never free from military conflict. Even in many areas where non-Russians were the majority of the population and where the Wehrmacht had initially been welcomed, there was a spirit of defiance. Groups of armed men formed themselves in the woods and made sporadic attacks on German armed units. By mid-1942 there were 100,000 partisans active against the Wehrmacht.39 German soldiers and airmen could never forget that they were detested by local inhabitants determined to see the back of them and to push a bayonet between their shoulder-blades for good measure. The student Zoya Kosmodeyanskaya was hailed as a national heroine. Captured by the Germans after setting fire to their billets in the village of Petrishchenko, she was tortured and hanged. On the scaffold she called out defiantly: ‘German soldiers, give yourselves up before it’s too late!’40
Yet even where the partisans had minor successes, terrible retaliation was effected upon nearby towns and villages. The Wehrmacht and the SS applied a rule that a hundred local inhabitants, usually randomly selected, would be shot in reaction to every killing of a German soldier. The result was that the Soviet partisan groups did not cause decisive damage to German power even when, from 1943, munitions and guidance started to reach them from Moscow.
In practical terms, then, it was the attitude to the war taken by civilians and soldiers in Soviet-held territory that was the crucial component of the USSR’s victory. They had quickly understood what was in store for them if Hitler were to win. They got their information from conversations with refugees, soldiers and partisans as well as from the mass media. Reporters such as Vasili Grossman, who was at double risk as a Jew and a communist party member, travelled to the front areas, and the facts as discovered by them were so terrible that the newspapers were allowed to reveal them without the usual official distortions. The regime, moreover, had the sense not to over-fill the press with eulogies to Stalin, Marxism-Leninism and the October Revolution. Only after the battle of Kursk, when it was already clear that the Red Army was likely to win the war, was the ‘cult’ of the great Stalin resumed in its pre-war devoutness.41
There was always an abundance of volunteers to join the Red Army. The war gave many people who were deeply dissatisfied with the Soviet regime a reason at last for co-operating with the authorities.42 This was especially noticeable among refugees whose minds burned with the ambition to fight their way back to their home towns and villages to rescue their families before it was too late.43 Thus the hostility caused by Stalin’s policies since the late 1920s could, at least to some extent, be put into suspension. The will to beat the Germans had a unifying effect.
Militant patriotism was in the air. Russians in particular acquired a more intense sense of nationhood as millions of them came together as soldiers and factory workers. Many other peoples of the USSR, furthermore, displayed the same toughness and resilience. All drew upon reserves of endurance associated with a life-style that, by the standards of industrial societies in western Europe, was already extraordinarily harsh. The Civil War, the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror had habituated Soviet citizens to making the best of an extremely bad lot: hunger, disease, low wages, poor shelter and state violence had been recurrent features in the lives of most of them. Their material expectations were low even in the good times. The difference in 1941 was that the torment originated from without rather than within the country. This time it was a foreign Fuhrer, not a Soviet General Secretary, who was the source of their woes.
The genocidal intent of Nazism impelled both Russians and the other peoples living in the regions unoccupied by the Wehrmacht to put up the sternest defence. If it had not been for Hitler’s fanatical racism, the USSR would not have won the struggle on the Eastern front. Stalin’s repressiveness towards his own citizens would have cost him the war against Nazi Germany, and the post-war history of the Soviet Union and the world would have been fundamentally different.
PART THREE
15
The Hammers of Peace
(1945–1953)
The compound of the Soviet order had been put under an excruciating test from abroad and had survived. Not only was Stalin still in power but also the one-party, one-ideology state was intact. There also remained a state-owned economy orientated towards the production of industrial capital goods and armaments. The mechanisms of the police state were in place; and, as before, it was not even a police state where due process of law was respected.
Yet there were features of the Soviet compound that had proved their ineffectiveness during the war even from a pragmatic viewpoint. Political, economic, national, social and cultural difficulties were acute. In the subsequent twenty-five years the political leaders tried various answers. Stalin simply reimposed the pre-war version of the compound and crushed any hopes of incipient change. His successors under Khrushchev tried to remove certain elements in a campaign of reforms. But Khrushchev introduced deep instabilities and fellow leaders came to regard his policies and techniques as a threat to the regime’s long-term durability. After sacking him, they attempted to conserve the compound by policies which trimmed the commitment to reform. All these changes, furthermore, were made while Soviet leaders wrestled with problems of geo-politics, technological modernization, popular indoctrination and their own power and its legitimization as a group and as individuals. Their constant quest was to conserve the compound in a manner that suited their interests.
For the world in 1945 had changed beyond retrieval since 1939. Adolf Hitler had shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Benito Mussolini had been hanged by Italian partisans and Hideki Tojo was awaiting trial before American judges. German, Italian and Japanese racist militarism had been shattered. The USA, the USSR and the United Kingdom had emerged as the Big Three in global power.
It was they who established the United Nations in October 1945. Without the Big Three, no major international project could be brought to completion. Britain had incurred huge financial debts to the Americans in the Second World War and already was a junior partner in her relationship with them. The crucial rivalry was therefore between the Big Two, the USA and the USSR, a rivalry which at times threatened to turn into all-out military conflict. Fortunately the Third World War did not break out; and the American-Soviet rivalry, while constituting a constant danger to global peace, became known as the Cold War. Global capitalism confronted global communism. President Harry S Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, was determined to assert the superiority of free markets and electoral politics over the Soviet system; but the likelihood of capitalism’s eventual victory in this struggle was far from being self-evident.
Multitudes of people in the USSR and Eastern Europe detested communist government, and there was no paucity of commentary in the West about Stalin. The horrors of his rule were vividly described by journalists and diplomats. Quickly the admiration of the USSR for its decisive contribution to the defeat of Hitler gave way to revulsion from the policies and practices of the Soviet regime after 1945.
Yet the Soviet Union of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin continued to attract a degree of approval. It still seemed to many observers that the USSR served as a model for enabling the emergence of industrial, literate societies out of centuries of backwardness. Central state planning had acquired global respect during the war. But whereas most countries with capitalist economies tended to restrict such planning after 1945, the USSR persisted with it on the grounds that it obviated the social evils characteristic of the West. Unemployment did not exist in the USSR. Among
