The premature Soviet counter-offensive of summer 1942 had opened the Volga region to the Wehrmacht, and it appeared likely that the siege of Stalingrad would result in a further disaster for the Red forces. Leningrad in the north and Stalingrad in the south of Russia became battle arenas of prestige out of proportion to their strategical significance. Leningrad was the symbol of the October Revolution and Soviet communism; Stalingrad carried the name of Lenin’s successor. Stalin was ready to turn either city into a Martian landscape rather than allow Hitler to have the pleasure of a victory parade in them.
Increasingly, however, the strength of the Soviet Union behind the war fronts made itself felt. Factories were packed up and transferred by rail east of the Urals together with their work-forces. In addition, 3,500 large manufacturing enterprises were constructed during the hostilities. Tanks, aircraft, guns and bullets were desperately needed. So, too, were conscripts and their clothing, food and transport. The results were impressive. Soviet industry, which had been on a war footing for the three years before mid-1941, still managed to quadruple its output of munitions between 1940 and 1944. By the end of the war, 3,400 military planes were being produced monthly. Industry in the four years of fighting supplied the Red forces with 100,000 tanks, 130,000 aircraft and 800,000 field guns. At the peak of mobilization there were twelve million men under arms. The USSR produced double the amount of soldiers and fighting equipment that Germany produced.
In November 1942 the Wehrmacht armies fighting in the outer suburbs of Stalingrad were themselves encircled. After bitter fighting in wintry conditions, the city was reclaimed by the Red Army in January 1943. Hitler had been as unbending in his military dispositions as Stalin would have been in the same circumstances. Field- Marshal von Paulus, the German commander, had been prohibited from pulling back from Stalingrad when it was logistically possible. As a consequence, 91,000 German soldiers were taken into captivity. Pictures of prisoners-of- war marching with their hands clasped over their heads were shown on the newsreels and in the press. At last Stalin had a triumph that the Soviet press and radio could trumpet to the rest of the USSR. The Red Army then quickly also took Kharkov and seemed on the point of expelling the Wehrmacht from eastern Ukraine.
Yet the military balance had not tipped irretrievably against Hitler; for German forces re-entered Kharkov on 18 March 1943. Undeterred, Stalin set about cajoling Stavka into attacking the Germans again. There were the usual technical reasons for delay: the Wehrmacht had strong defensive positions and the training and supply of the Soviet mobile units left much to be desired. But Stalin would not be denied, and 6,000 tanks were readied to take on the enemy north of Kursk on 4 July 1943. It was the largest tank battle in history until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Zhukov, who had used tanks against the Japanese at Khalkhin-Gol, was in his element. His professional expertise was accompanied by merciless techniques. Penal battalions were marched towards the German lines in order to clear the ground of land-mines. Then column after column of T-34 tanks moved forward. Red Army and Wehrmacht fought it out day after day.
The result of the battle was not clear in itself. Zhukov had been gaining an edge, but had not defeated the Wehrmacht before Hitler pulled his forces away rather than gamble on complete victory. Yet Kursk was a turning point since it proved that the victory at Stalingrad was repeatable elsewhere. The Red Army seized back Kharkov on 23 August, Kiev on 6 November. Then came the campaigns of the following year which were known as the ‘Ten Stalinist Blows’. Soviet forces attacked and pushed back the Wehrmacht on a front extending from the Baltic down to the Black Sea. Leningrad’s 900-day siege was relieved in January and Red forces crossed from Ukraine into Romania in March. On 22 June 1944, on the third anniversary of the German invasion, Operation Bagration was initiated to reoccupy Belorussia and Lithuania. Minsk became a Soviet city again on 4 July, Vilnius on 13 July.
As the Red Army began to occupy Polish territory, questions about the post-war settlement of international relations imprinted themselves upon Soviet actions. On 1 August the outskirts of Warsaw were reached; but further advance was not attempted for several weeks, and by that time the German SS had wiped out an uprising and exacted revenge upon the city. About 300,000 Poles perished. Stalin claimed that his forces had to be rested before freeing Warsaw from the Nazis. His real motive was that it suited him if the Germans destroyed those armed units of Poles which might cause political and military trouble for him.
The USSR was determined to shackle Poland to its wishes. In secret, Stalin and Beria had ordered the murder of nearly 15,000 Polish officers who had been taken captive after the Red Army’s invasion of eastern Poland in 1939. Subsequently Soviet negotiators had been suspiciously evasive on the question of Poland’s future when, in July 1941, an Anglo-Soviet agreement was signed; and the British government, which faced a dire threat from Hitler, had been in no position to make uncompromising demands in its talks with Stalin. Nor was Stalin any more easily controllable when the USA entered the Second World War in December 1941 after Japan’s air force attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor and Hitler aligned himself with his Japanese partners against the USA. The USSR’s military contribution remained of crucial importance when the Anglo-Soviet-German war in Europe and the Japanese war of conquest were conjoined in a single global war.
There was an exception to Stalin’s chutzpah. At the end of 1941 he had ordered Beria to ask the Bulgarian ambassador Ivan Stamenov to act as an intermediary in overtures for a separate peace between the USSR and Germany.30 Stalin was willing to forgo his claims to the territory under German occupation in exchange for peace. Stamenov refused the invitation. Stalin would anyway not have regarded such a peace as permanent. Like Hitler, he must have calculated that the Wehrmacht’s cause was ultimately lost if Leningrad, Moscow and the Volga remained under Soviet control. A ‘breathing space’ on the model of the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk would have been more advantageous to Stalin in 1941–2 than to Lenin in 1918.
Naturally Stalin kept this gambit secret from the Western Allies; and through 1942 and 1943, he expressed anger about the slowness of preparations for a second front in the West. Churchill flew to Moscow in August 1942 to explain that the next Allied campaign in the West would be organized not in France or southern Italy but in north Africa. Stalin was not amused. Thereafter a meeting involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin was held in Tehran in November 1943 — the greatest distance Stalin had travelled from Moscow in three decades. Churchill flew again to Moscow in October 1944, and in February 1945 Stalin played host to Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta in Crimea. At each of these meetings, he drew attention to the sacrifices being borne by the peoples of the USSR. Not even the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 put an end to his habit of berating the other Allies; for he knew that his complaints about them served the purpose of distracting attention from his designs upon eastern Europe.
All this notwithstanding, Stalin had been receiving considerable military and foodstuffs assistance from the USA and the United Kingdom to plug the gaps in Soviet production. The German occupation of Ukraine deprived the USSR of its sugar-beet. Furthermore, Stalin’s pre-war agricultural mismanagement had already robbed the country of adequate supplies of meat; and his industrial priorities had not included the development of native equivalents to American jeeps and small trucks. In purely military output, too, misprojections had been made: the shortage of various kinds of explosive was especially damaging.
From 1942, the Americans shipped sugar and the compressed meat product, Spam, to Russia — and the British naval convoys braved German submarines in the Arctic Ocean to supplement supplies. Jeeps, as well as munitions and machinery, also arrived. The American Lend-Lease Programme supplied goods to the value of about one fifth of the USSR’s gross domestic product during the fighting — truly a substantial contribution.31 Yet Allied governments were not motivated by altruism in dispatching help to Russia: they still counted upon the Red Army to break the backbone of German armed forces on the Eastern front. While the USSR needed its Western allies economically, the military dependence of the USA and the United Kingdom upon Soviet successes at Stalingrad and Kursk was still greater. But foreign aid undoubtedly rectified several defects in Soviet military production and even raised somewhat the level of food consumption.
There was a predictable reticence about this in the Soviet press. But Stalin and his associates recognized the reality of the situation; and, as a pledge to the Western Allies of his co-operativeness, Stalin dissolved the Comintern in May 1943. Lenin had founded it in 1919 as an instrument of world revolution under tight Russian control. Its liquidation indicated to Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR would cease to subvert the states of her Allies and their associated countries while the struggle against Hitler continued.
While announcing this to Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin played upon their divergent interests. Since Lenin’s time it had been a nostrum of Soviet political analysis that it was contrary to the USA’s interest to prop up the British Empire. Roosevelt helped Stalin by poking a little fun at Churchill and by turning his charm upon Stalin in the belief that the USSR and USA would better be able to reach a permanent mutual accommodation if the two leaders could become friendlier. But Stalin remained touchy about the fact that he was widely known in the West as Uncle Joe. He was also given to nasty outbursts. Churchill walked out of a session at the Tehran meeting when the Soviet leader proposed the execution of 50,000 German army officers at the end of hostilities. Stalin had to feign that he had not meant the suggestion seriously so that the proceedings might be resumed.
