The Penguin History of Modern Russia

uprising was led by Mark Retyunin in the Vorkuta.¹⁶ The insurgents were put down with exemplary savagery and the terror-regime was reinforced.

Repression continued through the war. Soviet citizens were warned to continue to treat foreigners warily, including citizens of the Allied countries. After December 1941, when the USA entered the war, a new offence was created by the NKVD: the praising of American technology (voskhalenie amerikanskoi tekhniki). An unguarded, admiring comment about an American jeep could lead to someone being consigned to the labour camps.¹⁷ By 1943, as the Red Army reconquered the western USSR, the security police arrested not only those Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Germans but even those who had just been taken prisoner-of-war by them. Victories in battle also encouraged Stalin to resume campaigns for Marxist-Leninist indoctrination in the armed forces themselves. Soldiers had previously been ordered only to fight well. Now they had to think acceptable thoughts too.¹⁸ Evidently Stalin had already decided that the pre-war regime was to be reinstated in all its brutality as soon as was possible.

Nevertheless this was not yet obvious to most people. What many of them preferred to note was that Stalin had introduced several concessions since the beginning of the German-Soviet war. And hopes grew that the regime would become more humane once Germany had been defeated.

This mood was encouraged by the concessions made in culture. Artists were permitted to create what they wanted so long as their works avoided direct criticism of Marxism-Leninism and had a patriotic resonance. The magnificent Leningrad Symphony was written in the city of that name by composer and part-time fire-warden Shostakovich, who had been in trouble with the official authorities before 1941. Writers, too, benefited. One was among the century’s greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova, whose innocent son had died in the NKVD’s custody. She continued to compose without fear, and the following stanza drew forth an ovation from within the Hall of Columns in Moscow:¹⁹

It’s not awful to fall dead under the bullets.
It’s not bitter to be left without shelter —
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
Great Russian word.
We will bear you free and pure
And hand you to our grandchildren, and save you forever from captivity.

Many ordinary working citizens were attracted to high art as never before, and the link that bound the arts and politics became a source of strength for the state authorities.

Stalin also somewhat moderated his rough approach to the religious faith of most Soviet citizens. At a time when he needed the maximum co-operation in the war effort it made no sense to give unnecessary offence to such believers, and the word was put about that the authorities would no longer persecute the Russian Orthodox Church. In its turn the Church collected money for military needs and its priests blessed tank divisions on their way from the factories to the Eastern front.

The shift in policy towards organized religion was formalized in September 1943, when Metropolitan Sergei was summoned to the Kremlin. To his bemusement, he was given the good news that permission was being given by the Soviet authorities for the Russian Orthodox Church to hold an Assembly and elect the first Patriarch since the death of Tikhon in 1925. Stalin playfully affected surprise that the Metropolitan had so few priests escorting him — and the Metropolitan forbore to mention that tens of thousands of priests would have been available had they not been killed by the NKVD. In fact Metropolitan Sergei died soon after being confirmed as Patriarch and he was succeeded in 1944 by Metropolitan Aleksi of Leningrad. But both Sergei and Aleksi followed a policy of grateful accommodation to Stalin’s wishes.

The Russian Orthodox Church was helpful to Stalin as an instrument whereby he could increase popular acquiescence in his rule. It was also pressed by him into the service of suppressing other Russian Christian sects as well as those Christian denominations associated with other nationalities. As the Red Army moved into Ukraine and Belorussia, nearly all ecclesiastical buildings were put under the authority of Patriarch Aleksi. The Russian Orthodox Church became one of the main beneficiaries of Stalinism. Real authority, it need hardly be added, remained with Stalin, whom Aleksi grotesquely described as a ‘God-given leader’.²⁰

While making manipulative compromises with religion, Stalin extended those he had been offering to Russian national sensitivities. In June 1943 the Internationale was dropped as the state anthem. Stalin ordered the composition of a less internationalist set of verses which began:

An indestructible union of free republics
Has forever been welded by Russia the Great.
Long live the land created by the will of the peoples:
The united, powerful Soviet Union!

Cheap copies of it were reproduced on postcards for soldiers to send back from the front. Stalin also tried to appeal more generally to Slavic peoples, including not only Ukrainians but also Czechs, Serbs and Poles. The bonds between the Slavs were stressed by official Soviet historians. Stalin wanted to increase the Red Army’s popular welcome in eastern Europe as it moved on Berlin. Russia’s role as past protector of the Slav nations was emphasized (and, it must be added, exaggerated).²¹

Special praise was showered upon the Russians for their endurance and commitment to the defeat of Hitler. An unnamed partisan gave an account to Pravda about German atrocities in a provincial city; his conclusion was defiant: ‘Pskov is in chains. Russian history knows that the people have more than once broken the chains welded on to a free town by the enemy.’²²

The Russian nation was encouraged to believe that it was fighting for its Motherland (and Fatherland: propagandists used the terms indiscriminately), and that this included not only Russia but the entire USSR. Political commissars urged troops to charge into action shouting in unison: ‘For the Motherland, for Stalin!’ It is doubtful that most of them really mentioned Stalin in their battle-cries; but certainly the idea of the Motherland was widely and enthusiastically accepted by Russians on active service. They would have taken this attitude even if the regime had not given its encouragement. The German occupation of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic republics in the first two years of the war meant that the great majority of Red Army soldiers perforce originated from the RSFSR and were Russians; and such soldiers needed little convincing that the Russian contribution was uniquely crucial to the struggle against Hitler.²³

Yet the eulogies of the Russians also had to avoid giving offence to other nations whose young men had been conscripted into the Red Army. Multinational harmony was emphasized in the following appeal to the Uzbek people: ‘The home of the Russian is also your home; the home of the Ukrainian and the Belorussian is also your home!’²⁴ Such invocations were not without their positive impact upon several peoples belonging to the USSR. The war induced an unprecedented sense of co-operation among nations.²⁵

But this was very far from meaning that a ‘Soviet people’ was created. Most national and ethnic groups experienced an increase in their sense of distinctness in the heat of the war. The brutal policies before 1941 had induced permanent hatred of Stalin among most non-Russians. Antagonism was especially noticeable both among the deported nationalities but also among peoples living in states which had recently been independent from Moscow. Western Belorussians, for example, were reported as being keen to fight against Hitler but not to swear a military oath of loyalty to the USSR. ‘Why,’ some of them asked, ‘is our nation being trampled upon?’ Romanians from Moldavia took a similar attitude; they especially objected to being prohibited from singing their own patriotic songs on campaign and being forced to learn the officially-approved Russian ones.²⁶ For such conscripts, talk of the Soviet Motherland was a disguised way of advocating Russian imperialism.

Yet still they fought in the ranks of the Red Army; for they judged Hitler’s defeat to be the supreme goal. The Soviet regime exploited this situation and anti-German sentiments were given raucous expression in the mass media. A poem by Konstantin Simonov ended with the words: