives and the stabilization of the situation that scattered groups began to unite to form regular detachments which later developed into large military formations. At various Red Army field headquarters, special sections were set up to communicate with the partisan units and direct them. A central headquarters of the partisan movement was established in Moscow.

This movement was especially widespread wherever the Nazis earned the hatred of major parts of the population because of the atrocities they committed. The extermination of the Jews in Byelorussia horrified the local population and was one of the reasons for the growth of the partisan move­ment. By the middle of 1942 almost the whole of Byelorussia, including its capital Minsk, had been won by the resistance, a movement that at the time had as many as 100,000 members. The partisans were also very popular in the Ukraine, in the Leningrad and Novgorod regions, and in the Crimea. By the end of 1942, the movement was linked in a number of regions to urban underground organizations. Large groups of partisans came into existence, such as those led by Kovpak, Fedorov, and Kozlov.

The German command had to divert as much as 10 percent of its ground forces on the Soviet front to the struggle against the partisans. In 1943, according to Soviet figures, twenty-five divisions of regular German troops, not including reserves, special units, police, and so on, were used for this purpose. A partisan movement of these dimensions could exist only with the support of the local population.

The partisans caused trouble in the rear of the German army, hitting its lines of communication, blowing up military targets, derailing convoys, and killing high-ranking officers. They also took reprisals against collab­orators and thereby reduced the Germans' room for maneuver in their efforts to manipulate the local population. Often they tried and executed anyone even suspected of collaborating with the enemy, in many cases on the basis of rumor alone. In the Crimea, for example, the partisan command ordered the burning of Tatar villages, allowed partisans to rob the native population, and deliberately misinformed Moscow, alleging that the Tatars had generally collaborated with the invaders. Similar situations occurred in Kalmykia and the Northern Caucasus.⁶¹

According to official Soviet figures, which are probably considerably inflated, almost 1 million armed partisans fought in the resistance movement against the Germans between 1941 and 1945.⁶² In 1943 and 1944 they coordinated their operations with the advancing Red Army. It is estimated that the number of partisans in the 1944 offensive was 250,000.⁶³

STALINGRAD

On July 17, 1942, the Battle of Stalingrad began, as fighting reached the city's outer suburbs. It ended with a Soviet victory on February 2, 1943. For the Red Army the defensive stage of the battle lasted until November 19, 1942.

The Soviet troops who retreated, after heavy fighting, into Stalingrad were a badly battered force. At the beginning of the battle, only eighteen of the thirty-eight divisions which formed the Stalingrad Front were fully equipped. Fourteen were completely unfit for combat (they had between 300 and 1,000 fighters), and six had no more than 25—40 percent of their regulars.

During the months of August and September, the German forces contin­ued to advance. Soviet soldiers engaged in stubborn and courageous street fighting and house-to-house combat. Incidents like the defense of the Sta­lingrad Tractor Factory and the fighting for Mamai Kurgan and the Pavlov house were inscribed forever in the annals of the war.

The Soviet high command correctly saw in Stalingrad the turning point of the war against Germany. At that point it was quite clear that in spite of the immense Russian spaces east of the Volga, it was not possible to withdraw any farther. A Soviet defeat at Stalingrad would have allowed the Germans to establish a solid border on the Volga, to call an end to the war, and probably to set up a Russian collaborationist government. Zhukov, who had been named deputy supreme commander, was sent to Stalingrad to coordinate and lead all operations of the Stalingrad and Don fronts. He had saved Russia in the Battle of Moscow in 1941. Now he was to save Stalingrad.

The fighting in Stalingrad showed once again that the incompetent med­dling of political commissars in military operations often led to gross errors and created difficulties for the military commanders. On October 9, 1942, the institution of commissars was abolished again, and a united command was reinstated. Reserves, ammunition, and armaments were rushed to the Stalingrad area and deliveries were kept up continuously. Behind the lines, well-equipped armies were hastily put together. The desperate resistance by Soviet troops prevented the Germans from taking all of the city. The German advance stalled. By mid-October the German command was forced to issue orders to go over to the defensive.

The Soviet Union found itself in an increasingly favorable position. Military production was rapidly increasing. In the second half of 1942, 15,800 fighter planes were produced (as against 9,600 during the first half), 13,600 tanks (as against 11,000), 15,600 artillery systems (as against 14,000).

By mid-November some 2 million soldiers were taking part in the Battle of Stalingrad, almost equally divided between the two sides. The Soviets held an advantage in armament: 1.4 to 1 in tanks and motorized artillery, 1.3 to 1 in field guns and mortars, 1.1 to 1 in fighter planes.

The plan of the Soviet command was to use the forces of three fronts, the Southwestern, the Stalingrad, and the Don, to encircle the German armies between the Volga and the Don, and then destroy them.

The Soviet offensive began on November 19, 1942. By November 23 a German army group numbering 330,000 was surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Its commander, General von Paulus, was unable to obtain Hitler's permission to break out of the encirclement. He was ordered to organize the defense and await assistance from the troops of Field Marshal von Manstein. But fresh Soviet troops blocked Manstein's attempt to break the blockade of Paulus's group. On December 16 the Soviet forces on the outer ring of the Stalingrad "pocket" counterattacked and Manstein was forced to withdraw in haste. Initially, Paulus rejected all offers to surrender; Hitler had forbidden him to yield. The Soviet forces began the systematic de­struction of the encircled Germans. At last, on February 2, 1943, Paulus surrendered. Ninety thousand soldiers, including twenty-four generals and Field Marshal von Paulus himself, were taken prisoner.

The German defeat at Stalingrad was a boost to the morale of the Soviet troops and the home front. It increased the prestige of the military and political command and Stalin's personal authority. The fact that victory had been achieved in the ruins of the city that bore his name led mystics and believers to see in this success an act of providence or fate. The propaganda machine used the victory to praise the party's organizational genius. Silence was maintained about the war's first twenty months and the responsibilities of the leadership. Finally, the Stalingrad victory increased the Soviet Union's international prestige.

Stalingrad was a major blow to the Reich. It created trouble and gave rise to doubts among Germany's allies, adding vigor to the resistance in Europe and strengthening the positions of the neutral states. The victory at Stalingrad was facilitated by the British victory in North Africa, at El Alamein, and the landing of American troops in Algeria in the fall of 1942. Those operations diverted a substantial part of the German air force from the Soviet front.

The Soviet offensive at Stalingrad soon developed into a general advance along an enormous front ranging from Leningrad to the Caucasus. The Caucasus, the North Caucasus, Rostov-on-the-Don, and part of the Donets Basin were liberated. In late January 1943 Voronezh was retaken, followed by Kharkov, Belgorod, and Kursk. However, the German command retook the city of Kharkov and the northeastern part of the Donets Basin. This counteroffensive took the Soviet front-line commanders and the general staff completely by surprise. They had believed that in this region the adversary had been routed and was in full retreat. On March 18 the Germans took Belgorod. The Red Army was forced once again onto the defensive. In the northwest, Demyansk was retaken and Rzhev liberated. On the western front, the Soviet offensive stopped at the approaches to Smolensk. By then the front was 270—300 kilometers from Moscow.

In January 1943 Soviet troops partly broke the blockade of Leningrad. The city had suffered terribly. In December 1941 Hitler had named Colonel General Kiichler commander of the newly formed Army Group North. His assignment had been to wipe Leningrad from the face of the earth. For almost 900 days this city of 2.5 million was subjected to endless artillery shellings. Residential electric power and water supply were disrupted. In

alone the city was shelled by artillery for 254 days. In spite of the indescribable suffering of the population, the factories in Leningrad con­tinued to turn out weapons. Workers, engineers, and technicians remained at their posts. Many died of hunger and fatigue on the job. Eight hundred thousand residents died in the siege, but the city held out. Several times Soviet troops launched very costly offensives seeking to break the siege, but they all failed. The only access to the city, called the "road of life," was over the frozen Lake Ladoga. Not until January 1943 did Soviet forces manage to open a ten-kilometer-wide corridor providing a land link with the rest of the country. From that time on, the situation in Leningrad began to improve. But the blockade was not completely lifted until 1944.

KURSK: THE TURNING POINT OF THE WAR

In the spring of 1943 the German—Soviet front, from Leningrad to the Black Sea, was stabilized. As the German military historian General Tippelskirch has said, the Soviet military command showed increasing flexibility in attaining its strategic objectives, but in questions of tactics, the German army maintained its supremacy.

The number of regulars in the Red army and navy had increased from 2.9 million men in 1941 to 6 million in 1943.⁶⁴ The Soviet war industry had greatly increased its production and, supplemented by American de­liveries of materiel and foodstuffs, was meeting the needs of the armed forces.

Despite defeats, the German high command decided in the summer of

to try to regain the strategic initiative and deal a decisive blow to the Soviets, one that would put an end to the war. The new offensive began on July 5, 1943, in the Kursk-Belgorod region. This gigantic battle mo­bilized almost 2.25 million people on both sides, 6,000 tanks and over 4,500 planes. The Soviet army was far larger than the German one, not only in terms of troops (1,337,000 men against 900,000) but also in ar­maments.

On July 23 the German offensive was contained. On August 3 the Soviets counterattacked along the Orel-Kursk-Belgorod line. On August 23 they retook Kharkov, this time for good. The Battle of Kursk, which lasted fifty days, was won by the Red Army. The power of the German army was shattered.

The Battle of Kursk developed into a major strategic offensive, from Velikie Luki in the northwest to the Black Sea in the south. All of the

Ukraine east of the Dnepr, including its capital, Kiev, was liberated; bridge­heads were established on the right bank of the Dnepr, and many parts of Central Russia and a part of Byelorussia were liberated. In the south, the Germans were expelled from the Taman peninsula, including Kerch.

In the midst of the Kursk-Belgorod battle, on July 25, the landing of American and British forces in Italy began. In September, Mussolini's Fascist regime was overthrown and Italy surrendered. Nevertheless, the Germans invaded northern Italy, and the war there took on a prolonged character.

THE KATYN TRAGEDY

The Allied victories in Africa, at Stalingrad, and at Kursk and the events in Italy helped strengthen the resistance in the nations occupied by the Germans. Growing discontent in Europe boded ill for Hitler, with his predictions of a thousand-year reign for the "Great German Reich."

The Soviet attitude toward the resistance and the national liberation movements in Europe was two-sided. On the one hand, the USSR helped them with money, arms, and men when the resistance organizations were led by Communists who sought not only to expel the invader but also to set up their own political system. On the other hand, it felt obliged to support the legal governments in exile, with which the United States and Great Britain had diplomatic relations.

The touchiest aspect of this policy was in the area of Soviet—Polish relations. After the division of Poland in 1939, a Polish government in exile was formed abroad and recognized by Britain, the United States, and other countries. In 1941, at Britain's request, the Soviet Union and the Polish exile government restored diplomatic ties. Many Polish citizens, among them many prisoners of war in Soviet camps, were freed, and the formation of Polish units on Soviet territory began. At that point, there were almost 250,000 Polish prisoners of war. Moreover, after the Soviet annexation of the western Ukraine and western Byelorussia, a large part of the Polish population had been deported to Siberia and Central Asia: approximately 1,200,000 people.

When Polish General Wladyslaw Anders, formerly a prisoner of war of the Soviets, was allowed to start organizing Polish troops in the USSR, it was discovered that many men on the Polish army's officer lists had dis­appeared. Of the 14 generals taken prisoner by the Red Army, only 2 could be found, and only 6 out of 300 higher-ranking officers. The Polish com­mand began an investigation, questioning Poles who had been prisoners of the Soviets. It was established that the 15,000 missing officers had been held in three camps, Kozelsk, Ostashkovo, and Starobelsk, and that they were known to have been there up until the spring of 1940. After that all trace of them was lost. The Soviet authorities claimed total ignorance on the matter. The Polish command set up a special commission to investigate the disappearance of the 15,000. It was discovered that the camps had been evacuated in April 1940 and that the Polish prisoners had been taken to nearby train stations and shipped to a place west of Smolensk.

Anders and the diplomatic representatives of the Polish government in Moscow tried to obtain an answer from official Soviet sources as to the fate of the missing officers. At a meeting with Stalin on December 3, 1941, General Sikorski, head of the Polish government in exile, asked about them again. The answer was unexpected: 'They fled." Stalin was then asked where 15,000 men could have fled to. His answer was plainly absurd: 'To Manchuria."⁶⁵ The Polish government in exile continued to search through official Soviet channels for the missing men, with the help of Britain and the United States, but to no avail.

In February 1943 the Germans announced they had discovered in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, the buried corpses of thousands of Polish officers. Each one of them had been shot in the back of the neck with a German bullet.

On April 16, 1943, the Sovinformburo announced that the crime of the Katyn forest had been the work of the Nazis.⁶⁶ The Germans responded with the creation of an international commission under their leadership. It said that the Polish prisoners had been executed by the NKVD in April 1940, that is, one and a half years before the Germans took Smolensk. The Germans authorized Polish physicians living in occupied Poland to hold an independent investigation. The doctors concluded that the Katyn murders had taken place in 1940. Nevertheless, the Germans failed in their attempt to obtain an anti-Soviet statement from them. The Poles did not want the NKVD crimes exploited by their sworn enemies, the Nazis.

The Polish government in London asked the Red Cross to investigate the matter. The Soviet Union categorically refused to cooperate with the Red Cross in such an investigation.

The discovery of the Katyn massacre and the furor raised over it led Stalin to break relations with the Sikorski government on April 25, 1943.⁶⁷ Churchill had urged Sikorski to keep the matter quiet, to preserve the anti- German coalition.⁶⁸ The Soviet government took advantage of the situation to organize a Union of Polish Patriots, which Stalin hoped would become the future Polish government.⁶⁹ At the same time, a Polish division was organized on Soviet territory. It was thus that the Katyn controversy un­expectedly came to serve the long-term political objectives of the Soviet government.

Immediately after the liberation of Smolensk by Soviet troops, a Soviet commission investigated the massacre and, of course, found it had been the work of the Germans in the fall of 1941, not of the NKVD in April 1940.⁷⁰ Its findings did not even mention such important details as the material of the ropes used to tie the victims' hands, the origins of the square wounds produced by bayonet stabbings, and the character of the vegetation on the graves. The commission also named the guilty, among them a certain Colonel Arens. He, to the surprise of all parties, turned himself in at the Nuremberg trial. At Soviet request, the Katyn affair was included in the indictment. But when it was established that Arens had been away from Smolensk in the fall of 1941 and that the Soviet testimony was very cloudy, a decision was made not to include Katyn in the final judgment of the Nuremberg tribunal. Later, Churchill was to write in his memoirs: "It was decided by the victorious Governments concerned that the issue should be avoided, and the crime of Katyn was never probed in detail."⁷¹

For years a number of organizations and individuals laboriously gathered facts and testimony to establish what happened to the 15,570 Polish pris­oners who had been in the Soviet camps of Ostashkovo, Kozelsk, and Starobelsk between September 1939 and April 1940. In 1952 the U.S. Congress set up a special commission of inquiry. All the facts and testimony were summarized, leaving no doubt about who committed the crime and when.

Among the prisoners were a large number of reservists, including 1,000 lawyers, hundreds of schoolteachers, university professors, journalists, art­ists, over 300 medical doctors, and a number of priests. Here was the cream of the Polish intelligentsia, equally hated by the Nazis and the Soviet Communists. Officers on active duty numbered between 8,300 and 8,400.

The corpses of 4,443 Polish prisoners of war were found in the Katyn forest.⁷² They were identified as those who had been held in the Kozelsk camp. Some of the younger ones had offered resistance and had been beaten; some showed wounds from bayonets of the type used in the Red Army. The bullets were made in Germany prior to 1939. Bullets of this type had been sold before the war in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Baltic countries.

The last letters received by the families of the prisoners were dated April 1940. In the personal diaries which by some miracle survived, the last date written was April 9. It was also discovered that the prisoners had written on the walls of the railroad cars in which they were shipped. All the inscriptions said the same thing: the trains were heading northwest and being unloaded at Gnezdovo. People were treated with utter brutality. At

Gnezdovo the road from the railroad station to the forest was lined with NKVD men. Prisoners were unloaded and forced to board buses, which disappeared into the forest and returned empty for the next load.

Those who remained in the camp at Kozelsk kept a count of those who were taken. The lists of victims were given to the Polish resistance and thus survived. A total of twelve shipments from Kozelsk, 50—300 each, was thus recorded. The following are excerpts from one diary, whose author left the Kozelsk camp on April 8, 1940, with a group of 277.

April 8,

We were loaded at the station into a prison-train under heavy guard.

We are moving in the direction of Smolensk....

April 9,

Tuesday—Today weather like that during the winter. ... Snow on the fields. ... It is impossible to deduce the direction of our motion.... Treat­ment is rough.... Nothing is allowed.... 2:30 PM we are arriving at Smo­lensk. ... Evening, we arrived at the station Gniazdowo [Polish spelling]. It

appears that we shall get off a lot of military men around. Since yesterday

we have had only a piece of bread and a sip of water.⁷³

Finally, living witnesses of the massacre were found. They said that the crime had been carried out by personnel from the Smolensk and Minsk divisions of the NKVD.

The Katyn massacre took place in April 1940, over a year before the German occupation of the Smolensk region. As was shown by an indepen­dent commission of inquiry, three-year-old vegetation was found on the graves discovered in 1943: in other words, the crime was committed in 1940 and not in 1941.

What happened to the other 10,000 Polish prisoners detained in the Ostashkovo and Starobelsk camps? All trace of those held at Ostashkovo disappear at the Bologoe and Vyazma train stations; the traces of those from Starobelsk are lost in the Kharkov region. Nothing more has been found about either group.

But 448 prisoners from the Kozelsk camp survived. They were considered possible collaborators of the Soviet government, a judgment made by the NKVD officials who operated in the camps under the command of a General Zarubin. They were transferred to the Pavelich Bor camp between the end of April and the end of May 1940. In early June 1941 they were moved to the Gratsovets camp.

The chairman of the Soviet commission of inquiry into the Katyn crime, which was set up immediately after the liberation of Smolensk, was Aca­demician Nikolai Burdenko, a surgeon and a prominent figure in Soviet medicine. It was he who signed the official finding of the commission stating that the crime had been committed by the Germans in 1941. After the war, in 1946, when Burdenko was seriously ill and had retired, he confessed to a friend, Dr. Olshansky:

There is no question that these "Katyns" have happened and will happen. If you begin to dig around in the soil of our mother Russia, you will surely

come across a goodly number of similar archeological discoveries. We

were obliged to totally refute the widespread German accusations against us. Under Stalin's personal orders, I went to the place the bodies were discovered. An examination was made, and it was found that all the bodies had been there for four years. Death had occurred in 1940.... In fact, for me as a physician, that question is incontestable and there is no need for discussion on the topic. Our NKVD comrades committed a major mistake.⁷⁴

Stalin knew the truth about Katyn; the extermination plan had been worked out by the NKVD and approved by Beria. Among others implicated in the affair, to various degrees, were Beria's assistant Merkulov (both he and Beria were shot in 1953) and NKVD Generals Zarubin and Reikhman.

The Katyn massacre was entirely in keeping with Stalin's political aims— to purge Poland of all patriotic elements, to wipe out the intelligentsia, and thus to clear the ground for a pro-Soviet regime. This was the policy he later pursued, at the time of the Warsaw uprising in 1944 and after that, when the Red Army was extending its control over all of Polish territory.

THE STATE AND THE CHURCH

The influence of the Russian Orthodox church and the number of its prac­ticing members had been greatly reduced by the socioeconomic transfor­mations in the Soviet Union and by government persecution. Of the 50,000 priests and 163 bishops before the revolution, only slightly more than 100 priests and 7 bishops remained at the outbreak of war. One thousand monasteries and sixty seminaries had been closed.⁷⁵ In response to gov­ernment persecution, all sorts of sects and communities, a kind of "church of the catacombs," came into being.

On the eve of World War II the religious policies of the party and the state began to change: the party understood the need to revive and exploit patriotic feelings. In the fall of 1939, after the annexation of the western Ukraine and Byelorussia, and again in the summer of 1940, after the occupation of the Baltic states, the patriarch of Moscow sent his bishops to these regions. The government was hoping in this way to win the complete submission of its new subjects. The Moscow Patriarchate willingly carried out this mission, since its own interests were being served as well.

The church was not left floundering by the German invasion. On June 22, 1941, the vicar general, Metropolitan Sergii, issued an appeal to the church and the people, calling on them to defend the country, and he condemned those priests who refused to heed his call. At the other extreme, in Berlin, Metropolitan Seraphim urged the Orthodox faithful to rise up against bolshevism under Hitler's leadership.⁷⁶ During the first two years of the war, Sergii issued twenty-three epistles praying for victory. On his initiative, collections were taken up to finance the formation of the Dmitry Donskoi tank column.⁷⁷ Stalin was generous enough to accept this gift from the church.

The German invasion awakened a tide of religious feelings among the population.⁷⁸ In the occupied territories the Germans authorized the re­sumption of religious worship. For Hitler, the function of the church was to help the occupation authorities keep the population submissive. The religious aspect of the matter was of little interest; in Germany itself the Nazis did little more than tolerate the church. One of their objectives was to prevent any unification of the Russian Orthodox church and the anton- omous Ukrainian church. The law on religious tolerance published in Berlin on June 19, 1942, was in fact a measure designed to regulate religion. All religious organizations were ordered to register with the German district commissar. The commissar had the right to remove any priest suspected of political unreliability. Religious organizations, and their local and central officials, had to limit their activities to strictly religious matters or else face penalties ranging from fines up to the dissolution of the church com­munity.⁷⁹ Shortly before the promulgation of this law, Hitler told his inner circle: 'The formation of unitary churches for larger parts of the Russian territory is ... to be prevented. It can [only be] in our interest if each village has its own sect which develops its own image of God."⁸⁰

The special units, Einsatzgruppen, which were in charge of exterminating Jews and other "undesirables," were also given the power to control the activities of the church, up to and including the arrest and execution of priests.

The main objective of Nazi policy vis-&-vis religion was to use the re­ligious sentiments of the population to Germany's advantage. As one Ger­man document stated: "All the resources of the churches, mysticism, religion, and propaganda must be... employed to this end: 'Hitler against Stalin!'— or 'God against the Devil.'"⁸¹

Sometimes German commanders supported the resumption of religious activities on the territory under their control.⁸² Their aim was purely prag­matic: to ensure a secure rear area for the German army and safe com­munication lines by placating the local population. However, such commanders were severely reprimanded in Berlin. For example, following the celebration of a mass in the Smolensk Cathedral in August 1941, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht not to help the church in the occupied territories.⁸³

The clergy's attitude toward the German occupation varied widely: from open support to the organization of resistance. In this respect, the story of Metropolitan Sergii Voskresensky is instructive. Sent to Riga as bishop in 1940, he refused to return to Moscow after the outbreak of the war. The Gestapo arrested and later released him, and he began preaching in favor of a German victory. At the same time he revived religious life in the Baltic region. By 1943 he had organized approximately 200 parishes, religious education was underway, and the church was publishing its own magazine. Such was Sergii's religious influence in the Pskov region that the Germans ordered his transfer to Vilnius. This was the beginning of a series of conflicts between Sergii and the Germans. He was assassinated on April 28, 1944, on the road from Vilnius to Riga, presumably by the Germans.⁸⁴

Naturally, the mass of believers did not have the slightest idea of what the Germans were plotting behind the scenes in regard to the church. What mattered to them was the right to express their religious beliefs openly, without fear of persecution. They never suspected that the Germans not only reviewed sermons for proper subject matter but also censored the texts.

On September 4, 1943, Stalin met with Metropolitan Sergii and two other high church officials. He approved the patriotic activities of the Orthodox clergy and faithful and authorized election of a "patriarch of Moscow and all Russia" and the gathering of a Holy Synod.⁸⁵ In a special appeal to the priests of the occupied regions, Metropolitan Sergii of the Moscow Patriarchate warned against any collaboration with the enemy, which would be an act of "treason against the church and the motherland." He condemned Bishop Polikarp of Kiev for collaboration with the Ger­mans.⁸⁶

Thus, not only was the state reconciled with the church; it also acknowl­edged de facto that the church would be considered (when needed) an integral part of the regime. On September 8, Sergii was elected patriarch by a Council of Bishops, which adopted a major document entitled "Con­demnation of the Traitors to the Faith and to the Motherland." It stressed that "every person guilty of treason to the cause of the church and who has gone over to the camp of fascism will be excommunicated as an enemy of the Cross, and if he is a bishop or other clergyman, will be defrocked."⁸⁷ The war against Nazi Germany was thus proclaimed one of the goals of the Orthodox church.

Soon afterward, a theological institute with a two-year course of study was opened in Moscow, and one-year theology courses were authorized in the dioceses.⁸⁸ Prayers for Stalin's health were organized in all churches. The metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia wrote fervently in the church mag­azine: 'The faithful see in our leader... the incarnation of all that is best and brightest, all that constitutes the sacred spiritual heritage of the Russian people, the legacy of their ancestors."⁸⁹

This official reconciliation between Stalin and the church also meant that, from then on, the Soviet regime would support the patriarch and the authorities in their struggle against deviations from the Orthodox line, a kind of "general line" of the church. Soon afterward, many leaders of the New Church repented and were accepted back into the fold of the Orthodox church. The state now intensified its struggle against unauthorized sects all over the country, supporting the official church in every region, such as the Georgian and Armenian Orthodox churches.

As in the past, all church nominations had to be approved by state agencies. As far as privileges went, the high clergy were placed on the same footing as high state and party officials. When the first decorations were issued after the war, among the recipients were bishops of the Russian Orthodox church.

THE SOVIET UNION AND THE WESTERN ALLIES

From the first hours of the German—Soviet war it became apparent that Hitler's hopes for the political isolation of the Soviet Union were unfounded. Turkish Foreign Minister Saracoglu was the only neutral to speak of it favorably. On hearing of the invasion, he said: "This is not a war, but a crusade. Yet even Turkey remained neutral and stayed out of the war.

The British reaction was different from that of the United States. In 1940—1941, the British empire had suffered defeat after defeat in its out­lying regions: General Waveil's Near Eastern offensive failed and was fol­lowed by the pro-German coup in Iraq. The British were defeated in Greece and Crete, and a Spanish attack on Gibraltar seemed inevitable. In the naval war the British merchant fleet was suffering enormous losses, par­ticularly in the Atlantic. It became much more difficult for Britain to supply itself with the raw materials and food it needed to survive.⁹¹ For the British, this was one of the worst periods of the war.

In the middle of 1941 both the Soviet Union and Britain inevitably had to face the choice of whether to make an alliance or not—the Soviet Union because of the threat of a German attack; Great Britain because of the very difficult situation in which it found itself after two years of war. A public opinion survey taken in Britain in April 1941 showed that almost 70 percent of those polled favored friendly relations with the Soviet Union. (In March 1939 it had been 84 percent.⁹²) The British government had already shown its willingness to form an alliance with the USSR—by its warnings to the Soviet government on the impending German attack, by its attitude in the Hess affair, and by its agreement with the United States on measures to take in support of the USSR in the event of a German—Soviet war. Im­mediately after the attack of June 22, 1941, Churchill announced that Britain considered itself the ally of the Soviet Union and would render it all possible aid, stressing at the same time that he had been and still was an opponent of communism.⁹³ His position was far different from that of the British military specialists, who believed that the Soviet Union would be defeated in a matter of ten days.⁹⁴

On July 12, 1941, an agreement was signed in Moscow between Britain and the Soviet Union, both sides undertaking not to make a separate peace with Germany.⁹⁵ On August 2 a military and economic pact was signed between the Soviet Union and the United States.⁹⁶ And in October a tri­partite agreement was concluded on the delivery of arms, military equip­ment, and strategic materials to the USSR.⁹⁷ The flow of supplies soon began, and Allied tanks and airplanes played their part in the Battle of Moscow. Assistance to the Soviet Union was very important in late 1941 and early 1942, when the Germans had reached the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad and were advancing steadily in the Russian southwest. The Soviet war industry, part of which had fallen into the hands of the Germans and the rest transferred to the east, was virtually paralyzed. U.S. and British arms deliveries were shipped through the dangerous waters of the Arctic Ocean, where German warships sent many Allied ships to the bottom. Allied seamen showed great courage in regularly bringing supplies through to Murmansk. A British air force unit was stationed there to carry out air reconnaissance and to protect the convoys as they approached Soviet shores.

From September 1941 to mid-June 1942 sixteen convoys were sent to the Soviet Union; they delivered over 3,000 planes, 4,000 tanks, 30,000 motor vehicles, and large quantities of other materials.⁹⁸ In mid-June these deliveries were suspended because of heavy British losses from attacks by German warships. During the entire war the Allies sent the USSR 18,700 planes, 10,800 tanks, 9,600 guns, 401,400 motor vehicles, 44,600 ma­chine tools, 2,599,000 tons of petroleum products, 517,500 tons of non- ferrous metals, 172,100 tons of wire and cable, 1,860 locomotives, and 11,300 flatcars. These contributions amounted to 12 percent of the ar­mament produced in the USSR for use against the Germans." The Allies also sent foodstuffs, clothing, and so on, to the USSR, and American trucks rendered the Soviet army mobile.

On the political level, the U.S.—Soviet—British alliance, formally con­cluded in 1942, focused on the question of a second front in Western Europe—that is, an Allied landing in France.¹⁰⁰ The political maneuvering over the question of the second front involved not only the exchange of opinions, demands, and promises between the leaders of the three countries but also well-organized public opinion campaigns in Britain and the United States calling for the immediate opening of a second front.

On the military level this was impossible. In 1941—1942 the Allies lacked both the necessary forces and the experience for a gigantic landing of this type. Also, the prevailing British strategic doctrine, which the Americans for a long time accepted, differed radically from that of the Soviets, who were willing to accept higher risks. The Soviet Union especially insisted that its military burden be lightened, and indeed that burden was far heavier than what the Allies bore.

In the summer of 1941, 70 percent of the German armed forces were concentrated on the German—Soviet front. In the first half of 1944, on the eve of the Allied landing, the figure was 63 percent and even after the opening of the second front, it was between 55 and 57 percent.¹⁰¹ The absence of a second front in Europe meant even greater Soviet military losses, and these were already monumental for many reasons—the general hazards of war, the criminal negligence, mistakes, and oversights of the Soviet government and high command, and the lack of combat experience. From mid-1943 on the Red Army's losses decreased significantly.

In 1943 a second front in France instead of an Allied landing in Italy was perhaps possible. But this time, political considerations came into play, particularly the desire to prevent the USSR from reaching the Balkans, a region which Britain still considered vital to its interests. The landing in Italy could have led to a successful Allied offensive in the Balkans, but this did not come about. At the same time a new question confronted the Allies: Had the USSR built up enough strength to win the war on its own without their assistance? This possibility could not be ruled out and had ominous implications for Britain and the United States.

In November 1943 the Soviets officially announced their peace program. The main points were as follows: liberation of the European peoples from Nazi occupation; assistance to them in restoring their independence; free choice of government for the liberated peoples; severe punishment of those responsible for the war; implementation of the necessary measures to pre­vent any new German aggression; lasting economic, political, and cultural collaboration among the European peoples.¹⁰² No doubt the program was very appealing. The problem was knowing how to guarantee free elections in practice.

Starting in mid-1943 the foreign and domestic policies of the Soviet Union seemed to pursue more clearly defined goals. Inside the country an effort was made to strengthen the prewar system and reestablish the au­thority the party had lost since the beginning of the war. The techniques of propaganda and repression needed to achieve this end were brought to bear. In terms of foreign policy, the Soviet Union skillfully took advantage of President Roosevelt's suspicious attitude toward British imperial policy. Roosevelt was counting on firm and lasting collaboration with Stalin. Amer­ican politicians and experts avidly sought the least sign of what was being called in the West the transformation of communism into Russian nation­alism. These hopes increased after May 1943, when Stalin ordered the dissolution of the Communist International, which for a long time had been a rump organization. At the same time the Soviet Union began to strengthen its contacts with the resistance and national liberation movements, espe­cially in Southeastern Europe, cleverly exploiting the natural desire of the Eastern European peoples for a change in the previously existing systems, which had turned their countries into satellites of Germany. This extremely skillful maneuver on Stalin's part provided the Soviet Union with immense possibilities for expansion in the postwar period.

Great Britain and the United States, on the contrary, supported parties and political figures linked in one way or another to the collaborationist regimes or the remnants of the old cliques. Neither the British nor the Americans made timely efforts to find and consolidate centrist and liberal forces in the countries about to be freed from the Germans. This stemmed, on the one hand, from a total lack of understanding of the nature of the Soviet regime and an organic inability by the Western statesmen to assess correctly the thinking of the Soviet leadership and, on the other, from their inability to understand and accept the fact that change was unavoidable, since it was the outgrowth of the struggle against totalitarian nazism.

The American leaders understood the problems of India and the Near East better because the latter involved oil and the former the dismember­ment of the British empire, which, as they saw it, would open the doors of the British possessions to American business. Lastly, the Americans, concerned with their war against Japan, overestimated their need for the

Soviet Union in the war. In general, they did not quite understand Europe; its spirit was foreign to them and its problems too complex, dangerous, and irritating.

As a rule, therefore, the United States and Britain continued to support the conservative elements in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, thus playing into the hands of the Communist parties, which were often controlled and led by the Soviet Union. The Communists did what Britain and the United States had been unable to do: from the start they put forward a program of national renewal, by which they won support not only from the working class but from the urban and rural middle classes as well. The policies of the Western Allies were vulnerable: they lacked a concrete, positive pro­gram to present to the liberated peoples of Europe. The Communist parties soon filled the void with their programs for action.

Starting in 1943 the Soviet government began to play a leading role in the policies of the anti-German coalition. Stalin himself attended the Tehe­ran conference, held November 28 to December 1, 1943. Cleverly playing on the differences between the United States and Britain, he obtained a firm promise that a second front would be opened in France no later than May 1, 1944. Churchill's plan for another front in the Balkans was rejected. Stalin's second victory at Teheran, which would be confirmed and reinforced at the Yalta conference in February 1945, was the official recognition by the Allies of the Curzon line as Poland's future eastern border. His third victory was the recognition of his claim to Koenigsberg, which historically had never belonged to Russia. For his part, Roosevelt also won a victory with Stalin's agreement to declare war on Japan no later than three months after the end of the war in Europe.

By the end of 1943 the world political and military situation had changed radically. The Allies had settled the great strategic and political questions in Teheran. Intensive preparations for the landing in France began, and in Germany a plot against Hitler by senior officers was ripening. On the German—Soviet front, the Soviet command firmly held the strategic initi­ative. The Soviet armed forces outnumbered the Germans by 1,259,000 (6,165,000 to 4,906,000). The USSR had 2.5 times as many planes (8,500 to 3,000) and 1.4 times as much artillery (90,000 batteries to 54,000), and so on.¹⁰³

In January 1944 a new Soviet offensive began, resulting in the final breaking of the Leningrad blockade on January 27, 1944, after a siege of 870 days. Novgorod was likewise liberated. Thus the front was moved westward between 150 and 280 kilometers from Leningrad. On the South­western Front in the spring of 1944 all of the Ukraine west of the Dnepr was liberated, including Krivoi Rog, Nikopol, Nikolaev, and Odessa. In

April and May came the Crimea's turn. In the south, Soviet troops reached the prewar border along a front 400 kilometers long.

On June 6, 1944, Allied troops landed in Normandy. Germany was caught in the pincers of a two-front war.

On June 10, Soviet troops began a second offensive on the Leningrad Front, occupying Vyborg and reaching the Soviet—Finnish border. On June 23, an offensive on three fronts started toward the west. On July 3, Minsk was liberated, and the next day Soviet troops crossed the old Polish border. During the summer of 1944 most of the territory of the Baltic states was cleared of Germans.

In July and August the Red Army entered Poland and occupied almost one-fourth of its territory, with a population of 5 million. The Soviets were accompanied by Polish troops organized in the USSR. A Polish National Liberation Committee was formed in Lublin in opposition to the Polish government in exile. It had the advantage of being in Poland and of enjoying full military and political support from the Soviet Union. The government in exile was far away, in London, but it had the trust of the overwhelming majority of the country's population.

At the beginning of August 1944 Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, prime minister of the Polish government in exile, arrived in Moscow to hold discussions with Stalin. The talks collapsed. Stalin wanted a government in Poland which recognized the new border and would bow unconditionally to Mos­cow's political aims. As for the government in exile, it hoped to reestablish an independent Poland whose eastern border would be the same as before September 17, 1939; Britain and the United States helped resolve this dispute in the USSR's favor.

The Soviets set as a condition for settling the Polish question the dis­armament and dissolution of all formations of the Home Army, which was loyal to the government in exile. In August Soviet troops occupied the Praga suburb of Warsaw on the right bank of the Vistula. The Polish capital was on the left bank, several hundred meters away. The offensive was cut short because, according to a later official version, it was necessary to reorganize and regroup after a very rapid advance.

The Polish government in exile decided to call for an insurrection in Warsaw to liberate it before the arrival of Soviet troops. On August 1, 1944, underground units of the Home Army, under the command of General Bor- Komarowski, began an insurrection which was joined by many of Warsaw's inhabitants. The Polish command in Warsaw counted on support from the Soviet troops. According to one version of the events, a Captain Kalugin from Soviet field headquarters reached Warsaw and established links with the Polish command. However, his report to his superiors that a Soviet landing on the western bank of the Vistula was possible received no reply. What became of Kalugin after that is not known.

The British and American governments begged Stalin to support the insurgents. Stalin refused, arguing that the insurrection had begun without any prior coordination with the Soviet command and that it was an adventure for which the London Poles were to blame.¹⁰⁴

On October 2 the insurgents capitulated. Hitler ordered the population removed from the city, the insurgents disarmed and taken prisoner, and most of Warsaw destroyed.

The Warsaw uprising was in the last analysis beneficial to Stalin's political goals. Its failure proved to be fundamentally detrimental to the Polish government in exile. A new trip by Mikolajczyk to Moscow, at a time when Churchill was also there, was futile. Churchill had often warned Miko­lajczyk that he would not support him unless he made concessions to Soviet demands.¹⁰⁵ Roosevelt, who had never really involved himself in Polish affairs, stated that he would defer to the Soviet and British governments on the question.He told Mikolajczyk that if a mutual satisfactory agreement would be reached, American government "would offer no objection."¹⁰⁶

Meanwhile, the Polish armed forces under Soviet command had reached the size of 286,000. On December 31 the Polish National Liberation Com­mittee became a provisional government and was immediately recognized by Moscow. On November 24 Mikolajczyk resigned and a new government was established in London, headed by Tomasz Arciszewski, a leader of the Polish Socialist party and a stubborn opponent of any concessions to Moscow.

This was the situation when Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met once more, this time on Soviet territory, at Yalta.

YALTA: THE BLESSING OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

After the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and the attempt on Hitler's life in July, it was clear that the end was only a matter of time, making a summit meeting inevitable.

In the summer and fall of 1944, Soviet armies knocked Finland out of the war, occupied Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and a large part of Hungary, and approached Warsaw. They played a major role in deposing governments that had collaborated with Germany and Italy.

In October 1944 Churchill, trying to secure the flanks of the British empire, made a "gentleman's agreement" with Stalin, with Roosevelt's consent, to apportion the influence of Great Britain and the Soviet Union in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. (To this day the Soviet side has denied the authenticity of this agreement.) According to Churchill, Britain rec­ognized that Romania and Bulgaria were in "the sphere of natural Soviet interests" and that "Great Britain will fully respect Russian action." Soviet influence in Hungary was also recognized.¹⁰⁷ Later, in the last days of the war, Churchill tried to snatch Czechoslovakia and urged Eisenhower to occupy Prague before the Soviet army. Eisenhower's refusal, backed by Truman, thwarted Churchill.¹⁰⁸ Only in Greece did the Soviet Union rec­ognize the primacy of British interests. The United States, of its own accord, virtually withdrew from the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe, main­taining an interest only in Poland and of course in Germany and Austria.

Several months before the Yalta conference, the Soviet Union already controlled the fate of Eastern Europe and the Balkans and to a significant degree that of Central Europe. The presence of 6.5 million Soviet soldiers buttressed Soviet claims. This was simply a fact of life, which both Roosevelt and Churchill understood and accepted.

At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, Soviet military production had reached its highest point, accounting for 51.3 percent of total industrial production in the USSR.

By October 1944 all the territory of the prewar Soviet Union, except for part of Latvia, had been liberated. The Red Army entered non-Soviet Europe. Romania and Bulgaria were soon out of the war. Bucharest and Sofia fell as the Red Army marched into the Balkans.

Well before their entrance into Europe, Soviet authorities had trained foreign Communist cadres to lead the new pro-Soviet regimes in the nations of Southeastern Europe, where the arrival of the Red Army was soon followed by radical social and economic change. Many of these new gov­ernment leaders had been officials in the Comintern; others had taken part in the underground Communist movements in their respective countries during the war. The Soviet leadership preferred those who had served in the Comintern, survivors of the purges, whose servility was beyond ques­tion. The same tactic was applied everywhere: first of all, unification of all opponents of the old regime, including representatives of the old ruling classes; then the gradual, systematic elimination of all opponents of the Communist party in the given country, all sympathizers of the Communists being recruited to the new regime, all others being suppressed; and finally, an open takeover by the Communists, backed by the armed forces and secret police. In the first stage, the industrial workers and farm workers and part of the peasantry tended to support the program of social reforms put forward by the Communists because it promised to rid the nation of corrupt government and exploitation by capitalist and feudalistic landown­ers and to give power to the people. Once they realized the new power was worse than the old, it was too late.

In Bucharest on August 23, two days after the beginning of the Soviet offensive, King Michael reached an agreement with the Romanian Com­munists to oust the dictator, Antonescou. On August 24 Communist units took over all strategic points in the capital. On August 31 Soviet tanks entered the city. King Michael was awarded the highest military honor, the Soviet Order of Victory. Soon afterward he was forced to flee because the Soviet government had decided to put an end to the masquerade and place its cronies in power.

Things went well for the Soviets in Bulgaria from the start, undoubtedly because the revolution had been led by veterans of the Comintern. On September 9 the Communist-led Patriotic Front came to power. Several hundred politicians and parliamentarians were executed; others either fled or pledged allegiance to the new government. Veteran Comintern leader Georgy Dimitrov returned to Sofia.

In Yugoslavia the government was practically in the hands of the Com­munists, headed by Josip Broz Tito. His was the only party that had led a continuous armed struggle against the invaders from July 1941 on, creating a huge insurrectional army. Final victory was obtained with help from the Red Army, which participated in the taking of Belgrade.

Things went differently in Slovakia, where on August 29, 1944, a popular insurrection broke out when the Germans entered Slovakian territory invited by the puppet government of Monsignor Tiso. The insurrection continued to the end of October 1944 before it was suppressed. The Red Army was unable to break through the German defenses in the Carpathians to help the insurgents.

At the beginning of October 1944 the Soviet army entered Hungarian territory. Horthy announced his break with Germany and asked the anti- Nazi Western powers for a cease-fire. But he was overthrown by Szalasi, the leader of the Hungarian fascists, which greatly prolonged the battle for Hungary. Several times the Soviets launched very costly offensives which did not bring the desired results. Military operations on Hungarian territory ended only with the German withdrawal in March 1945. Power passed to a coalition government supported by Moscow. After some time, the allies of the Communists and the fellow travelers were kicked out of the govern­ment and forced to flee the country; others in fact joined the Communist party. Rakosi, an old Cominternist, was placed at the helm. That he had spent twenty years in Hungarian prisons and his way of thinking had not changed since the 1920s had fatal consequences for Hungary.

On July 20, 1944, the German generals' plot against Hitler, long in the planning stages, was finally carried out. But the bomb that went off at Wehrmacht headquarters missed him. All the people involved in the plot were executed. Thus was lost the last hope of those officers who would have liked to reach an understanding with the Allies after Hitler's fall.

By the autumn of 1944 the Germans had successfully stabilized their front in western Prussia, along the Vistula, and in the Warsaw region.

In December 1944 the British and Americans, stopped by the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes (the Battle of the Bulge), appealed to Stalin to divert the Germans and begin the invasion of East Prussia ahead of schedule. By the end of January 1945, one week before the Yalta con­ference, Soviet forces had reached the Oder—Niesse line, were approaching Frankfurt-am-Oder and Kustrin (Kostrzyn), and had taken Schneidemlihl (Pita). The Red Army was only sixty-five kilometers from Berlin.

Selecting a meeting place for the Allied leaders was hardly the minor problem it might seem at first glance. While Roosevelt and Churchill corresponded about the site of their future meeting with Stalin, the latter had already made his decision.

Military action had ended in the Crimea in the middle of May 1944. The palaces in Livadia, Oreanda, and Alupka were renovated and the grounds cleared of debris. Airports, roads, bridges, and railways were quickly put in order. At the same time the native population of the Crimea was also cleared out: the Crimean Tatars were accused en masse, every man, woman, and child, of collaboration with the Germans and deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Whether or not Roosevelt and Churchill knew about these deportations, they constituted a violation of human rights bor­dering on genocide, a bad omen for the impending conference.

Churchill categorically opposed Stalin's proposal to hold the meeting at Yalta, fearing that it would give Stalin a great advantage. But Roosevelt insisted that they still had to reckon with the most important factor: in the Soviet Union all decisions were made by one man, Stalin. The future of the world would depend on his participation in the conference. The Amer­ican president believed that if the Allies were patient and understanding, the USSR would take part in the new world organization of nations (the United Nations) and become a constructive force in world affairs.¹⁰⁹ If on the other hand the wartime alliance against the Axis powers were to break up and the world were divided into two armed camps, the Soviet Union could become a disruptive force.

Roosevelt also had other, more practical, considerations. He was in­curably ill, and several urgent matters remained unfinished: the utter defeat of Nazi Germany and the establishment of a future world order. He realized that the USSR remained the decisive Allied force in the European theater. Another important task was ending the war in the Far East. Japan still had an army of 4 million, a significant part of which (the Kwantung army) was inaccessible in Manchuria. Putting it out of action, potentially the most important part of the final stage of the war, could be done only by the Soviet Union. Roosevelt's military advisers gloomily predicted that without the Soviet army's help it would take another eighteen months after the end of the war in Europe before Japan could be brought to its knees. They calculated that a landing on the Japanese islands would cost 1 million American lives. This was a weighty argument. The president also knew that a test of the atomic bomb could be conducted no earlier than in five months, in July 1945.

At Roosevelt's insistence Churchill grudgingly accepted Stalin's proposal to hold the conference in the Crimea. From this time on Stalin was in complete psychological control of the situation. His political skill had never attained such heights, nor would it ever again after the conference. True, it was impressively buttressed by the bayonets of the Soviet army, then inundating Europe.

Under the unique conditions of the wartime alliance, a confrontation between two diametrically opposed systems of political thoughts, or more precisely, a clash of two worlds—the Soviet and the free world—took place at Yalta. However, something completely unexpected happened: a conver­gence not only of viewpoints but also of ways of thinking.

The Soviet world had tremendous advantages, first and foremost its military strength. Its ignorance of the Western world also worked in its favor. Moreover, the West as a whole, not only its leaders, recognized the Soviet Union's decisive role in smashing the German war machine; thus, the Soviet world also had Western sympathy for the sacrifices borne by the Soviet people and the desire to make compensation for them.

There were also more practical considerations. Roosevelt probably hoped—and this was his mistake—that a war in the Far East would divert the Soviet forces from Europe, thus weakening Soviet pressure. The mistake is almost incomprehensible, since the Soviet Union had promised it would declare war on Japan after the conclusion of the war in Europe, when the European theater of operations would no longer require many troops.

It was very easy for Stalin to satisfy Roosevelt. The American president was overwhelmed by Stalin's willingness to collaborate with Chiang Kai- shek, rather than with the Chinese Communists. Roosevelt was also satisfied that Stalin had agreed to join the United Nations under the conditions stipulated by the United States. How could the USSR have refused? It was granted three votes, since the Ukraine and Byelorussia were allowed to join the UN as independent members.

At the time of the Yalta conference, February 4—11, 1945, Soviet prestige in the West was at its peak.

The Western statesmen were concerned most of all over the situation in Poland, which was under Soviet control. Its future was in Stalin's hands. Both the American president and the British prime minister tried to coax what they could out of Stalin. But for Stalin the Polish question had es­sentially been decided. During the preliminary meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the agenda of the conference, Molotov suggested to Eden that the most important thing was not to interfere with the Poles because Poland was already liberated.¹¹⁰ Herein lay the essence of the Soviet position: the West should not interfere. Indeed, the Soviet Union was even prepared to make a few concessions, for example, the inclusion of several Polish leaders residing in the West as members of the Polish government which had been organized in the USSR and a promise to hold free elections (a promise never kept). The British requested permission to station British observers in Poland, with a guarantee of their freedom of movement. Stalin was magnanimous. Why observers? Let England and the United States send ambassadors to Warsaw. Churchill was grateful. Of course he understood that Poland's fate was in Stalin's hands and sought to mollify him. Still there was a ticklish ethical problem. England had entered the war to defend its ally Poland, invaded by Germany. Poland was a "question of honor for England."¹¹¹ Stalin understood that, but explained that for the USSR it was not only a question of honor but of security. Churchill no longer insisted on the return of Lvov to Poland and even recognized the Curzon line as the border between the Soviet Union and Poland. Moreover, Churchill himself provided a justification: "[After] all Russia has suffered in fighting Germany and after all her efforts in liberating Poland, her claim [to Lvov and the Curzon lin$] is one founded not on force but on right."¹¹²

Churchill's declaration about the right of the USSR to Lvov was a crucial turning point in the conference. It signified Britain's willingness to sanction the changes in the Soviet—Polish border made when Poland was divided by the Nazi—Soviet pacts of August 23 and September 28, 1939.

Still, Churchill wanted to get Stalin's pledge about the future Polish government. The most important thing, as he saw it, was not the territory but the form of government to be established on it. He was right, of course, in principle. But at this conference everything was important, both territory and power. Churchill proposed the creation of a Polish government without delay, right there at Yalta. Stalin feigned indignation: "I am called a dictator and not a democrat, but I have enough democratic feeling to refuse to create a government without the participation of the Poles themselves."¹¹³ Even the worldly Churchill was flabbergasted. In fact, Stalin and Churchill each made use of the ideological Achilles' heel and the particular language of his opponent. Roosevelt stood, as it were, above the battle. Juggling the very same terms and concepts, while each of the participants at the con­ference tossed in his own idea, was one of the methods of the political game at Yalta.

However, there was always the danger of "becoming too absorbed." For example, Churchill moved heaven and earth in order to get a more ac­ceptable agreement about Poland from Stalin. Obliquely he tried to show Stalin that he was not hostile to communism. He recalled, for example, that despite his former conflicts with Gallagher, a Communist member of Parliament, he, Churchill, had sent condolences when Gallagher's two adopted children died. Churchill also explained to Stalin that opposition to communism in England was not based on disagreement over the principle of the relation between the individual and the state. During the war the interests of the individual were subordinated to those of the government. One needed only to add, "exactly as in the USSR." The apotheosis of Churchill's display of a benign attitude toward communism was his toast "to the proletarian masses of the world."¹¹⁴

In the end the Soviet point of view on the Polish question was the one adopted. It was decided that the London Poles would join the provisional government already existing in Poland, to form a national unity government. The Curzon line was recognized as Poland's eastern border, and the question of the western border was postponed until the following peace conference. The Poles agreed to hold elections as soon as possible, after which the Allies would establish diplomatic relations with the new government.

In the meantime, at the end of March 1945, the Soviet military authorities lured the chiefs of the Polish resistance into an ambush, making them believe that the Soviets wanted to negotiate. They were arrested, taken to Moscow, and tried (the so-called Trial of the Sixteen) in June 1945. They were sentenced to prison terms of various lengths, which they served in Soviet camps, three of them dying there, including General Leon Okulicki, head of the Home Army; one man who was not sentenced was later released to the authorities in the Polish People's Republic, where he died.

The historical meaning of the dispute over the future borders of Poland was understood and exposed by the Mensheviks in exile. An editorial of the party's organ observed the following, based on the example of what happened to Polish territory.

What was being decided and drawn up in advance was the fate of the future world order. Which one will set the precedent: annexation and invasion, or democratic peace? Will the most important Eurasian state, which claims to lead the international working-class movement and to be the bearer of the ideals of the future, successfully pass the test not only of strength (which it has already passed) but also of law and justice, at least in international relations? This is a problem of worldwide importance.¹¹⁵

Expansionist by nature, the Soviet system failed this second test. The conference decided that Germany would be occupied by the Allied troops and the nation would be demilitarized, de-Nazified, and democra­tized. These measures called for abolition of the armed forces, destruction of the German military machine, an end to Nazi influence in political life, and punishment of all war criminals.

The conference also stated that the Allies had no intention of harming the German people. This was an important declaration because the Nazis presented the Allied demands for an unconditional surrender as meaning the destruction of the German people in the event of defeat and used this prospect to frighten the population into continuing the war. Hitler's last hope was the outbreak of a conflict between the Soviet Union and its Western allies in the final stages of the war.

At Yalta a convergence of the ways of thinking, if not the ideologies, of Stalin and the Western leaders clearly took place. For example, in the discussion of Poland's western borders, there arose the question of where the Germans of East Prussia would go. According to Churchill, the issue was the forced resettlement of millions of people. Personally, Churchill said, he was not terribly shocked by such a prospect, but many in England would be. Giving East Prussia to Poland would mean resettling 6 million Germans. It could be done, Churchill admitted, but still there were per­suasive arguments against it. Stalin solved the problem very simply: "When our soldiers arrive all the Germans will flee, and not one German will be left." Churchill responded that the problem then would be how to handle those who fled to Germany, adding: "Of course we have already killed six or seven million Germans and most likely will kill another million before the war is over."

Stalin: "One? Or two?"

Churchill: "Oh, I'm not proposing any limitation. So there should be room in Germany for some who will need to fill the vacancy. I am not afraid of the problem of the transfer of populations as long as it is in proportion to what the Poles can manage and what can be put in the place of the dead in Germany."¹¹⁶

The three leaders repeatedly expressed their commitment to Allied unity.

The very thought that one of them would try to attain world supremacy was dismissed as preposterous.¹¹⁷ All three favored a better and more stable world. Roosevelt was moved to liken the relationship among the allies to the relations among members of a family.¹¹⁸

But what was each of them really thinking? Stalin knew that events would take a different turn after the war. Indeed, he did not hide this. Therefore he tried to accomplish everything he could at Yalta while he had the chance. The issue of the future of Germany quite probably bothered him most; after all, Eastern and Southeastern Europe were virtually recognized as in the Soviet sphere. However, a solution to the German problem did not depend on Stalin alone. Although he agreed in principle with the American and English proposal to dismember Germany, in actuality that solution contra­dicted his concept of a Soviet—German alliance and, more specifically, his plan to exploit German material and human resources for the restoration and development of the Soviet economy.

Reparations became a subject of heated discussion. Britain and the United States, recalling the experience with reparations after World War I, were extremely reluctant to open discussion of the problem. Churchill jokingly suggested solving the problem of reparations according to the principle, 'To each country according to its needs, from Germany according to its ability." But Stalin rejected this allusion to the principle of com­munism. He had a different maxim: 'To each according to his worth."¹¹⁹ Churchill explained frankly that England did not oppose confiscation of German factories by the Soviet Union, as long as England could still get German exports. Stalin calmly reassured him, "Of course the Russians will confiscate German factories as soon as they reach them."¹²⁰

How Stalin really envisioned the future Germany would become clear only four years later, when the German Democratic Republic was estab­lished. At Yalta Stalin confined himself to the telling prediction that, indeed, Germany did have a future.¹²¹ Time would show that Stalin envi­sioned this future to be in a Sovietized Europe.

In reading the Yalta documents on the rights of small nations, one is struck by the actual similarity of what appear to be different viewpoints on the part of Stalin and the Western leaders. Stalin made it perfectly clear that he would never agree to submit any action of the great powers to the judgment of the small nations: "Do you want Albania to have the same status as the United States? What has Albania done in this war to merit such a standing? We three have to decide how to keep the peace of the world, and it will not be kept unless we three decide to do it."¹²² Somehow, Stalin complained, certain liberated countries had gotten it into their heads that although the great powers had shed blood for their liberation, they could accuse the great powers of not taking the rights of small countries into account. (One wonders whether Enver Hoxha, who wrote a heart-felt book about Stalin, ever read the papers of the Yalta conference.)

Roosevelt agreed that the great powers bore the greater responsibility and that "the peace terms should be written by the three powers represented at Yalta" (emphasis added—A. N.).¹²³ Churchill observed conciliatorily: 'The eagle should permit the small birds to sing, and care not whereof they sing."¹²⁴ But the "Mountain Eagle," as Stalin was sometimes called in the USSR, having just deported entire lesser nationalities, wanted the "small birds" to keep silent altogether. Andrei Vyshinsky, no doubt on Stalin's orders, warned Charles Bohlen (Roosevelt's interpreter at Yalta and later ambassador to Moscow) that the Soviet Union would never agree to the right of the small powers to judge an act of the great powers. When Bohlen observed that the U.S. delegation at the conference always had to keep in mind the concern of the American people that the rights of smaller nations be protected, the former public prosecutor snapped, "The American people should learn to obey their leaders." Bohlen sarcastically retorted that if Vyshinsky were to visit the United States, he, Bohlen, would like to see him tell that to the American people.¹²⁵ A little while later Vyshinsky, the "prosecutor of death" in the purge trials, would go to New York as the Soviet delegate to the United Nations and would tell the American people and the "small birds" that chirped there what they needed to know. And the American press would sing the praises of Vyshinsky's mind, energy, and wit.

A frank exchange, as it were, between the democratic and Soviet ex­perience of rule took place at Yalta. Several times during the conference Churchill, seeking a concession from Stalin, reminded him that general elections were soon to take place in England and that if a satisfactory outcome were not reached at Yalta he could be removed from power. After all, the Soviet Union had no better friends than he and Eden. Stalin consoled his "comrade-in-arms" with the thought, "Victors are never kicked out," and added for the British prime minister's edification: "People will under­stand that they need a leader, and who could be a better leader than the one who won the war?" Churchill tried to explain that England had two parties and that he belonged to one of them. "Stalin has a much easier task since he was only one party to deal with." Stalin weighed the situation: "One party is much better," he said profoundly.¹²⁶

Who would know better than Stalin?

The United States and Great Britain gave de facto recognition at Yalta to the formation of the Soviet empire, whose European borders stretched from the Baltic in the north to the Adriatic in the south and in the west to the Elbe and the Werra. In the Far East, in exchange for joining the war against Japan, the USSR received Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile islands, so that its borders almost reached the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Only a small strip of water would now separate the USSR from Japan.

The signing of the agreement which stipulated the conditions for the Soviet entry into the war against Japan crowned the Soviet empire. The president of the United States and the prime minister of Great Britain became this empire's godfathers, but these godfathers were hardly being altruistic. They obtained what they felt was most vital for their respective countries at the time when the war was coming to an end in Europe: agreement on a general policy regarding defeated Germany, recognition (albeit only verbal on the Soviet side) of the dissemination of democratic principles in the liberated countries of Europe; approval of the new world organization of nations; and Soviet agreement to enter the war against Japan. Given the domestic political situations in the United States and Britain, the prevailing pro-Soviet sentiment in the West, and finally the actual military situation at the time, it is unlikely that the United States and Britain could have achieved anything more.

THE CAPITULATION OF GERMANY

The final Soviet offensive, operation Vistula-Oder, began on January 12, 1945. On two fronts (the First Byelorussian and First Ukrainian) the com­mand had concentrated 45 percent of its regulars, 70 percent of its tanks, 43 percent of its guns and mortars, and its entire air force. At that point, the Soviet forces were twice the size of Germany's in soldiers, three times in artillery, and seven times in aircraft.¹²⁷

From January 12 to January 17, the German defenses were breached along a wide front. At the beginning of February the Soviets took Silesia, reached the Oder, and established a bridgehead on the river's left bank. The German army suffered enormous losses: thirty-five divisions were com­pletely destroyed, and twenty-five lost between 60 and 70 percent of their regulars.¹²⁸ According to Soviet figures, the Germans suffered half a million casualties, killed, wounded, or captured. The Red Army also took many guns and airplanes. At that point, Soviet troops were between 80 and 160 kilometers from Berlin.

On April 25 American and Soviet troops met in the vicinity of Torgau, on the Elbe. On April 26 the war entered its final stage. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide. On May 1 Soviet soldiers raised the victory flag in Berlin. The day after, the fight for Berlin was over. On May 7 the Soviets reached the Elbe along a wide front. On May 8 Germany signed an un­conditional surrender in Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin, Zhukov signing for the Soviet Union.

The war that had started on September 1, 1939, was over.

A CHALLENGE TO THE REGIME

Among the most complex problems of the World War II period in Soviet history, and one that Soviet historians are not allowed to study, is the question of collaboration on the part of some Soviet citizens. The Soviet literature on this subject endlessly repeats the same stereotyped formulas about the traitor Vlasov, the general who defected to the Germans, and the just retribution that came to him. Yet it was not just a question of Vlasov.

At the end of the war the Wehrmacht had in its ranks over 1 million Soviet citizens of various nationalities, including several hundred thousand Russians. These people came from many different backgrounds and had chosen to collaborate with the Germans for a variety of reasons. Many prisoners of war, having been abandoned by their government, signed up with Vlasov as a means of surviving in the German camps. They probably hoped to cross over to the Red Army at the first opportunity. Others hoped to sit things out until the war ended. There were those, however, who joined the Nazis of their own free will, out of political conviction or simple hatred of the Soviet government, which they wished to overthrow and replace with one more to their liking.

One of them later wrote that the German occupation allowed anti-Soviet attitudes to come to the fore:

If all of Russia had been occupied, it is very possible that the entire country would have become anti-Soviet. Under Soviet rule, these people remained docile and did not reveal their revolutionary inclination, something that requires a great effort of will. At the beginning of the war, the conviction that the Soviet government would soon collapse lent courage to even the most passive elements.¹²⁹

Among Soviet prisoners of war, anti-Soviet ideologists made their ap­pearance. Of these, special mention should be made of Milety Aleksan- drovich Zykov (probably a pseudonym), who claimed to have been an assistant to the editor of Izvestia from 1931 to 1935, to have been arrested in the purges, and then to have been released in March 1942. After being taken prisoner by the Germans, he drafted a memorandum calling for the creation of a new Russian government and army, headed by some Soviet general among the prisoners of war. This government would make a de­fensive alliance with Germany.

Another ideologist was Georgy Nikolaevich Zhilenkov, former secretary of the party in the Rostokino District of Moscow and later a member of the military council of the Twenty-fourth Army. In the fall of 1942, while in German captivity, he was appointed commander of the Central Experimental Unit, the "Ossinotorf Brigade," consisting of Russians and used against the Red Army. With Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky, excommander of the Soviet Forty-first Guards Division, Zhilenkov wrote several memoranda in which he called on the German government to form a Russian National Committee and a Russian army of 50,000—80,000 men, launch a war of national liberation against the Stalinist regime, and promise the Russian people an independent development in the framework of the "new order" in Europe. These memoranda were seasoned with a good dose of anti-Semitism.¹³⁰

In mid-August 1942, Colonel Mikhail Shapovalov, former commander of a Soviet artillery corps, who was taken prisoner at Maikop, drafted a similar document.

It seems that Soviet officers who were prisoners of the Germans discussed the future of the Soviet Union intensively. All sorts of tendencies appeared, and many different proposals were made. One of them was that a "Committee for the Implementation of the 1936 Constitution" be formed.

To Hitler, however, the idea of having Russian, Slavic, allies seemed atrocious. He categorically forbade the arming of anyone in the occupied territories. "Only Germans shall have the right to bear arms," he ruled.¹³¹

As early as 1941 some German officers, who kept their distance from Nazi racial theories and were concerned only with military considerations, began to use Soviet prisoners as auxiliary personnel: interpreters, drivers, railroad police, and so on, and even as support troops. Later, with the development of the partisan movement, Russian units were formed against them. For example, in the Lokot District of the Bryansk Region a Russian brigade, 20,000 strong, was organized to fight the partisans. It was called the Russian National Liberation Army (Rossiiskaya Osvoboditelnaya Na- tsionalnaya Armiya—RONA), although it had police functions only. It was headed by Bronislav Kaminsky, an adventurer notorious for his cruelty. He enjoyed the absolute trust of the German authorities and was in effect the master of the district; he had been granted full power to police the area. By virtue of his service in the struggle against the partisans, Kaminsky was promoted to brigadier general by the Germans, and his "army" became an SS division. In the summer of 1944, this division was assigned to help crush the insurgents in Warsaw. Later the German commander ordered Kaminsky shot for the atrocities committed by his troops.¹³²

In July 1941, on the initiative of Colonel von Tresckow, the chief of operations for the staff of the German Army Group Center who later par­ticipated in the 1944 plot against Hitler, a Russian brigade was formed under a Colonel Sakharov. In the same army group a Cossack unit was formed, headed by a former Red Army major and regimental commander named Kononov, a member of the Communist party since 1927. Kononov defected to the Germans on August 22, 1941.¹³³

At the end of December 1941, with Hitler's blessing, the organization of "national legions" of non-Russian Soviet prisoners began. In total num­bers these units were not very large: 110,000 from the Caucasus; between 110,000 and 170,000 from Central Asia and Kazakhstan; 20,000 Crimean Tatars; and 5,000 Kalmyks. On average, 15 percent of each unit consisted of Germans.¹³⁴

Some former Soviet prisoners of war even became officers or noncom­missioned officers in the national legions, but they did not have the right to issue orders to German soldiers. A very important fact that must be borne in mind is that many of the legionnaires were precisely exprisoners of war, rather than men who had deliberately crossed over to the German side. The fighting capacity of these units was not very high, and between 2.5 and 10 percent of the legionnaires deserted.

In 1943 70—80 percent of the national legions were sent west. Sometimes the legionnaires made contact with local resistance groups and went over to them.¹³⁵ There were cases of open rebellion against the Germans, like the one in April 1944 by a Georgian battalion on Texel Island in Holland. It is probable that if the Soviet government had not abandoned its soldiers who were prisoners of the Germans, such cases of rebellion and of legion­naires joining the Resistance or crossing over to the Red Army would have been more numerous. But having lived in the Soviet Union, they knew only too well how vindictive the Soviet government could be. Nevertheless, in 1944 an SS regiment commanded by G. Alimov and made up of soldiers from Turkestan joined the uprising in Slovakia.

Such instances were not always the rule, however. For example, the Nazis used legionnaires and Cossack units against the resistance movements in Western Europe and the Balkans and in the suppressions of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Also, in the Saint Donat massacre in the Drome region of France they used troops from the "national legions" (called Mongols by the local French population).¹³⁶

It is important to understand the reasons that led individuals or groups to collaborate with the Germans. As a general rule, persecution by the Soviet government, particularly harsh during the period of collectivization, was responsible, as were the massive repression of the later 1930s and the chauvinist policies toward non-Russian minorities. It is not surprising that instances of collaboration with the enemy, including combat on the German side, were more frequent in both relative and absolute terms among non- Russian nationals than among Russians.

One can only speculate about the course events might have taken if, instead of implementing a policy of genocide, repression, and violation of human and national sensibilities, the Nazis had adopted a more moderate attitude, one more acceptable to the population, Russian or otherwise. Such a policy was impossible, however; the Nazis would have stopped being Nazis, and World War II would probably not have taken place. Hitler's Germany sought total subjection and partial extermination of the peoples of the Soviet Union, Poland, and other Eastern European states. Whatever the differences of opinion within the Nazi leadership over tactical questions, their goal remained unchanged: to enslave the Slavic peoples and make permanent the Reich's hegemony over Europe. This explains why the ene­mies of the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union had no choice but to fight the merciless invader of their country. They did so, however, with the secret hope that after victory things would improve.

After the German defeat at Moscow, some German experts on Soviet affairs, as well as some officials of the Reich, began to feel more and more convinced that Germany could win only if the Russian national anti-Stalinist forces could be rallied.¹³⁷ But this project ran counter to the official doctrine of the master race and the subhumans. The German experts in charge of psychological warfare against the USSR thought that if a "Russian de Gaulle," a Soviet general, could be found, the Red Army's anti-Stalinist forces would rally around him.

A search for such a general started in the prison camps. That was how Vlasov was found. He had commanded the Second Shock Army and had been captured on the Volkhov Front in July 1942. Vlasov was reputed to be one of the most capable Soviet generals. In 1942 he turned forty-two. He had served in the Red Army since 1919 and was a party member. His peasant background and excellent army record gave him impeccable cre­dentials. At one time he had commanded the Ninety-ninth Infantry Division, which was considered the finest in the Kiev Military District before the war. During the defense of Kiev he had commanded the Thirty-seventh Army and, during the Battle of Moscow, the Twentieth Army. Then he had served as deputy commander of the Volkhov Front and finally as commander of the Second Shock Army. Those were Vlasov's outstanding credentials.¹³⁸ For a while, Stalin himself had wanted to assign him to command the Stalingrad Front.¹³⁹ Vlasov enjoyed an excellent reputation in the army because on three occasions he had extricated his troops from German encirclement. He was also distinguished by great personal courage.

What led him to accept the Nazi offer? To judge from documents that survived and accounts by his contemporaries, Vlasov was deeply disillu­sioned with the Stalin regime. He had witnessed all the prewar purges in the army. Also, he had been one of those who had to bear the bitter burden of defeat during the first year of war. The incompetence, brutality, and irresponsibility of the top leadership caused him to rebel inwardly. This inner break with the Stalinist system ripened under the tragic conditions of captivity. Vlasov became involved in the Germans' game, hoping to come out of it with an independent Russian national army allied with Germany. One cannot help but wonder at his political naivet6. From the start he made a fatal mistake: nothing but destruction awaited Russia upon Hitler's victory. There was no reason whatsoever to expect help from Germany in the struggle against Stalin. Hitler's war was directed, not against Stalin personally or bolshevism alone, but against the very existence of Russia as a nation.

The Soviet Union was part of a coalition that included the Western democracies, the United States and Great Britain, and the resistance move­ments. Nazi Germany was a deadly threat to all of them. Vlasov enjoyed a certain sympathy from some Wehrmacht officers, who had been assigned to use him and his reputation for propaganda purposes and who invested considerable effort in supporting him as the aspiring leader of an inde­pendent anti-Stalinist movement.

Undoubtedly, although Vlasov genuinely expected to benefit from his alliance with the Germans in his struggle against Stalin, the Germans never considered him an ally. He was a veteran Soviet general and, in his own fashion, a Russian patriot. And that was precisely what aroused the Nazis' mistrust of him. For the Nazis he could be nothing more than a means to help them attain their ends. As in the case of the national legions, it was only the exigencies of war that led the Germans to authorize the formation of the Russian Liberation Army, the ROA. The Nazis trusted neither of these formations. They used some of them to fight partisans in the occupied Soviet territories and the resistance movements in the West. But as a general rule the Nazis feared using these units against the Red Army, considering their defection likely.

Whether Vlasov had read Mein Kampf or merely heard of it, German cruelty to Soviet prisoners of war and "Eastern workers" should have led him to question the morality of being in league with the Nazi racists. It is true that no such scruples had prevented Stalin from signing the German— Soviet pact and later waging a joint struggle with the Nazis against the

Polish resistance. There was another historical precedent. During World War I the Bolsheviks had openly favored the defeat of tsarist Russia in the war with Germany, employing the slogan 'Turn the imperialist war into a civil war." Moreover, they had accepted financial aid from the German General Staff. But when Vlasov decided to lead a struggle against Stalin, his choice of allies was no less important than the struggle itself. In fact, it was not he who made the choice: the German officers, concerned with the outcome of the war, chose him from among dozens of Soviet generals in German captivity. They made the selection at their own risk, hoping that the Nazi leaders would understand Vlasov's value in rallying the Rus­sian army against the Soviet regime.

From his first leaflet, drafted by German propaganda specialists and signed by him on September 10, 1942, at the Vinnitsa prisoner of war camp, a leaflet calling on the Soviet intelligentsia to join forces in the struggle against Stalin and his clique, Vlasov allowed himself to be used for Nazi propaganda aims. Contrary to the facts, he said that the executions of Soviet prisoners and brutality toward them by the Germans were nothing but "false propaganda." In this "open letter," he called for an alliance with Germany, which was highly misleading, of course, for Germany had no intention of allying itself with Vlasov. It is true, however, that the German officers had told Vlasov otherwise.

At the end of 1942 the Germans authorized and helped in the formation of a Russian National Committee, but they hid the fact that they only needed the organization for propaganda purposes. Among the several dozen Soviet generals held prisoner, only a few agreed to participate in the com­mittee, among them Major General V. F. Malyshkin, former head of the general staff of the Nineteenth Army, taken prisoner in the Battle of Vyazma; Major General F. I. Trukhin, former head of the operations section of the general staff of the Baltic Military District; and Major General Ivan Bla- goveshchensky, commander of a coastal artillery unit. The propaganda section of the committee was entrusted to M. A. Zykov, and foreign relations to G. N. Zhilenkov.

On December 27, 1942, the Russian National Committee published its program, the so-called Smolensk Manifesto.¹⁴⁰ It had thirteen points, in­cluding the following demands: abolition of the kolkhozes and transfer of the land to the peasants; reinstitution of private trade and professions; an end to forced labor; freedom of speech, assembly, and religion; and release of all political prisoners. The manifesto called on Red Army soldiers and officers to join the ranks of the Russian Liberation Army, "which is fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Germans." It also referred to Germany as a nation which, under Hitler's leadership, sought to create a new order in

Europe, free of Bolsheviks and capitalists. Although this manifesto was named after the city of Smolensk, it was actually written in Berlin.¹⁴¹ Soon after the publication of the manifesto, Vlasov was allowed to speak in several occupied cities. At a public meeting in Mogilev he demanded that the Germans make known their intentions concerning Russia. He also said, 'The Russian people lives, has lived, and will live. It can never be turned into a colonized people." Hitler forbade any more public speeches by Vlasov in occupied Soviet territory. In a memorandum, the Fiihrer defined Vlasov's movement as solely an instrument of German propaganda. The overwhelm­ing majority of "Eastern soldiers" were sent west.

How deeply disappointed Vlasov and his collaborators were over German policy may be seen from some of their public statements. Malyshkin com­plained to an audience of 5,000 Russian emigr6s gathered in the Wagram Hall in Paris: 'The German command has not succeeded in persuading the Russian people that the German army is only fighting against bolshevism and not against the Russian people itself." Malyshkin called on the Germans to change their policies and asserted that Russia had never been and would never be a colony. He added: "Russia can be defeated only by Russia."¹⁴² This sentence, borrowed from Schiller's Demetrius, became the trademark of all Vlasovite propaganda.

In the summer of 1944, shortly after the attempt on Hitler's life, Himmler, who had been one of the principal opponents of the Russian Liberation Army, had the idea of using Vlasov's movement to serve the interests of Germany, which at that point was heading toward defeat. On September 16 he met with Vlasov; as a result of this meeting the idea of a Russian political movement fighting alongside the Germans against the Stalin regime was revived. The decision was made to create a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR). Vlasov was assigned to bring into this committee all the "national committees" already established under German auspices. Himmler promised that the KONR would be recognized as a provisional government once the German army had reconquered Soviet territory. Naturally, Himmler could easily promise anything he wanted. For him the main thing, of course, in view of the horrendous losses Germany had incurred, was to deploy additional military forces against the Red Army—be they Russian, Turkic, or anything else, as long as they would fight for the Reich. In addition, the KONR could be used for propaganda purposes. The KONR was under the direct control of Himmler's secret police apparatus, which in June 1944 had kidnapped and murdered the ideologist of Vlasov's movement, Zykov.

On November 14, 1944, the KONR met in Prague and adopted the so- called Prague Manifesto, which called for the overthrow of Stalin's tyranny, liberation of the peoples of Russia from the Bolshevik system, and resto­ration of the rights won in the "popular revolution of 1917." Included among the manifesto's goals were an end to the war and an honorable peace with Germany. The future regime was portrayed as a free state of all the people, "without Bolsheviks or exploiters."¹⁴³

The KONR program curiously combined recognition of the necessity for, and legitimacy of, the 1917 revolution with condemnation of the Bolshevik betrayal of revolutionary ideals. That point of view was a seductive one for many Russian and Soviet intellectuals, who favored ideas of socialism but rejected the excesses of the Stalinist dictatorship. The future social and political order in Russia was presented as a strong centralized state (national labor) which would carry out tasks typical of a welfare state, providing social justice, equality, and a guaranteed standard of living. Specific to the Soviet situation was the demand for dissolution of the kolkhozes and a return to private enterprise.

In the opinion of Boris Nicolaevsky, a well-known political writer and Menshevik leader, the central idea of the Vlasov movement "was not the formation of an army to lead an armed struggle against Stalin's dictatorship but an attempt at creating an anti-Bolshevik program on the basis of a democratic program, not narrowly nationalist or separatist, but federalist, oriented toward Russia as a whole."¹⁴⁴

Vlasov's movement was a very complex phenomenon, born under ex­ceedingly unfavorable historical conditions, a fact that left an indelible mark upon it. Its complexity can be seen, for example, in the documents of the movement and the speeches of its leaders. Having decided to become allies of the Nazis, they were forced to abide by certain rules and pay tribute to Hitler's policies. This is not, however, the only reason for the anti-Semitic views of several prominent leaders, such as Zhilenkov and Malyshkin.¹⁴⁵ The curriculum of the ROA propaganda schools included a special anti-Semitic segment which repeated Nazi propaganda word for word.¹⁴⁶ However, in drafting the Prague Manifesto, Vlasov and others firmly resisted all pressure to include anti-Semitic slogans in the program.¹⁴⁷ It would seem that Nicolaevsky was right that the KONR's call for an end to the "criminal war" led by the Soviet Union and British and American plutocrats against Germany amounted to nothing but the parroting of Nazi propaganda. It has been argued that without such wording the manifesto could never have been published.¹⁴⁸

Should Vlasov be considered an anti-Stalinist and the head of a political movement? There can be no unequivocal answer. Probably Vlasov, the Soviet generals who rallied to his cause, and the majority of his closest collaborators were convinced anti-Stalinists. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that there was some freedom of choice for the Soviet generals in German captivity. General M. F. Lukin, former commander of the Nine­teenth Army, was offered the leadership of the future "Russian army" by the Germans. Lukin countered with an offer he knew to be unacceptable to the Nazis, and they did not approach him again. He survived the war, then spent a number of years in Soviet prison. But General Karbyshev, who also refused to collaborate with the Germans, was frozen to death at Mauthausen.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that the program of social reforms camouflages the most important fact of the time when it was conceived: Vlasov had no chance whatsoever of freeing himself from the Germans, who wanted to use him, the ROA, and the KONR solely for their own purposes. Vlasov understood that the moment had passed, that Germany had lost the war. But he harbored naive hope, encouraged by the "Soli- darists" of the NTS (National Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists), that a conflict was inevitable between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. These illusions, incidentally, were shared and supported by the entire Nazi leadership. Vlasov counted on reaching an understanding with Great Britain and the United States, but his hopes were doomed.

At the end of January 1945 the KONR armed forces were formed. At Hitler's request, Vlasov was named commander. He never succeeded in bringing under its banners all the "Eastern troops" and other German formations in which Soviet citizens and emigr6s were serving (numbering approximately 1 million all together). How many men did Vlasov's army have? Estimates vary: it is probable that at most he had between 50,000 and 60,000 men. In any event, at the end of April 1945 the First Division had 20,000 men; the army consisted of two divisions, neither fully equipped, plus reinforcement units.

The composition of the divisions was heterogenous. The First Division, according to an American researcher, consisted of a certain number of soldiers from the Kaminsky Brigade who had taken part in the suppression of the Warsaw uprising and some SS men from Byelorussian units of the Siegling division who had fought against the Allies in the West.¹⁴⁹ The Vlasovites deny this allegation. The majority, however, had served in "East­ern units" of the German army or had been Soviet Ostarbeiter, prisoners of war, or refugees from the USSR. The Second Division, which was only in the process of formation, consisted of "Eastern battalions" from Norway, and former prisoners of war and Ostarbeiter. Among ROA troops there were some war criminals. But it would be unfair to label the whole army as such.

The Vlasovite command made great efforts to recruit to their army among the Ostarbeiter, but the task was not an easy one. Colonel Koreisky of the ROA, who attended a meeting in Sosnowiec (Upper Silesia) to celebrate the publication of the Prague Manifesto, later recalled:

The Ostarbeiter would walk in front of us, barefoot, dirty, with tears in their eyes. Colonel Kromiadi could not bear it and began to cry. These slaves of the Germans, our sons and brothers, went silently by, every now and then giving us a glance full of revulsion. A young girl yelled at us, 'Traitors."...

The prisoners of war and Ostarbeiter would join the Polish underground units or organize their own. In battle they fought better than anyone. They had no other choice: victory or death.¹⁵⁰