The nearness of death at the front had done much to remove the Stalinist conditioning of fear. Officers and soldiers had become quite outspoken, especially about their aspirations for the future. Those from rural areas wanted to do away with the collective farms. Officers, having been given primacy over the political officers in the autumn of 1942, believed that it was now time for the Soviet bureaucratic elite, the
With the approach of victory, Red Army officers had indeed started to become over-confident in the eyes of SMERSH and the NKVD. And political officers had not forgotten the insults of Red Army counterparts when they had been downgraded at the time of the battle of Stalingrad. They were also extremely concerned again by soldiers’ letters comparing conditions in Germany with those at home. Abakumov’s SMERSH was afraid of a new ‘Decembrist’ mood among officers.
The Soviet authorities were acutely aware that the soldiers of the Russian army which had invaded France in 1814 compared life there with their miserable existence at home. ‘At that time,’ one report explained, ‘the influence of French life was a progressive one because it gave Russian people the opportunity to see the cultural backwardness of Russia, Tsarist oppression and so forth. From this, the Decembrists [who attempted a liberal
Political departments were also horrified by the ‘anti-Soviet comments’ of soldiers complaining that their families were treated badly at home. ‘We don’t believe that life is getting better in the rear,’ one soldier is reported to have said. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’ They were also aware of how badly they had been treated themselves at the front. Some units in the Red Army came close to mutiny just before the end of the war when an instruction specified that the bodies of dead soldiers were to be stripped even of their undergarments. Only officers could be buried fully clothed. There were also apparently an increasing number of cases of unpopular officers being shot in the back by their own men.
SMERSH arrests for ‘systematic anti-Soviet talk and terroristic intentions’ increased dramatically during the last months of the war and just after the surrender. Even the chief of staff of an NKVD rifle battalion was arrested for having ‘systematically carried out counter-revolutionary propaganda among the troops’. He had ‘slandered leaders of the Party and the Soviet government’ and had praised life in Germany and ‘slandered the Soviet press’. A military tribunal of NKVD troops condemned him to eight years in Gulag labour camps.
The proportion of political arrests in the Red Army doubled from 1944 to 1945, a year when the Soviet Union was effectively at war for little more than four months. In that year of victory, no fewer than 135,056 Red Army soldiers and officers were condemned by military tribunals for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. Similarly, the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR condemned 123 senior officers in 1944 and 273 in 1945.
These figures also do not take into account the treatment of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans. On 11 May 1945, Stalin ordered that each Front should organize camps for holding ex-prisoners of war and Soviet deportees. One hundred camps holding 10,000 people each were planned. Ex-prisoners were to be ‘screened by NKVD, NKGB and SMERSH’. Of the eighty Red Army generals captured by the Wehrmacht, only thirty-seven survived until released by the Red Army. Eleven of them were then arrested by SMERSH and sentenced by tribunals of NKVD forces.
The entire repatriation process was not completed until 1 December 1946. ‘By then 5.5 million people had returned to the USSR, of which 1,833,567 had been prisoners of war.’ Over 1.5 million members of the Red Army captured by the Germans were sent either to the Gulag (339,000 of them), or to labour battalions in Siberia and the far north, which was hardly better. Civilians taken by force to Germany were ‘potential enemies of the state’ to be kept under NKVD watch. They were also forbidden to go within 100 kilometres of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, and their families remained suspect. Even as recently as 1998, declaration forms for joining a research institute in Russia still contained a section demanding whether any member of the applicant’s family had been in an ‘enemy prison camp’.
Stalin and his marshals paid little regard to the lives of their soldiers. The casualties for the three Fronts involved in the Berlin operation were extremely high, with 78,291 killed and 274,184 wounded. Russian historians now acknowledge that these needlessly high losses were partly due to the race to get to Berlin before the Western Allies and partly to packing so many armies into the assault on Berlin that they were bombarding each other.
The treatment of those mutilated when fighting for their country was equally heartless. The lucky ones had to queue ‘long hours for artificial limbs which looked like those pieces of wood on which men who lost a leg at Borodino stumped around’. But soon the authorities in the major cities decided that they did not want their streets disfigured by limbless ‘samovars’. So they were rounded up and deported. Many were sent to Belaya Zemlya in the far north as if they too were Gulag prisoners.
Anger and frustration in the Soviet Union took many forms that summer. The most appalling were vicious outbreaks of anti-Semitism. In Central Asia, Jews suddenly found themselves being attacked and beaten up in markets and schools. Local people apparently shouted, ‘Wait until our boys get back from the front, then we’ll kill all these Jews.’ The local authorities simply termed it an ‘act of hooliganism, and often [left] the crime unpunished’.
The most serious anti-Semitic outrage took place in Kiev. At the beginning of September a Jewish NKVD major was attacked in the street ‘by two anti-Semites in military uniform’. They may well have been drunk. The major finally managed to draw his pistol and shot them both. Their funerals rapidly turned into a violent demonstration. The coffins were being carried through the streets when suddenly the procession headed for the recently re-established Jewish market. On that day alone nearly 100 Jews were beaten up. Five of them were killed and another thirty-six were taken to hospital seriously injured. The unrest continued to such an extent that a permanent guard had to be placed on the Jewish market. This time not just ‘hooligans’ were blamed. Even members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine were described as ‘worthy successors’ of Goebbels. The following year, Grossman and Ehrenburg’s ‘Black Book’ on the Holocaust was removed from circulation by the authorities.
It is very hard to know how deep Stalin’s anti-Semitism ran or how much it was conditioned by his loathing for Trotsky. Partly as a result of Trotsky’s internationalism, he certainly seemed to see Jews as part of an international network and therefore suspect. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ implied treachery. This reached its peak in the anti-Semitic hysteria whipped up over the ‘Doctor’s Plot’ shortly before his death. Stalin, although a Georgian, had become something of a Russian chauvinist. Rather like other outsiders, such as Napoleon and Hitler, he wrapped himself in the national mantle. In one notorious victory speech on 24 May, he praised the Russians above all ‘the nations of the Soviet Union’ for their ‘clear mind, stamina and firm character’. This was aimed mainly at the southern non-Russian nations, many of whom were brutally deported on his orders, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. Yet Stalin, in contrast to Hitler, was essentially a practitioner of political rather than racial genocide.
While nothing was to be allowed to detract from the ‘Russian’ triumph, the Party line paid tribute to one man alone: ‘Our great genius and leader of troops, Comrade Stalin, to whom we owe our historic victory.’ Stalin had shamelessly pushed himself to the fore whenever a battle was about to be won, and had disappeared from view during any disaster, especially one of his own making. Commanders always had to acknowledge his wisdom and guiding hand. To take any credit for themselves was extremely dangerous.
Stalin became suspicious if any Soviet citizen was lauded abroad, and he must have been even more distrustful when Zhukov was praised to the skies in the American and British press. Although Stalin was afraid of Beria’s power, which he was soon to curb, he was even more concerned by the immense popularity of Zhukov and the Red Army. When Eisenhower visited the Soviet Union, Zhukov accompanied him everywhere, even flying with him to Leningrad in Eisenhower’s personal aircraft. Everywhere they went, the two great commanders received a rapturous welcome. Eisenhower later invited Zhukov and his ‘campaign wife’, Lydia Z–ova, to visit the United States, but Stalin summoned his marshal to Moscow immediately to spike this plan. It was clear to him that Zhukov had built a genuine rapport with the Allied commander-in-chief.
Zhukov, although aware of Beria’s attempts to undermine him, did not realize that the main threat came from Stalin’s jealousy. In the middle of June in Berlin, Zhukov was asked about the death of Hitler at a press conference.
