The Penguin History of Modern Russia

feeding of its population. Moscow workers in the hardest manual occupations in 1943 were receiving only 2,914 calories per day; they needed at least 3,500 for mere subsistence.² If the widespread drought of 1946 had occurred three or four years earlier, the result of the war itself might have been different.³ Stalin’s collective farms were the worst imaginable form of wartime food production. The USSR was in some ways at its peak of efficiency in the Second World War; but it was at its lower depths in others.

The regime’s self-inflicted damage was not confined to the economy. In 1941 Stalin ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans from their autonomous republic in the RSFSR. Two years later, as the Wehrmacht was beginning to retreat into the eastern parts of Ukraine and Belorussia, the process was repeated. Karachai, Kalmyks, Ingushi, Chechens, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meshketian Turks and Greeks of Crimea were arrested and deported from their native lands in the North Caucasus and other southern parts of the RSFSR. Men, women and children were crammed into freezing cattle-trucks and transported to inhospitable areas of Kazakhstan, where they were abandoned without the rudimentary means of sustenance. Stalin secretly branded whole nationalities as traitors, and the NKVD was instructed to round them up in a lightning military operation; and Beria was able to report to Stalin on the fulfilment of these instructions by NKVD General I. A. Serov.⁴

Armed groups of Chechens and others had indeed rendered active assistance to the Wehrmacht. But this was not the whole story; for thirty-six Chechens had been decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union for their conspicuous valour as Red Army soldiers.⁵ Moreover, even the Third Reich did not trust the Volga Germans. They had settled in Russia in the eighteenth century and Nazi officials classified them according to four categories of Germanhood — and the fourth category embraced those who were impervious to Nazi ideas and were to be handed over to the Gestapo.⁶ And vastly more Ukrainians than Volga Germans or Chechens had started by warmly greeting the German invasion. Nevertheless the Ukrainian nation was not subsequently deported. Presumably even Stalin blanched at the scale of resources that he would have to divert from the war against Hitler. Probably, too, he was using the maltreatment of small nationalities as a signal to the larger ones to accord the maximum co-operation to the Soviet authorities.

Stalin also caused wholly needless resentment even among Russians.Lieutenant-General A.N. Vlasov, whom the German forces had captured in 1942, was infuriated by Stalin’s refusal to allow him to retreat in time from an unavoidable encirclement. Vlasov the un-questioning Stalinist turned into an anti-Stalin Russian patriot who agreed to organize a Russian Liberation Army out of Soviet POWs. Vlasov was a dupe. His intention was for these armed units to fight on the Eastern front, overthrow Stalin and then turn on the Nazis, driving them out of Russia and installing a government committed to moderate socialist policies; but Hitler foresaw such a trick and restricted Vlasov’s men mainly to guard duties in the Channel Islands. Yet the Russian Liberation Army’s very existence testified to the hatred stirred up by Stalin, and Vlasov’s comrades undertook the most concerted endeavour ever made by Russians to bring him down.⁷

Thus the ultra-authoritarian features of the Soviet regime caused harm to its war effort. Britain and the USA were states which lacked a capacity to enforce their political, social and economic commands before entering the war. This had not impeded them from carrying out the necessary wartime reorganization. Indeed a democratic state probably benefits from needing to secure voluntary acceptance of centralization and discipline. An elected political leadership, buoyed up by popular consent, has small reason to use violence on its own citizens.

Such considerations were odious to Stalin and his cronies. Already having been a highly ‘militarized’ society before 1941, the USSR became co-ordinated as if it were simply a great armed camp wherein the Red Army itself was but the most forward and exposed contingent. ‘Everything for the Front!’ was the state’s rallying slogan. The NKVD unconcernedly reduced the dietary provision in the Gulag system by a further thirty per cent. The new norms for prisoners were far below the level of subsistence, and 622,000 of them are reckoned to have died in the penal- labour camps between 1941 and 1945.⁸ Food distribution had also become a powerful instrument for the control of the free population: urban inhabitants were eligible for official ration-cards, which could be withdrawn for acts of delinquence. For a brief and unique time in Soviet history, factories and mines had dependable work- forces.

The increased compliance did not mean that the previous informal patterns of organization were eliminated. The opposite was the case: both the cliental ‘tails’ and the ‘family circles’ were indispensable to the operation of administrative machinery in wartime, when abrupt movements of the military front could cut off a city, province or whole region from commands from Moscow. The vertical and horizontal linkages which Stalin had tried to uproot in the Great Terror had been replanted in 1939–41; they were crucial to the state’s ability to organize its military effort.

And so committees of defence were formed in all cities, typically involving the leading figures in the party, soviet, police and army command. The precise relationships among institutions behind the front line underwent modification and the further enhancement of the party’s authority was particularly noteworthy. Nikolai Patolichev, who served successively in Yaroslavl and Chelyabinsk as first secretary of the party province committee, later recorded how he had intervened in factories when industrial targets were not being met. He countermanded instructions from military commanders and the local NKVD for the good of the cause. Patolichev knew that, if his judgement was called into question, he could get on the phone to Moscow and seek central political support.⁹ Party committees were not as dominant as they had been in the course of the First Five- Year Plan: they had to share power with other institutions at the local level. Yet the reinforcement of the communist party’s authority was none the less substantial.

Stalin used cunning to restrict the potential for insubordination to himself. He made appointments from rival cliental groups to the most important institutions, localities and fronts. This brought him several advantages. It ensured a lively competition to fulfil his orders. It gave ample opportunity, too, for denunciations of one group by another: the slightest sign of disloyalty to Stalin would be reported to him. He also kept watch over the Red Army through political commissars whose main task was to check on the obedience of military officers.

Yet at the same time he reduced some of the annoyance given to such officers. In November 1942 he decreed that the commissars should become mere deputies to their commanders and no longer be their equals. Moreover, the best-nourished citizens were those on active service. Each soldier, in addition to his daily ration, was given a 100-cc tot of vodka to steady the nerves and keep out the cold.¹⁰ The officers were looked after still more carefully, and the central state organs ensured that their families were given additional privileges.¹¹ Epaulettes were restored to uniforms. The practice of saluting superiors was reintroduced. As wagger returned to the gait of generals. Stalin had little alternative but to treat them better than before 1941. The losses in the officer corps were grievous in the Second World War. According to Red Army records, 1,023,093 commissioned officers were killed and 1,030,721 were invalided out of service.¹²

The plight of the armed forces in summer 1941 was such that thousands of officers convicted as ‘spies’ were recalled from Siberian labour camps, given a couple of square meals and recommissioned to fight against their alleged spymasters. These were the lucky ones. Other inmates who had not been officers before their arrest were also released, but only on condition that they served in the dreaded penal regiments which marched out in front of their own side’s tanks and armoured vehicles, clearing the enemy’s minefields at the high risk of their lives. They were motivated by patriotism as well as by a desire to erase the undeserved shame of a prison sentence: the regulations of the penal regiments allowed them to earn their freedom in reward for acts of conspicuous bravery.¹³ They also saw the frightful dangers as being more tolerable than the living death of Gulag labour on starvation rations.

Not that the Gulag system was dismantled: the great majority of camp prisoners were given no chance to fight Hitler. The exact number of them at the moment of the German invasion and through the war is still uncertain; but probably there was a decline by two fifths in the three years after January 1941. Thereafter the camps were replenished with fresh intakes. By January 1945 the estimated total came to nearly nine tenths of the pre-war one.¹⁴

Slave labour had become a permanent category of Stalin’s thought and a permanent mode of his governance. None of his associates dared to challenge this. The timber still needed felling and the gold mining; the new factory sites still had to be completed in the Urals and Siberia. Confidential official discussions started from the premiss that the economy would be seriously dislocated if the Gulag camps were to be closed and emptied of their prisoners. A certain industrial administrator, when his department had difficulty in hitting its production target, was heard to remark: ‘The fact is that we haven’t yet fulfilled our plans for imprisonments.’¹⁵ It is therefore hardly surprising that many prisoners felt they had nothing to lose by rebelling. In January 1942 an