Stalinism at War

The Soviet Union in World War II

Mark Edele

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350383463
• eBook ISBN: 9781350153523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

"Masterfully told and compellingly reinterpreted." The Moscow Times Stalinism at War tells the epic story of the Soviet Union in World War Two. Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens – Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime – to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan. In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949.

1 Preparing for war

Doom and gloom

‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and lose its independence?’ Stalin was at his most rhetorical when he spoke to an assembly of his industrial managers in 1931.¹ The dictator posed this question at a time his strategy to prepare the Soviet Union for war had produced chaos, even catastrophe. There were successes, to be sure. In the wake of the dual decisions to industrialize at a forced pace and order the peasants into collective farms – Stalin’s first ‘revolution from above’ – both employment in industry and gross industrial production more than doubled between 1928 and 1932. But this Industrial Revolution came at the price of plummeting living standards and at the cost of worker resistance, which had to be suppressed. Calorie consumption declined by between 20 and 30 per cent and Soviet workers would not eat as well as they had in 1928 until well after Stalin’s death. Housing was cramped and unpleasant. The most fortunate lived in communal apartments, with one family per room and shared kitchen and bathroom facilities, if there were any. Others lived in barracks, in tents, in hastily constructed dugouts or in sheds nailed together from whatever material could be found. Workers grumbled about their hard lives: was this really socialism?²

But if life in the cities was dreary, catastrophe loomed in the countryside. Stalin could not know it, yet, but a famine of major proportions was afoot, killing millions in 1932–3, especially in Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan. This famine was a direct result of Stalin’s agricultural policies, especially the relentless grain requisitioning to pay for industrialization and the confiscation of cattle to feed the cities. The government soon learned what was going on, but the dictator refused to act decisively, either because he did not believe that things were really as bad as reported to him or because he was willing to sacrifice Ukrainian peasants and Kazakh nomads for the good of his socialism.³

It was in this context of social, economic and political crisis that Stalin argued for his type of crash developmentalism. Russia, he claimed, had always been beaten by foreign powers, because the country was backward culturally, technologically and militarily. The Soviet Union, he implied, was the successor of the Russian Empire and beholden to the same geopolitical laws: either overcome backwardness or perish. That the red empire was also the only socialist country, an island in the sea of capitalism and, according to those believing in the doctrines of Marxism–Leninism, humanity’s only hope for a better future made the choice only starker: a war would come, Stalin insisted. Marx, Engels and Lenin had taught that capitalism necessarily led to war. As he had lectured a foreign reporter in 1929, just a month after the stock market crash which inaugurated the Great Depression in the capitalist world: it was not clear ‘when, where, and on what pretext’ a war would start. But that it would come was not in question. ‘It is inevitable’, the dictator explained the contours of his worldview, ‘that the efforts of the stronger powers to overcome the economic crisis will force them to crush their weaker rivals’. In the long run, this dynamic could have but one outcome: eventually, ‘the giant powers must fight for markets among themselves’. The interwar order, instituted with the peace treaty of Versailles in 1919, was doomed to break down, the dictator explained and Europe was an armed camp.⁴ The Soviet Union better be ready. A peasant country with backward agriculture would again lose, as Russia had in the First World War. The task was to transform it into an industrialized war machine able to win modern wars.

Stalin’s predictions of a coming war were correct. But was the strategy he had developed in response successful? Was the Soviet Union prepared for war when it broke out, first in Asia in 1937, then in Europe in 1939? The answer is ambiguous.

The dictator and his country

In 1931 Stalin could not know what the outcome of his efforts would be. But he did know where he was heading. He also knew where he came from. His Soviet Union had emerged from the First World War and its violent aftermath in Eastern Europe. Beaten in war and rocked by political and social unrest, the tsarist empire had broken apart into a patchwork of new states, most barely able to restore even the most basic functions of governance: to monopolize the means of violence. Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Stalin among them, turned out to be adept at this task. They had taken control over the Russian heartland around Moscow, where they built the core of their new state. It proved itself best suited to reassemble the defeated and fractured empire – a paradoxical outcome, given their anti-imperialist ideology. In 1920 and 1921, the Red Army would reconquer much of the tsarist lands. Only Poland, Finland and the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) remained independent for the time being.⁵

The state they built in the process did cover much of the same real estate as its tsarist predecessor, but it was a fundamentally different polity: not only a dictatorship but a dictatorship of a new kind. Because the Bolsheviks had few technical cadres of their own – bureaucrats, doctors, engineers, statisticians, army officers etc. – they needed to co-opt a good part of the old elite. These people, of course, could not be trusted and hence some kind of surveillance mechanisms needed to be established. Part of the answer was the secret police, but this situation also called for political leadership of the ‘bourgeois specialists’, as Lenin called them. The answer was found in what would become a central feature of Leninist states: the duality of party and state administrations. In order to keep a good eye on the state, staffed with what were considered hostile specialists, a parallel hierarchy was created of Communist Party positions, which would oversee the work of the technocrats.

While Lenin’s men had managed to reassemble the empire, it was a starving country they now controlled. The working class, in whose name these Marxist revolutionaries governed, had all but disappeared in the conflagration of war, revolution and Civil Wars. What was left of tsarist industry – once growing at a rate faster than any other – produced a pittance. Gross industrial production, which stood at 8,431 million roubles in 1913 and had grown to 9,220 million roubles as a result of the wartime armaments boom by 1916, had collapsed to only 1,718 million roubles by 1920. The regime, popular in 1917–18 for ending the war and giving land to the peasants, was confronted with political unrest: by 1920–1 workers were on strike, peasants rebelled and revolutionary sailors asked for the end of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Lenin reacted with a two-pronged policy: the uprisings were suppressed with unrestrained brutality; economic concessions decreased discontent.⁶

The result was the New Economic Policy (or NEP, 1921–7), a compromise solution. It combined dictatorial government with a planned state economy and a growing private sector ruled by market forces. This settlement was doomed for a complex mix of reasons. It was haunted by economic contradictions and was politically unpopular among rank-and-file members of the ruling Communist Party. Many communists were upset that they seemed to have shed their proletarian blood during the Civil War only for petty bourgeois tradespeople and tight-fisted peasants to reap the benefits. NEP also depended on foreign credits and access to world markets (for grain, especially), which proved problematic with the deterioration of the world economy culminating in the stock market crash of 1929. In order to work in the medium term, NEP also required fairly level-headed economic management at a time when Lenin’s deputies were embroiled in a nasty succession struggle after the leader’s premature death in 1924. Finally, the NEP allowed only for relatively modest economic growth at a time when Soviet relative backwardness vis-à-vis the capitalist world threatened doom. While the NEP had allowed recovery of most indicators to pre-war levels by the late 1920s, this was a return to an economic performance under which the Russian empire had lost the First World War over a decade earlier. And this normalization was concentrated in consumer goods, not in the heavy industries which could form the basis of a modern war economy. ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries’, summarized Stalin this view in 1931. ‘We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.’⁷

The NEP thus found its gravedigger in Stalin. Once he buried it, he would become one of the most ferocious dictators of the twentieth century but also the man who presided over the Soviet Second World War with an iron fist. Stalin had been one of the few plebeians in a pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party dominated by intellectuals. He had stayed in the country and worked in the underground while Lenin had nursed his migraines in Switzerland. He had shown himself a practical politician before the revolution and proved his mettle after the Bolshevik takeover as a terroristic dictator over Tsaritsyn, the city later renamed Stalingrad in his honour. As commissar (minister) for Nationalities, he presided over the management of the national question in the multi-ethnic Soviet empire. In 1922, Lenin installed him as general secretary of the Bolshevik Party, the single most powerful position in the Soviet dictatorship save Lenin’s own. After his teacher’s death, Stalin proved more skilful in the succession struggle than his more sophisticated competitors. Once in power by 1928, he inherited a Soviet economic system in deep crisis and a country which could expect war with Japan in the East, Poland or Germany in the West and Finland in the north. It was not likely to win such a war unless it acquired a modern industry.

Stalin’s strategy

Stalin developed a three-pronged strategy to deal with this problem. The state would sponsor crash-industrialization, buy state-of-the-art equipment from the capitalists abroad and employ foreign specialists to install this technology and train the domestic workforce. In order to pay for this massive investment in heavy industry, the peasantry had to be brought to heel. Forced into collective farms, the agricultural population lost control over its labour and the fruits of its work. It was subjected to arbitrary grain collections. Third, a new elite of proletarian origin was trained to take over from the fickle intellectuals beholden to the old regime.

Together these three revolutions made up Stalin’s first revolution from above – the industrial revolution of the First Five-Year Plan, the agricultural revolution of collectivization and the cultural revolution of challenging the old elite by training its replacement. It built the basics of the warfare state that would win the Second World War: a subdued population, a growing police apparatus, a centralized economy, a propaganda machine trying to direct the entire population to the regime’s ends and a group of beneficiaries – young, upwardly mobile cadres who owed their advancement to comrade Stalin and his socialism. Together with younger and thoroughly indoctrinated communists of the next generation, they would form the ‘core’ of the Soviet Union’s fighters in the Second World War. These cadres had a stake in Stalin’s system and had made the goals of his socialism their own. Rather than brainwashed automatons, they were creative actors, engaged in a continuous process of self-indoctrination. Seeing themselves as part of a global struggle for a better world, they were disciplined, hard-working and committed to a cause – attributes which would serve them well in the coming war.⁸

Crucially, however, Stalin’s revolution preserved the central feature of the duality of state and party apparatuses, which had originally been developed to control a state not staffed by cadres loyal to the regime. In an example of the preservation of structures which have outlived their original justification, the party–state duality remained a fundamental feature of the Soviet polity. As we shall see in later chapters, until 1941, Stalin was not technically heading the state hierarchy at all: he was the general secretary of the Communist Party, nothing more. Eventually, this would change. From the summer of 1941, Stalin would stand at the head of both hierarchies as the top official in charge of everything.

By the time Stalin gave the speech about Russia having been beaten, beaten and beaten again because of her backwardness, however, his revolution from above was incomplete. Yes, new cadres had been trained but the levers of power in the Bolshevik Party, the wider state apparatus and the economic management were still largely in the hands of pre-revolutionary specialist or old Bolsheviks loyal to the party of Lenin but not necessarily content with Stalin as leader. In Stalin’s eyes, this situation was risky: in times of war, elites of dubious loyalty might well make revolution, as they had in 1917. But then, the revolution had been against tsarism, capitalism and imperialist war. Next time it would be against the only bastion of socialism, the one and only radical alternative to the capitalism responsible, in Stalin’s Marxist mind, not only for exploitation but also for war. This risk could not be taken. Extreme measures were called for.⁹

The Great Terror

On 1 December 1934, Stalin found a pretext for launching his second revolution from above. On this day, a slightly deranged gunman shot the Leningrad Party boss dead. Stalin immediately took charge of the investigation into his comrade’s murder and used it to ‘uncover’ all kinds of ‘enemies’ within the party ranks. Some of the victims of the emerging Great Purge were truly in opposition to Stalin. Many more were loyal Stalinists who had confessions beaten out of them. Each arrest triggered several others, as the accused were forced to point fingers at alleged co-conspirators. The purge began in the Party and the state apparatus but soon broadened to include the military, decapitating the Red Army. Three out of five Marshals did not survive the decade. More army-level commanders were shot between 1936 and 1941 than had been in these positions at the start of the period: the terror chewed up replacements, too. Many more experienced cadres saw their careers destroyed even if their lives were spared. Lower down the hierarchy the impact was less spectacular and reinstatements lowered the overall share of victims to about 8 per cent of the officer corps in 1937 and 4 per cent in 1938. But the purge truly only became the Great Terror after it spread to the population at large in a series of ‘mass operations’ in 1937 and 1938. Overall, in these two years, nearly 1.6 million people were arrested, and a staggering 681,692 of them shot. More died in detention, as a result of torture, malnutrition, overwork, disease or accidents, increasing the death toll of these two bloody years to maybe 1.5 million.¹⁰

To Stalin, this bloodletting was an essential part of war preparation. Wreckers were everywhere, he told the Central Committee in 1937. They were ready to ‘do their spoiling work . . . in the period immediately preceding war or during war itself’.¹¹ The closer his police looked at personal networks within the party, the more conspiracies they thought they saw. The more he learned about the views of the population, relentlessly eavesdropped upon by party members and police agents, the more isolated he felt. A public debate about a new constitution, the promise for more open elections and a census of the population all revealed widespread hostility to his form of socialism. In the context of the looming threat of Japan from the east and a militarizing Nazi Germany from the west, it was clearly not enough to just purge state, party and army from hidden enemies. Formerly well-off peasants (‘kulaks’), whose property had been confiscated and who had been sent into exile as part of collectivization at the start of the decade, people who had fought with anti-Bolshevik armies in the Civil War, officers and civil servants of the old regime, members of competing socialist or non-socialist parties, clergymen, common criminals, ‘anti-Soviet elements’, Poles, Germans, Finns, Latvians, Chinese, Koreans and other diaspora nationalities all fell victim.¹²

Did Stalinism prepare the Soviet Union for war?

When Stalin stopped the bloodletting in November 1938, he had achieved his goal: there was no opposition left in his empire and in his party. Even his closest colleagues in the Politburo were now so t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Stalinism at war, 1937–49
• 1 Preparing for war
• 2 The war begins in the east, 1937–9
• 3 War in the west, 1939–40
• 4 Armageddon, 1941–2
• 5 Recovery, 1941–2
• 6 Triumph, 1943–5
• 7 War of ideologies
• 8 The war after the war, 1944–9
• 9 Impact and aftermath
• Appendix: Maps
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright