Propagandists who had portrayed Germans as honorary Russians during the two years of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty came to treat the entire German people as the enemy; and most citizens of the USSR readily condoned this in the light of the barbarities of the Nazis.
They also approved of certain alterations in economic policy. For example, the authorities earned a degree of popularity by quietly dropping the May 1939 restriction on the size of private plots on kolkhozes: there was recognition that the goodwill of the peasantry was vital to halt the steep decline in agricultural output. In practice, too, peasants were allowed to trade their produce not only in the legal private markets but also illicitly on street corners. The Soviet state continued to bear responsibility for the supply of all kinds of food to the armed forces; but only an extremely small range of products, mainly bread, was guaranteed to urban civilians, who had to supplement their diet in whatever fashion they could. Sanction was given for the marking out of vegetable allotments outside factory buildings and on the outskirts of towns. The potatoes grown on these little patches of ground prevented many families from starving to death.27
Only in Stalin’s USSR could such meagre concessions to cultural, religious, national and economic aspirations be regarded as startling indulgences on the part of the authorities. If conditions had not been so hard for most people, the concessions would also have been discerned as a sign of the inability of the state authorities to exert total, detailed control over society. This inability, which had already been observable before 1941, attained even greater salience during the German-Soviet war: Stalin had learned the need for a dose of pragmatism in his choice of policies.
Urban conditions were appalling. Hunger was incessant for most townspeople in the regions held by the Red Army. There was a very high rate of mortality; and human corpses in some places were used by the living to survive a little longer. Cattle, pigs and poultry had gone first; then dogs, cats and rats, followed by any berries and herbs and then nettles, grass and tree bark. So that dead people were sometimes quite literally a last resort. Geographical factors had a deep and direct influence on things. Leningrad was the city worst supplied with food: the courageous convoys sent over the ice of Lake Ladoga could not always get through the German siege. But malnutrition and disease affected all urban areas; and houses demolished by artillery and bombing from the air were not replaced; sanitation was ruined. Precious few families escaped the loss of loved ones: even Stalin’s son Yakov was killed by the Germans.
In the countryside it was mainly old women and men judged unfit for military conscription who worked on the farms. Most of the twelve million military volunteers and conscripts came from the villages;28 and appeals were made also for able-bodied men and women to enter industrial employment so that the factory labour- force increased by a third between 1942 and 1945.29 The consequence was a further depopulation of the countryside. Not only that: the tractor drivers who were needed for the maintenance of large-scale arable cultivation were among the earliest lads to be pressed into the Red Army. The technical core of collective farms imploded; whole rural areas collapsed to a level of production insufficient to meet the subsistence requirements of the villages. On farms in the vicinity of the military fronts there was usually total devastation. Homes, byres and barns were bombed into oblivion, and it was common for peasants to live out the war sheltering in holes in the ground.30
So whence came this capacity to endure and resist? The answer cannot lie only with the industrial might and organizational efficiency of the regime, even when allowance is made for the informal institutional patterns and the modified policies that enhanced performance. What was crucial was the reaction of countless millions of Soviet citizens to the news of what was going on in the vast area of the USSR currently under German occupation. Above all, they learned that the policies of Hitler were even more ghastly than those of Stalin. They learned that defeat by the German forces would bring about consequences of almost unimaginable horror.
Thus the Gestapo and Wehrmacht had the task of killing every Jew and Gypsy. Captured communist party members were to be summarily executed. There was piteous slaughter at Babi Yar in Ukraine where 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned to death over the edge of a ravine; and around the town of Cherkessk alone there were ‘twenty-four vast pits filled with the corpses of men, women and children tortured and shot by the German monsters’.31 Further millions of people — Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians — were deported to labour camps such as Auschwitz where all but very few met their deaths through brutal labour, starvation and beatings. The author of
Not all governments in the eastern half of Europe were simply victims of German oppression. Hungary and Romania, albeit under pressure from Berlin, provided contingents for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler also gave favoured status to Croats in what had been pre-war Yugoslavia; and the Germans encouraged Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers to form SS units that sought revenge for their sufferings at Stalin’s hands. The Wehrmacht was warmly received, too, further south. Ukrainian peasants offered bread and salt as a traditional sign of welcome to their invaders in the hope that Hitler would break up the collective farms and abolish the state quotas for grain deliveries.
In fact the Ostministerium, which Hitler established to govern the territory seized from the USSR, refused to de-nationalize the collective farms and large industrial enterprises but instead transferred them into the property of the Third Reich.33 But other concessions were forthcoming. Elections were held to local administrative posts. German officials held such functionaries under ruthless control, but at least a semblance of self-administration existed for some months. In addition, former entrepreneurs could apply for licences to run their workshops and cafes again: small-scale private business was restored to the economy.34 The Ostministerium also authorized the reopening of churches. In contrast to the Soviet authorities, the Germans prevented the re-emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and gave preference to Ukrainian and Belorussian denominations (although these, too, were highly restricted in their public activities).35 Thus the Ostministerium endeavoured to alleviate the tasks of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front.
Initially collaborators were not hard to find. Many deportees and ex-prisoners were persuadable to work for the Nazis. For example, a policeman called Noga from Prokovskoe district in southern Ukraine enthusiastically informed on ‘the people who interested the Germans’. Noga, having served out six years of Siberian exile, eagerly took his chance to beat a captured partisan to death.36 Plenty of such persons volunteered their services to the German occupiers; and inhabitants of the western provinces of Ukraine and Belorussia (which had recently been annexed to the USSR) deserted the Red Army in large numbers.37 In December 1941 Hitler sanctioned the recruitment of volunteer military units from among the non-Slav nationalities. The Turkestani, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Tatar and North Caucasian legions were quickly formed. Even a Cossack unit came into existence since Hitler’s racial theorists rejected the incontrovertible fact that the Cossacks were descended from runaway Russian peasants and from Russian soldiers who had completed their military service.
Most of the conquered peoples soon learned by direct experience that one of three destinies had been planned for them: execution; deportation for forced labour; or starvation. In the kolkhozes the German delivery quotas were raised even above the levels imposed by Stalin before 1941. Field-Marshal Reichenau implacably explained to the Wehrmacht: ‘To supply local inhabitants and prisoners-of-war with food is an act of unnecessary humanity.’38
There was astonishment at the savagery ordered by Hitler. Ferocious conflicts had taken place between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the previous two centuries; but the butchery had by and large been confined to the fields of battle. The last time when Russians confronted an external enemy disposed to take hostages as a normal method of war was in the campaigns against the Chechens in the 1820s and 1830s — and the Chechens were the objects of Russian aggression, not themselves the invaders. In the 1930s it had been the unconscious assumption of Soviet politicians and ordinary citizens alike that if ever war broke out with Germany, the fighting would be no dirtier than in the First World War. They failed to anticipate that an advanced industrial society, even one that had been infected with belligerent racism, could resort to mass inhumanities on Hitler’s scale.
Resistance intensified as Hitler’s intentions became public knowledge, and the German-occupied zone was
