The Shadow of War

Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present

Stephen Lovell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405169585, 9781405169592
• eBook ISBN: 9781444351590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Taking the achievements, ambiguities, and legacies of World War II as a point of departure, The Shadow of War: The Soviet Union and Russia, 1941 to the Present offers a fresh new approach to modern Soviet and Russian history.

• Presents one of the only histories of the Soviet Union and Russia that begins with World War II and goes beyond the Soviet collapse through to the early twenty-first century
• Innovative thematic arrangement and approach allows for insights that are missed in chronological histories
• Draws on a wide range of sources and the very latest research on post-Soviet history, a rapidly developing field
• Supported by further reading, bibliography, maps and illustrations.

1

Introduction: World War II and the Remaking of the Soviet Union

No foreigner needs to spend too much time in Russia to discover how central the war remains to how Russians see themselves even in the early twenty-first century. Most long-term visitors to Russia (whether Soviet or post-Soviet) will have been lectured at some stage on the failure of the Western allies to open a second front before 1944. Hedrick Smith, the highly informative New York Times correspondent in Moscow in the mid-1970s, caught the enormous outpouring of war commemoration on the thirtieth anniversary of victory: in his acclaimed The Russians he subtitled one of the chapters “World War II was only yesterday.” At the same time there were some war-related topics on which Russians were less eager to hold forth: the volte-face in Soviet foreign policy that made Stalin an ally of Hitler between August 1939 and June 1941, the actions of the Soviet political police in Poland and the Baltic states, the extent of wartime cooperation between the USSR and the West (and the extent of Western aid through Lend-Lease).

Opinion polls of the post-Soviet era have consistently placed the Great Patriotic War at the top of Russians’ list of defining historical moments. The October Revolution, by contrast, is now almost an irrelevance. This is not because Russians have abnormally short memories. Rather, it is because the prewar era is too complex and divisive to serve the purpose of historical myth. It is now fast becoming a cliché of Russian textbooks and public discourse to refer to the 1930s as a “complex and tragic era,” as if it is futile even to attempt to establish human agency in the deaths of millions of people. Russia has never had a true moral reckoning with the catastrophes of collectivization and terror, and by now there are reasons to doubt that it ever will.

Another reason why the war scores so highly in the popular consciousness is that its other main rival as a historical milestone, the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not – to put it mildly – seen as an unmixed blessing. Even Russians with no great love of one-party socialism are likely to abhor the way in which the removal of Communist dictatorship led directly to the neglect of Russia’ s national interests and the florescence of crony capitalism.

FIGURE 1.1 Stalingrad, summer 1945.

Source: © Mark Redkin/PhotoSoyuz.

But the prominence of the war in contemporary Russia is not due primarily to the lack of suitable alternative historical markers. It matters in absolute, not relative, terms. It cost the Soviet Union almost 30 million people: somewhere between 24 and 27 million premature deaths and the best part of 3 million other Soviet citizens who were displaced by the war and never returned to the USSR. If further account is taken of the wartime birth deficit, losses may run as high as 35 million. The Soviet population figure at the start of the war – 200 million – was not reached again until 1956.¹

Many of the previously most developed parts of the country lay in ruins. Capital losses amounted to about 30 percent of national wealth. War damage had destroyed or disabled close to 32,000 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometers of railway, and housing for 25 million people. Infrastructure had all but collapsed. At the end of war, 90 percent of Moscow’ s central heating and around half of water and sewage systems were out of action, while 80 percent of roofs required urgent repairs. Despite the Soviet victory, much of the population endured unimaginable hardship. Household consumption fell from 74 percent of national income in 1940 to 66 percent of a significantly reduced national income in 1945. In 1945, the average peasant on a collective farm received 190 grams of grain and 70 grams of potatoes for a day’ s work. In 1946–7, acute postwar scarcity, compounded by harvest failure and the government’s commitment to industrial reconstruction, brought what turned out to be the last Soviet famine, whose death toll was at least 1 million and possibly a good deal higher.²

The war brought not only death, devastation and hunger but mass displacement and upheaval. During the war, the enemy occupied territory with a prewar population of 85 million (or 45 percent of the total Soviet population). Millions of people were displaced by the German advance. Around 15 million more were moved to the rear in 1941–2; by the end of 1942, more than half of workers and employees in Kazakhstan, one of the principal destinations, were evacuees. An industrial evacuation effort of unprecedented scale and speed was launched within days of the German invasion. In the critical early months of the war hundreds of large factories were relocated – the greatest proportion to the Urals, others to the Volga region, Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia, and Central Asia. Without the evacuated facilities, which included some of the crown jewels of the Soviet defense sector, the war effort would have been all but doomed. Two-thirds of prewar ammunition production, for example, had taken place on territory that would be occupied or wrecked by the enemy. The evacuation of Leningrad’s all important Kirov tank factory had to be completed in late 1941 by air after the city had been isolated by German forces.³

At the end of the war 11.4 million men in the armed forces had to find their way home somehow. Demobilization was a gradual process, but the vast numbers placed immense strain on Soviet society and infrastructure: about 3.5 million men had returned to civilian life by September 1945, 8.5 million by 1948. And then there were the captured enemy combatants. According to the Soviet General Staff, the Soviet Army took 4,377,300 prisoners between 22 June 1941 and 8 May 1945; at the end of June 1945, the Ministry of Internal Affairs gave a figure of 2 million prisoners taken in 1945 alone. Nearly 700,000 Germans from the combat zone were sent home immediately at the end of the war, as were 65,000 Japanese. Thereafter, repatriation would be a slow process that ended only in spring 1950. German prisoners convicted of specific crimes were allowed home only in 1956.⁴

There is, then, no shortage of ways in which the war may be seen to have cast a “shadow” over the later Soviet era. This makes it all the more surprising how little use existing histories of the Soviet Union have for it. The foundational decades of Soviet history are usually seen as the 1920s and (especially) the 1930s. Over the last half-century, and especially since the opening of the archives in the late 1980s, scholars have produced a vast quantity of interesting dissertations, books, and articles on the Soviet “system” as it came to be in the first ten or fifteen years of Stalin’s rule. The war is usually recognized as traumatic and important, but ultimately is granted the status of a cataclysmic interlude between two phases of Stalinism: the turbulent and bloody era of the 1930s and the deep freeze of the late 1940s (which would soon, under Stalin’ s successors, turn to thaw).

Nonmilitary historians do not quite know what to do with the war.⁵ It can – indeed must – be mentioned, but its impact on the paradigms and agendas of Soviet history has so far been vastly more limited than its human and material cost might seem to warrant. Russian historians – and Western specialists – have produced an enormous amount of writing on military aspects of the conflict of 1941–5, but this impressive body of work has mostly failed to connect with the preoccupations of those who study Soviet history over a longer range.

The design of this three-volume Blackwell history of Russia forces us to take the war seriously. Periodization is not an empty formality but rather an intellectual choice with far-reaching consequences. The chronological boundaries of this volume invite consideration of the war as a conditioning factor for later Soviet and Russian history – all the way to the early twenty-first century present. To my knowledge, there is no other book that examines exactly the period from 1941 to the end of the century and beyond. Most authors zero their clock in 1917, 1945 or 1953, while 1991 has tended up to now to mark the watershed between history and political science. To start an account with the Nazi invasion rather than the Soviet triumph makes it possible to see the war not just as a catastrophe that had to be withstood and overcome but rather as a starting point for much that followed.

The legacy of the war was not only destructive. It also brought the Soviet regime new opportunities. Internally, its hand was strengthened by the growth of Soviet patriotism and the consolidation of a loyal new elite. Internationally, it now had a large part of Europe (and in due course of the entire world) directly in its sights. The war also had ideological value: it could also be interpreted by the regime and its committed servants as the delayed culmination of the revolution, a“Bolshevik Armageddon.”It was a self-destructive conflict among the main parties to world capitalism that picked up where 1918 had left off. It was the moment that the home of world Communism had to fight off the renewed threat to its existence of which the Soviet leadership had been warning its population since the late 1920s. The war finally sorted out the enemies from the friends of Soviet power, the truly committed from the impostors and opportunists. In this life-or-death struggle, “enemies of the people” (who had needed violent unmasking in the 1930s) were exposed as such: as traitors, cowards, collaborators. The Soviet body politic was now fully purged and could look to the future with confidence.⁶

The war was quite literally an ordeal by fire for the new generation of committed Stalinists who had got their career breaks in the 1930s. The Soviet political system and its armed forces had to learn quickly on the job. The Red Army in particular had started from a low base. In the late 1930s Stalin had launched a bloody purge of his military elite. The first major action seen by the army since then had been a disaster: in the Winter War of 1939–40, the Finns had successfully defended their independence in the face of a Soviet assault, inflicting heavy casualties on their enormous adversary. Over the three and a half months of the conflict, nearly 127,000 Soviet soldiers were killed or lost in action, which was more than 90 percent of all the combat losses sustained by the Soviet armed forces since 1922. The early months of the conflict with Nazi Germany were more disastrous still. By the start of the rearguard defense of Moscow in early December 1941, the Soviet armed forces had lost almost 3 million men killed or captured and over a million more sick and wounded.⁷ Catastrophic failures of command and preparation were compounded by collapsing morale: it is hard otherwise to explain how 2 million or more Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in the late summer and autumn of 1941. Discipline was instilled at gunpoint: in the first three months of the war alone, the political police (NKVD) shot 10,000 Soviet soldiers for desertion, a third of them in front of their units.⁸

Disaster, however, brought a form of rebirth. The Red Army of 1941 perished in the first months of the war not just physically but also operationally. From mid-1942 onwards, the Party authorities ceded more authority and autonomy to frontline officers. The men brought in to replace their dead comrades managed to learn fast, and the poorly led army of 1941 became a more effective fighting force. Human endeavor and know-how was backed up by technology. The Soviet mode of war became faster moving as production of tanks and mobile artillery increased. Transport and communications also helped to boost military coordination: more than half a million American jeeps and trucks were combined with vastly improved radio communications.⁹

In the spring of 1943, with victory at Stalingrad, the momentum of the conflict swung to the Soviet side, and by the end of that year the Soviet leadership could begin to reflect on the likely shape of the postwar European order. In 1945, as the Red Army rushed toward Berlin, it might be thought that the Great Patriotic War had succeeded where the civil war had failed: it had delivered on Lenin’ s promise that socialism would spread west. It also, in due course, appeared to have spread revolution east: from mid–1946 onward China was convulsed by a civil war between nationalists and Communists.

But this apparently favorable geographical conjuncture did not make the Soviet leadership rest easy. Stalin might have gained a more comfortable buffer zone in eastern and central Europe, but he soon found himself drawn into competition with a capitalist adversary, the United States of America, that had not previously been one of the Bolsheviks’ principal hate figures. The victory of 1945 had not fully assuaged Soviet feelings of weakness, vulnerability and encirclement by hostile powers. Stalin and his comrades had hardly forgotten how poorly the Soviet Union – a thoroughly militarized society by 1941 – had been prepared for the German assault.

Besides failing to remove external sources of unease, the war had also created or exacerbated internal divisions in Soviet society. The USSR now contained tens of millions of people who had experienced German occupation. About 1 million Soviet soldiers ended up fighting against the USSR, whether voluntarily or under duress.¹⁰ The Soviet regime was expert at making enemies of its own people. During the war, POWs were classified as traitors by Soviet officialdom; their families might face reprisals. After the war, more than 5 million Soviet citizens (POWs or forced laborers) were repatriated to the USSR, where they immediately came under suspicion; hundreds of thousands of them spent time in the camps.

The problem of potentially disloyal elements in the Soviet population had a large ethnic dimension. In Ukraine and Belorussia, around 300,000 people had served in the local police of the occupation forces by 1943.¹¹ Levels of collaboration would surely have been much greater if the Germans had not done so much to antagonize the population of the occupied territories. Although the experience of Nazi overlordship in the western regions had for many people not been much preferable to Stalinist rule, these parts of the Soviet Union had strong reasons – national, ethnic, religious, political – to resent the reimposition of Stalinist controls. Soviet measures against the populations perceived to have committed collective treason – mass deportation – hardly provided a long-term solution.

The war represented the apotheosis of the social mobilization for which Soviet ideology was striving, yet this too had disturbing implications for Stalin’s rule. Besides the possibility of a Bonapartist threat from the military High Command, the postwar regime faced the challenge of bringing a vast army – close to 12 million men at the moment of victory in Europe – under control. Loyal servants of the Soviet cause during the war might not prove so loyal or committed when returning to civilian life, or when government austerity could no longer be justified by the fact of a life-and-death struggle. The problem was compounded by the rapid wartime growth in Party membership. Frontline soldiers had been admitted to the Party in their hundreds of thousands. While this mass constituency was in principle a good thing, it also carried the danger that the purpose and ideological purity of the Party would be compromised. Had the Party taken over Soviet society, or vice versa?

Even government and administrative elites were a source of concern for an ageing dictator. After the disastrous early months, the Soviet political system had functioned remarkably effectively in wartime. Its successes, however, had been bought at the cost of blurring the boundaries between the military, the political system, and economic administration. The war had forced the regime to give administrators and managers more leeway, and to punish them less arbitrarily, than in the preceding era of Great Terror. How was Stalin to make sure that they did not feel too comfortable in their positions and that the administrative system did not end up subverting his political will?

Even at the moment of victory, then, there were reasons for Stalin to feel “embattled.” ¹² Later sections of this book – especially Chapter 2 – will explain how he set about maintaining his kind of order: by extending the military discipline and austerity of the war years into the late 1940s, and by periodically striking fear into his loyal servants. But Stalin’ s rule also asserted itself in less tangible ways – notably by controlling the memory of the war itself.

The War Remembered

The process began even before the war ended. Especially after victory at Stalingrad, the personality cult fostered by Stalin entered a new, more intense, phase. From the beginning, the war had caused Stalin to take on a more public role. In the summer of 1941 he quickly outgrew his notional Party post, becoming Supreme Commander almost immediately after the Nazi invasion. With an engaging radio address two weeks after the start of the war, and then with his last-minute decision in October 1941 not to join much of his government in evacuation, he allied himself with popular patriotism to an extent inconceivable in the 1930s. Even if Stalin’s military command was largely a disaster until he started paying attention to his generals in 1942, his symbolic authority took on a new martial coloring.¹³

After 1945 Stalin remained at the core of accounts of the war, but patriotic memory abandoned any populist concessions to become entirely Party-centered. In a famous Kremlin speech two weeks after the victory over Germany, Stalin raised a glass to the powers of endurance of the Russian people (narod); a month later, on a similar occasion, he spoke warmly of the “simple, ordinary, modest people” who formed the “cogs” of the mighty state mechanism that was the Soviet Union.¹⁴ These, however, were toasts at banquets rather than statements of intent: very soon the much-cited narod would be handed back its normal Stalinist role as a bit-player in the narrative of Communist triumph. Naturally, this required writing out of the story the many ambiguities and contradictions of Russia’ s war. Nothing was heard of the NKVD atrocities in Poland and the Baltics before the Wehrmacht’s arrival, or of the war crimes of the Soviet Army on its westward march in 1944–5. The mass panic of Moscow’ s population in October 1941, at a moment when the government itself appeared to be turning tail, was taboo. Nor, of course, could it be mentioned that not all Soviet people had thrown themselves into the cause with patriotic aplomb: hundreds of thousands had been worked to death in the Gulag, others had been conscripted into labor battalions, while frontline soldiers had been kept fighting by “blocking units” (zagradotriady) instructed to mow down any troops who appeared to be retreating. Any Soviet people who did not have an exemplary record – notably those conscripted or captured by the Germans – were automatically under suspicion after the war; many of them could never shake off the stigma.

FIGURE 1.2 Stalin and Zhukov on the Lenin Mausoleum, 1945. The Party and the military in uneasy equilibrium.

Source: © Eugeny Khaldei/PhotoSoyuz.

Even the men and women who unquestionably had done their patriotic duty – the frontline soldiers, or frontoviki – were denied adequate recognition by the postwar Soviet state. Soviet provisions for returning soldiers always lagged far behind the American G. I. Bill, with its extensive package of welfare benefits, educational opportunities and home loans. By 1948 veterans in the USSR had ceased to exist as a coherent category of welfare recipient. They were even denied symbolic recognition: Victory Day was celebrated in 1946 and 1947 but then discontinued as a public holiday.¹⁵

Veterans gained a louder public voice almost by accident in the mid-1950s, when the Soviet authorities permitted – as an international propaganda move – the creation of a Soviet Committee of War Veterans, which quickly outgrew its brief to take on welfare and lobbying functions. At the same time, a less statecentered version of the war made a comeback for reasons that were less accidental. One important factor was Nikita Khrushchev’s pride in his own war record and his indignation at Stalin’s monopoly on heroic wartime leadership. Khrushchev could argue that, unlike Stalin, he had spent most of his war not in the Kremlin but in several of the most intense theaters: Kiev, Kharkov, Stalingrad, Kursk. In his Secret Speech of February 1956, besides exposing some of the crimes of the Great Terror, he set about tarnishing Stalin’s war record. Even on the printed page, Khrushchev’s tone and delivery are noticeably more vivid and heartfelt when his four-hour oration moves on from the 1930s to the Great Patriotic War. ¹⁶ De-Stalinization was at least in part driven by the need of the Soviet elite to reclaim the memory of the war from its deceased progenitor. Like Stalin, moreover, Khrushchev felt it necessary in due course to remove and disgrace the war’s most famous Soviet general, Georgii Zhukov. Yet, while this Kremlin revisionism may have been self-interested, in combination with a slight liberalization of public discourse it made war memory a more honest and democratic affair. The 1950s and 1960s saw an outpouring of fiction and film that gave the war a more nuanced human dimension and brought to light some of its moral ambiguities.

The Brezhnev era confirmed the centrality of the war to Soviet self-understanding. Brezhnev, like Khrushchev, was concerned to burnish his own image as war hero, most notoriously by awarding himself medals and having his ghostwritten memoirs win a state prize. But he was prepared to share at least some of the credit with Soviet society. Victory Day was re-instituted as a public holiday in 1965, while v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Series page
• Copyright
• Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• 1: Introduction: World War II and the Remaking of the Soviet Union
• 2: Reform, Reaction, Revolution
• 3: From Plan to Market
• 4: Structures of Society
• 5: Public and Private
• 6: Center and Periphery
• 7: National Questions
• 8: Geopolitical Imperatives
• 9: From Isolationism to Globalization
• 10: Conclusion: The Second Russian Revolution?
• Notes
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index