because the Wehrmacht conducted a planned and orderly retreat. Thus there was no definitive end to the battle. But Hitler had sustained strategic defeat simply by not having been able to win. After Kursk the Wehrmacht was pushed steadily westwards. Red Army morale rose as German spirits dipped. The USSR conscripted its vast reservoir of peasant soldiers while the Germans and their allies were running out of fighting men. Soviet factories reached a peak of production and were accelerating at a faster rate than Germany’s industrial capacity. Stalin and his Stavka believed that the reverses suffered by German arms at Kursk signalled the beginning of the end for Hitler’s New Order in Europe.
Soviet commanders were right that Stalin had contributed less than themselves to the victory at Kursk. Yet they saw only the military side of his activity: they had little cognisance of his other interventions in the USSR’s war effort. Stavka had nothing to do with foreign policy, political organisation, cultural and social policy or economic mobilisation. Stalin interfered in all these sectors and his impact was deep. In 1941–2 this had already led to several adjustments which he thought necessary to the interests of the USSR. The massive territorial losses in the war’s early months precipitated a collapse in food supplies as Ukrainian wheat, potatoes and sugar beet fell into the hands of the Germans. Although no directive was issued, the authorities slackened off their efforts against the black market in agricultural produce. The exceptions were cities under siege such as Leningrad where the NKVD punished anyone caught trading on the street. But market economics more widely crept back into the Soviet order as party and municipal government accepted that peasants bringing sacks of vegetables for sale helped to alleviate urban malnutrition;8 and Stalin, who had fulminated against the flouting of trading laws in the 1930s, kept silent about this during the war.
He also understood the need to widen the limits of cultural expression. Many intellectuals who had been suspect to the authorities were told that the state welcomed their creative services. Notable among them were the poet Anna Akhmatova and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Akhmatova had been married to the poet Nikolai Gumilev, who had been killed as an anti-Soviet militant in 1921; her son Lev still languished in prison and her writings had not been published for years. But well-read members of society remembered her with affection. It was in Stalin’s interest to allow her work to be read over the radio and at concerts. This permission was not indiscriminate. Preference was given to those of her poems which emphasised the achievements of the Russian people. Shostakovich had learned the lesson of his troubles before the war and given up accompanying his music with words. He wrote the score of his Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony while working as a night fire warden. The piece was recognised for its greatness by the first-night audience in 1942.
Cheap editions of the Russian classics were distributed at the front. Stalin as writer also belonged to the Soviet literary pantheon and the commissars gave his pamphlets to the troops; but he was not in fact a favourite author for men on active service. The regime recognised this and moderated its insistence on placing his
Stalin also dropped the Internationale as the USSR state hymn (or national anthem) and held a competition for a new one. The winner was Alexander Alexandrov with a melody which stirred the soul. Words were added by Sergei Mikhalkov and Garold El-Registan and they were among the most effective items in the armoury of official propaganda. The first verse went:9
The second verse moored patriotism in allegiance to the October Revolution:
The hymn had a genuine emotional resonance for the wartime generation; it was hardly a cultural ‘concession’ since it contained a paean to Stalin; but it indicated that the authorities understood that cosmopolitanism, as embodied in the Internationale, did little to make Russians fight for the Motherland.
Still more important were Stalin’s decisions on the Russian Orthodox Church. By 1939 there were only around a hundred places of worship still open to believers.10 No monastery had survived the Soviet years. Tens of thousands of priests had been slaughtered in the Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror. People nevertheless believed in God. When the USSR census took place in 1937, some 55 per cent of the population rejected the aspirations of the atheistic state and declared themselves religious believers — and naturally the true proportion of the faithful must have been much greater.
Stalin, former pupil of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, welcomed Acting Patriarch Sergei’s patriotic stance. He was also pleased by the offertories collected in churches for the production of armaments. The Dmitri Donskoi tank column came from this source. It suited Stalin nicely that the Russian Orthodox Church was stiffening the military commitment of its congregations. Buildings were quietly allowed to be reopened for religious purposes. Stalin formalised the position by inviting Acting Patriarch Sergei to a meeting with him in the Kremlin on 4 September 1943. Sergei arrived, wondering what exactly awaited him.11 Stalin acted as if no contretemps had ever taken place between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church. Jovially he enquired of Sergei why he had come with so few priests. Sergei overcame the temptation to say that he could easily have mustered more clergy if Stalin had not spent the previous decade arresting and executing them. Yet the atmosphere was lightened by Stalin’s proposal that in return for the termination of persecution and for a measure of freedom to hold services of worship the Church should acknowledge the legitimacy of the Soviet state and avoid criticism of its internal and external policies.12
The timing of this concession was never explained by Stalin; he did not even allow
This would be more plausible if he had simultaneously lessened the pressure on the other Christian denominations, especially those with organisations in the West. But Stalin openly privileged the Russian Orthodox Church. The explanation is probably connected to his calculations about rule in the USSR. The meeting with the Acting Patriarch occurred shortly after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. The Red Army was about to start offensives to retake the western borderlands. Hitler had permitted Christian denominations, including the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, to function under German occupation. Religious freedom, having been tasted again, would be hard to suppress quickly. While restoring limited autonomy to the Russian Orthodox Church, Stalin enabled it to resume charge of buildings which had not belonged to it since the 1920s. As the Soviet armed forces fought their way into Ukraine and Belorussia, churches were transferred into the possession of the Russian Orthodox Church. Evidently Stalin judged that Christian believers would be more easily controlled if Sergei, who was elected Patriarch at the Synod held in September 1943, was presiding over them. Stalin left nothing to chance. He appointed G. Karpov to the Governmental Council on the Russian Orthodox Church to oversee relations with it. Stalin wanted his pound of flesh.
Another change in policy occurred in the international communist movement. Stalin reverted to his inclination in early 1941 to abolish the Comintern. Turning to Dimitrov, he instructed him to organise the necessary formalities. At meetings of the Comintern Executive Committee in May 1943 the foreign communist leaders meekly agreed to Stalin’s demands.14 He claimed to have concluded that it had been mistaken to try — as Lenin had done — to run the world communist movement from a single centre. He himself had repeated the error, and the
