Myths and Legends of the Eastern Front: Reassessing the Great Patriotic War

By Boris Sokolov and Richard W. Harrison

“This English translation of the original Russian work is thought provoking, challenging the ‘official’ version of what happened” during World War II (Firetrench).

The memory of the Second World War on the Eastern Front—still referred to in modern Russia as the Great Patriotic War—is an essential element of Russian identity and history, as alive today as it was in Stalin’s time. It is represented as a defining episode, a positive historical myth that sustains the Russian national idea and unites the majority of Russian citizens.

As a result, as Boris Sokolov shows in this powerful and thought-provoking study, the heroic and tragic side of the war is highlighted while the dark side—the incompetent, negligent and even criminal way the war was run—is overlooked. Although almost eighty years have passed since the defeat of Nazi Germany, he demonstrates that many of the fabrications put forward during the war and immediately afterwards persist into the present day.

In a sequence of incisive chapters he uncovers the truth about famous wartime episodes that have been consistently misrepresented. His bold reinterpretation should go some way towards dispelling the enduring myths about the Great Patriotic War. It is necessary reading for anyone who is keen to understand how it continues to be distorted in Russia today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526742278

Boris Sokolov

Dr. Boris Sokolov is a prolific author and a member of PEN International, which celebrates literature and promotes freedom of expression. In 2008, he was forced to resign from his post at the Russian State Social University after publishing an article about the Russian-Georgian War. His work has focused on WW2 and biographies of prominent military and political leaders.

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Translator’s Introduction

The study contains a number of terms that may not be readily understandable to the casual reader of military history. Therefore, I have adopted a number of conventions designed to ease this task. For example, major Soviet field formations (i.e., Western Front) are spelled out in full, as are similar German formations (i.e., Army Group South). Soviet armies are designated using the shortened form (i.e., 38th Army). German armies, on the other hand, are spelled out in full (i.e., Eighteenth Army). In the same vein, Soviet corps are designated by Arabic numerals (1st Guards Cavalry Corps), while the same German units are denoted by Roman numerals (e.g., VII Army Corps). Smaller units (divisions, brigades, etc.) on both sides are denoted by Arabic numerals only (7th Guards Cavalry Division, 255th Infantry Division, etc.).

Given the large number of units appearing here, I have adopted certain other conventions in order to better distinguish them. For example, Soviet armoured units are called tank corps, brigades, etc., while the corresponding German units are denoted by the popular term panzer. Likewise, Soviet infantry units are designated by the term rifle, while the corresponding German units are simply referred to as infantry.

Elsewhere, a front is a Soviet wartime military organization roughly corresponding to an American army group. Throughout the narrative the reader will encounter such names as the Western Front and Soutwestern fronts, etc. To avoid confusion with the more commonly understood meaning of the term front (i.e., the front line), italics will be used to denote an unnamed front.

The work subscribes to no particular transliteration scheme, because no entirely satisfactory one exists. I have adopted a mixed system that uses the Latin letters ya and yu to denote their Cyrillic counterparts, as opposed to the ia and iu employed by the Library of Congress, which tends to distort proper pronunciation. Conversely, I have retained the Library of Congress’s ii ending (i.e., Tukhachevskii), as opposed to the commonly used y ending. I have also retained the apostrophe to denote the Cyrillic soft sign.

The work contains endnotes by the author. They have been supplemented by a number of appropriately identified editor’s notes, which have been inserted as an explanatory guide for a number of terms that might not be readily understandable to the foreign reader.

Preface

The famous American historian Anne Applebaum rightly believes that in modern Russia ‘the ruling class considers itself the heir of the Soviet system’.¹ As a result, the Great Patriotic War is becoming the centre of a Russian-Soviet identity and in a variant only slightly updated from the Soviet myth. It is only this period of twentieth-century history that up until now has remained a positive historical myth. Victory in the Great Patriotic War is the sole event of the last century, in the positive perception of which the overwhelming majority of Russian citizens are united. This is the single component part of the Russian national idea that the current powers can offer to the people. And for the sake of preserving this idea, which is almost the single foundation of the Russian identity, practically the entire period of the Second World War has to be shifted beyond the bounds of historical science, leaving it exclusively within the power of political mythology.

The history of the Great Patriotic War is viewed only as a weapon of political propaganda. Only those events are taken which may be interpreted in a heroic key, not excluding, for example, the tragic events of the war’s beginning. However, in history there is not only the heroic and tragic, but the low, foul, criminal, and shameful as well. When such themes have to be addressed, they only mention them and, as far as possible, try to justify the actions of the Red Army, the Soviet people, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders. After all, respect for the traditions of preceding generations in Russia is first of all respect for totalitarian and authoritarian traditions, insofar there were almost no others in the history of Russia and the USSR.

The main component parts of the great heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War, which remains to this day, are as follows:

1. Soviet foreign policy during 1939–41 was not expansionist and was directed exclusively at securing its own security: the USSR was not preparing to attack Germany.

2. The Red Army’s losses in the war were comparable in size to those of the Wehrmacht ; in 1941–2 Soviet losses were greater than the Germans’, and in 1943–5, when the Red Army had learned how to fight, the Germans lost more than the Soviet forces, not only in captured, but in killed as well, so that on average the irreplaceable losses of both sides during the war were almost equal to each other.

3. The Soviet Union made the decisive contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany and was capable of winning even without the aid of the Western Allies.

All of these myths are quite easy to refute in an objective study of the history of 1939–45. The basic conclusions of this book boil down to the following: Stalin’s Soviet Union could fight and win only at the price of great losses. In principle, it could not be otherwise.

The Red Army fought much worse than the Wehrmacht throughout the war.² Thus even at the end of 1944 and in 1945, given a more or less bearable correlation of forces, the German forces inflicted tactical defeats on the Soviet troops, although this did not have any influence on the overall strategic situation, which was unfavorable for Germany.

The USSR’s ‘decisive contribution’ to the victory over Germany manifested itself only in the enormous size of Soviet irreplaceable losses, which exceeded the losses of all the war’s other participants taken together. However, this is a highly doubtful subject for pride, in that it is the consequence of the Stalinist strategy of ‘burying them with corpses’. Yes, the German ground forces really did suffer the greatest losses on the Soviet-German front. However, the decisive role in the war of this or that country can only be determined according to the principle of whether this or that country could have won without the participation of its allies. The Soviet Union, as we are convinced, could not have won without the support of the British Empire and the USA. And could the Western Allies have won if the Red Army had suffered a heavy defeat in 1942 or 1944? Yes, they could have, but only by employing the atomic bomb against Germany.

Stalin and his generals and marshals simply buried the enemy with corpses. They did not know how to fight otherwise. Stalin did not need a professional army in which he saw a threat to his absolute power. The Soviet dictator preferred a poorly trained militia that would bury the enemy with corpses.

The Soviet Union during the Second World War was neither an economically advanced country nor an innocent victim of aggression. And for the Soviet peoples the great victory was only a great tragedy. To admit to this is extremely difficult for the Russian sense of consciousness, insofar as Russians, as well as the other Soviet peoples, were single-mindedly taught the opposite over the course of several decades.

And without the help of the Western Allies, who not only delivered critically vitally strategic materials, fuel and munitions to the USSR, but who destroyed the main part of the Luftwaffe and the Germany navy, and who during the final year of the war diverted upon themselves up to 40 per cent of the German ground forces, the Red Army would not have won.³ It is not by accident that the Wehrmacht began to suffer the greatest losses on the Eastern Front precisely during the last year of the war, following the Alied landing in Normandy, when the Germans began to be catastrophically short of men for waging war on two fronts and the Soviet superiority in men and materiel became truly overwhelming. This factor of overwhelming superiority annulled the circumstance that the quality of the Soviet armed forces during 1941–5, contrary to widespread opinion, not only did not improve, but quite the opposite, became continually worse. The cadre Red Army, which had been more or less trained to fight, had been practically completely destroyed before the end of 1941. The last cadre formations, which were transferred from Siberia and the Far East, perished at the very end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942. They were replaced by a militia, which they hardly trained to fight before the very end of the war. A similar worsening of the quality of the rank and file took place among the Germans, but significantly more slowly, so that the Wehrmacht’s irreplaceable losses were of an order less than in the Red Army. And it was namely following the landing in Normandy that the correlation of Soviet and German losses significantly worsened, although all the way up to Nazi Germany’s capitulation it remained in favour of the Germans. It is simply that from the second half of 1944, aside from the establishment of Soviet air superiority and the overwhelming Soviet superiority in tanks, the Red Army’s superiority in ground forces became even more overwhelming – seven to eight times in the combat units. The Germans could no longer withstand such pressure.

There is still another important conclusion, which one must take into account in studying the history of the Second World War, which is that Stalin was an equal architect of the Second World War alongside Hitler. One could not have planned and realized this enormous tragedy in the history of mankind without the other. The essential difference between them was that Hitler emerged among the vanquished, while Stalin emerged among the victors, and thus was able to impose upon the global community his picture of the war, at least on the Eastern Front, and this picture was only slightly modernized by his successors and remains dominant in both Russian historical science and Russian society. In accordance with this concept, the Soviet Union in 1939–40 did not carry out any expansionist plans and did not seek to attack Germany, and that all annexations that arose from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were carried out exclusively for supporting its security and repelling a future German invasion.⁴ It is also necessary to keep in mind that many Soviet feats, which were forcefully circulated by Soviet propaganda in the war and postwar years, either had no place in reality or were in no way performed in the way they were written about in Soviet books and newspapers.

However, these and other tenets are now being declared in Russia a falsification of history, harmful to Russian interests. In reality, the powers that be are reestablishing through forcible means the Soviet picture of the war, moreover in the harshest Stalinist variant. Against all facts, Stalinist foreign policy and the Stalinist manner of waging war are being fully justified. And a flawed picture of the history of the Great Patriotic War only facilitates Russia’s cultural and political isolation.

The subject of Soviet military crimes, carried out by the Red Army both during the concluding stage of the Great Patriotic War in the countries of Eastern Europe and in Germany, as well as in Asian countries during the brief Soviet-Japanese War, remains absolutely taboo.⁵ At the same time, this unattractive part of the war’s history is also important for the comprehension of the history of the Great Patriotic War and the recognition of the fact that in this regard the people also have reason to repent.

Three kinds of documents most accurately reflect the real operational situation in the USSR during the years of the Great Patriotic War. These are, first of all, the wire conversations of the Stavka of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief with the commanders of the fronts and armies and with the Stavka representatives at the front headquarters.⁶ Stalin often conducted these conversations himself from Moscow, or he entrusted them to the chief of the General Staff. Iosif Vissarionovich did not mince words and demanded that they report the entire truth to him, while the commanders were afraid to lie to him to his face. As regards reports and operational summaries, which the commanders at various levels dispatched upward, from company to front, these reports were first of all designed to justify the actions of their authors, to cover up mistakes and miscalculations, to underestimate their own losses and to inordinately exaggerate the enemy’s losses, while as the information reached the higher headquarters these tendencies manifested themselves even more noticeably. They often failed to communicate the abandonment of important inhabited locales for days at a time in the hope that they would still be able to win them back, the scale of enemy breakthroughs was minimized, while, just the opposite, one’s own successes were exaggerated. As a result, the Stavka lacked an objective picture of what was happening at the front, where at times the situation would radically change in mere hours and it was unable to adopt the correct decisions. Thus, from the beginning of the war the General Staff sent its representatives to the front and army headquarters (in 1943 they even appeared in corps and even some division headquarters). Their chief task was to inform the General Staff and the Stavka of the true state of affairs. Although the General Staff’s representatives did not directly bear responsibility for the course and outcome of combat operations, they answered with their head for the veracity of the reports sent up the chain of command. Thus, their information was sufficiently objective. However, the overwhelming majority of these reports remain classified and unpublished. Besides this, Stalin judged the situation at the front by the reports of the special sections (from 1943 these were known as SMERSH military counterintelligence sections).⁷ They were obliged to report not only about the fight against spies and diversionists, but about the overall situation at the front as well. And in those parts dealing with combat operations these reports are, for the most part, truthful, insofar as the SMERSH workers bore no responsibility for the course of combat operations. However, when they wrote about purely ‘Chekist’ affairs, then these reports at times remind one of the tales of Scheherazade, although quite sad ones.⁸ The SMERSH workers, in order to fulfill the plan for catching spies, often arrested and shot completely innocent people.

The special section reports are mainly stored either in the Stavka files, or in the FSB archives, and for the most part are not accessible to researchers.⁹ Materials of the special commissions for the investigation of certain of the Red Army’s major failures, which were created by a decision of the Stavka (Stalin, to be exact) and the GKO also have great importance for studying the history of the Great Patriotic War.¹⁰ Some of these were gathering dust in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History and to one degree or another are available to researchers. Others, as before, are stored in the Presidential Archive, which is practically closed to historians, including documents of the Molotov commission, which investigated the circumstances of the Western Front’s disaster in October 1941, and the Malenkov commission, which studied the circumstances of the Soviet forces’ failure during the tank battle at Prokhorovka in July 1943.¹¹ The Presidential Archive and the General Staff’s Military Memorial Centre evidently also contain the main documents of the Stavka of the VGK, only a small portion of which may be found in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. And without the operational planning documents it is impossible to judge just how effectively they were carried out and to what extent they achieved their assigned objectives. Here we often have to rely on the memoirs by generals and marshals, from whom it is difficult to expect objectivity, as they are interested parties.

For some reason it is believed that it is impossible to hide historical truth in the archives, as if important information is so often repeated that even the opening of a part and, even more so, the majority of archival holdings allow researchers, given a bit of skill and experience, to get hold of the necessary information. Yes and no. If one is speaking of social history, about researching the state of the economy, society and everyday life, and even the mores of various strata of society, not excluding the highest ruling circles, then such work requires great masses of documents and generalizations garnered on the basis of their study. Here the secrecy of these documents truly, in principle, cannot hinder the researcher and fundamentally influence the conclusions drawn.

However, it is quite a different situation when considering more traditional political history, with which history began as a science. After quantitative methods achieved significant successes in history, the most scientific parts of historical science began to be considered, economic, socio-economic and social history, not only in Russia, but in the world at large. Political history, to which the entire historical process was once reduced, and which as early as the second half of the nineteenth century was unconditionally the ‘queen’ of the historical sciences, is today, if not in exile, at least playing second fiddle. It is no longer fashionable and political history has begun to be viewed as a sort of intertwining and collision of subjective wills, behind which we can discern no kind of clear regularities, as well as a collection of these and other examples, which are employed for various reasons for substantiating these or other ideological, historical, political, philosophical, or ethical concepts, or for the purpose of adapting them to modern political needs. But the belittling of political history can be seen as completely pointless. After all, it also has its regularities, although of course it lacks postulated Marxist laws. However, we really will not find regularities either in economic or social history. And attempts to find certain regularities in the events of political history are not only worth it, but very necessary in order to understand many processes taking place in the social and economic sphere. For political decisions most decidedly influence them and to understand why this or that political decision is adopted, why one political force replaces another and which decisions are characteristic to a greater degree to one or another political forces, it is necessary to properly familiarize oneself with the socio-economic problems of history and contemporaneity.

No small amount of this book about the Eastern Front during the Second World War is devoted to quantitative indices of human losses, troop strengths and data on the production of various types of industrial and agricultural items, although political and purely military history is not neglected either.

One should emphasize that in no other country do they call the Second World War either Great or Patriotic, nor do they block out the years of their participation in the Second World War into a separate war. In the USA, for example, no one would ever take it upon themsleves to speak of some sort of Great American War from 7 December 1941 to 2 September 1945. And in order that the war always remains in Russia Great and Patriotic, it must be preserved in the social consciousness in the form of a great heroic myth. And the gradual constricting of access to Soviet archives is required, first of all, to preserve just this myth. Sometimes this myth leads to absurdity. For example, in all honesty, it is not clear which is correct – ‘Leningrad, the hero-city’ or ‘Saint Petersburg, the hero-city’. In essence, both of these word combinations sound absurd. In the first case, it transpires that we are speaking of a city that has not existed on the map since 1991. In the second case, we are speaking of a real and existing city, which was, however, not known by this name during that period when the events took place, in connection with which it received the title of hero-city.

During the conduct of his research, the moral evaluation of the object of his study should not worry the researcher, whether we are speaking of history or physics. Of course, it does not occur to anyone to think about a moral evaluation of physics. No one will assess an atom or electron from the point of view of morality. But the thought of the moral appraisal of the object of his study occurs to the historian almost all the time. And it is very difficult for him to step back from the positive or negative evaluation of this or that historical event or historical figure accepted in society, and this influences in a most negative way the objectivity of his study. At the same time, a moral consideration of events and personages, of course, can and should be given, but only upon completing the research, according to its results.

Stalin was the same kind of dictator and aggressor as Hitler. And the Red Army, just like the Wehrmacht, seized foreign territories, even before the German attack. And in 1944–5, when the Red Army entered Eastern Europe, while liberating its peoples from the Nazi yoke, it either once again annexed these territories, or imposed puppet communist regimes there. However, the Wehrmacht, in liberating Soviet territory from communist power, established there the Nazis’ ‘new order’, transforming them into German colonies. The only difference was that Stalin ended up in the camp of the victors and Hitler completely lost the war.

Chapter 1

The Origins of the Second World War

The Role of Hitler and Stalin in its Outbreak. The Soviet Occupation of Eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. The ‘Winter War’ with Finland

Having signed the Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939 and the corresponding secret protocols to it, Stalin and Hitler embarked upon the path of unleashing the Second World War. Actually, the USSR entered the war on 17 September 1939, when the Red Army, without a declaration of war, invaded Polish territory and occupied Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia and the Vilnius corridor. The Soviet Union entered the war as an aggressor. The occupation of the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and the attack on Finland were also acts of aggression.

Winston Churchill thus evaluated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the secret protocols to it:

only totalitarian despotism in both countries could have faced the odium of such an unnatural act. It is a question whether Hitler or Stalin loathed it most. Both were aware that it could only be a temporary expedient. The antagonisms between the two empires and systems were mortal. Stalin no doubt felt that Hitler would be a less deadly foe to Russia after a year of war with the Western Powers. Hitler followed his method of ‘One at a time.’ [. . .]

On the Soviet side it must be said that their vital need was to hold the deployment positions of the German armies as far to the west as possible so as to give the Russians more time for assembling their forces from all parts of their immense empire. They had burnt in their minds the disasters which had come upon their armies in 1914, when they had hurled themselves forward to attack the Germans while still themselves only partly mobilised. But now their frontiers lay far to the east of those of the previous war. They must be in occupation of the Baltic States and a large part of Poland by force or fraud before they were attacked. If their policy was coldblooded, it was also at the moment realistic in a high degree. [. . .]

This treaty was to last ten years, and if not denounced by either side one year before the expiration of that period, would be automatically extended for another five years. There was much jubilation and many toasts around the conference table. Stalin spontaneously proposed the toast of the Fuhrer, as follows, ‘I know how much the German Nation loves its Fuhrer, I should therefore like to drink his health.’ A moral may be drawn from all this, which is of homely simplicity – ‘Honesty is the best policy.’ [. . .] Crafty men and statesmen will be shown misled by all their elaborate calculations. But this is the signal instance. Only twenty-two months were to pass before Stalin and the Russian nation in its scores of millions were to pay a frightful forfeit. If a government has no moral scruples, it often seems to gain great advantages and liberties of action, but ‘All comes out even at the end of the day, and all will come out yet more even when all the days are ended’.¹

The war was viewed by the armies and peoples of all the belligerent states as a patriotic war, that is, a war in defence of one’s homeland, regardless of whether they had to fight on their own or someone else’s territory. Thus, it is more correct to speak of the Second World War and not of a patriotic war of this or that people. And who was the aggressor and who was the victim was determined by the policy of the governments of the corresponding states. The undisputed aggressors were Germany, the USSR, Italy, Hungary, Japan, and Siam (Thailand). The just as undisputed victims of aggression, if one picks only the period of the Second World War, remain Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Great Britain, the USA, China (the Japanese attacked the latter as early as 1937), Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. And some peoples were aggressors and victims. The first among these were the Finns. In 1939 they became the victim of Soviet aggression and in 1941 fought against the USSR together with Hitler in order to return the lands seized following the ‘Winter War’.² One may understand the Finns, but the fact that they fought against one aggressor in alliance with another aggressor made them participants in aggression. Romania, from which Stalin in 1940 seized Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, was in the same situation, which roused Romania to a joint campaign with Hitler against the USSR.³ However, the Ukrainians also appear as victims and as part of the aggressor’s army, although because they lacked their own state they can in no way be viewed as participants in aggression, either Soviet or German. In 1939 those Ukrainians who lived in Poland became victims of German and Soviet aggression. However, the majority of Ukrainians were part of the Red Army, which seized Eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina, and then unsuccessfully tried to seize all of Finland. The same sort of duality was characteristic of all the Soviet peoples, not excluding the Russian people. Having become the victim of German aggression, they at the same time carried out aggression against other peoples as part of the Red Army and the Soviet punitive organs. They try not to speak of this in contemporary Russia, presenting the USSR as the main victim of German aggression and the Russian people the main author of victory.

If one objectively compares the Soviet and Nazi regimes, then they have much more in common than what separates them. The domination of one dictator, one party and one ideology, imposed on the entire population of a country. The complete absence of any kind of democratic freedoms. Cruel repressions against the political enemies of the regime and all who are suspected of political disloyalty, as well as against all those national and social groups of the population declared as inferior. An aggressive foreign policy, directed at the achievement of hegemony in Europe. All of these points of contact are sufficient to ponder; was the victory of such a regime in the Second World War really so good, and is there anything here to celebrate? There were also differences between the regimes, although the points of contact are more important for us here. In evaluating Soviet policy during 1939–41, one cannot help but recognize its aggressive character, which was expressed, in particular, in the attack on Finland and the occupation and annexation of the three Baltic countries. Russian diplomats still do not employ the word ‘occupation’ in their conversations with their colleagues from these countries, preferring to speak of the ‘peaceful attachment’ of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to the USSR. And Russian historians, or at least those who work in the official structures of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are strictly forbidden to employ the term ‘occupation’ in regard to Soviet actions in the Baltic States, about which some of them honestly admitted in striving for an objective evaluation of the events of 1939–41. At the same time, if one compares the introduction of Soviet forces into the Baltic States and their subsequent attachment to the Soviet Union with the German ‘peaceful occupation’ (without combat operations) of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Luxembourg, then it transpires that there are no practical differences between them. It is interesting that in the joint Russian-German textbook, The History of Germany, which was published in 2008, it is directly stated that ‘On 12 March 1938 German troops occupied Austria. A true terror was unleashed within the country against all political enemies.’ And here it is emphasized that following these events ‘the term Anschluss acquired the meaning of the forcible seizure of territory’.⁴ If one inserts in the place of Austria one of the Baltic States, and ‘March 1938’ with ‘June 1940,’ then one doesn’t even have to change the phrase about terror against political opponents.

Of course, there were differences between the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian systems, although it’s impossible to say that they were ones of principle and touched upon their attitude toward the values of European civilization. Nazism stressed more the racial principle, and communism the class principle. In cases of necessity, however, Hitler carried out repressions of communists and social democrats, or, for example, Catholics, while Stalin repressed entire ‘punished peoples,’ struggled against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and during the Great Terror executed representatives of ‘particularly unreliable’ nationalities, for example, Germans and Poles in the course of the NKVD’s ‘national operations’.⁵ And if one is to speak of the closeness to European civilization, then even under Hitler Germany remained significantly closer to its standards. Nazi totalitarianism did not destroy the market economy and private property and did not introduce such harsh limitations, as in the USSR, on the activity of Christian churches. From the point of view of the quality of armaments production, military equipment and the armed forces’ level of military training, Germany was significantly superior to the Soviet Union and in this sphere, undoubtedly, relied on the achievements of European civilization in military affairs. In this regard, czarist Russia was sufficiently backward, which manifested itself in the First World War. But practically everything that Nazi Germany was charged with at Nuremberg could also be laid at the feet of the Soviet Union of that time.⁶

At first the population of the territories occupied by Stalin did not exhibit any sort of hostility toward the Soviet forces. However, several months of the ‘communist paradise’, with its forcible collectivization, the shuttering of churches, a consumer goods deficit, and repressions against the intelligentsia and representatives of the propertied classes radically changed the situation.⁷ For example, in Northern Bukovina many sought to run away to Romania, and not only Romanians, but ethnic Ukrainians as well, although they came up against Soviet border guards on their way. On 1 April 1941 the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, reported to Stalin:⁸

Part of the peasants from the four closest villages in the Chernovtsy Oblast’s Glibokoe District left for the district centre of Glybokoe with the demand that they be sent to Romania. The crowd numbered about a thousand people, predominantly men. In the middle of the day on 1 April the crowd entered the village of Glybokoe and went up to the NKVD district building, while many carried crosses and a single white banner (which, the participants of this procession explained, was supposed to symbolise their peaceful intentions). The following sign was glued to one of the crosses: ‘Behold, brothers, these are the same crosses that the Red Army soldiers broke.’ The crowd’s participants were not seen to have any weapons. After they explained to them at the district NKVD building the illegality of such a gathering and demanded that the people disperse, the crowd melted away . . . The chief of the State Security Administration ordered the arrest of the instigators, which was done today at night.

Two days ago several groups of peasants came to the district executive building in the Storozhinets border district with the same demand. It transpired that they had been instigated by kulaks and Guardists [members of the ‘Iron Guard’ fascist organization, B.S.].⁹ The identified instigators in the Storozhinets district have been arrested . . .

At about 7 p.m. a crowd of 500–600 people in the Glybokoe area attempted to break through to Romania. The border guards opened fire. As a result, according to preliminary data, about 50 people were killed and wounded, and the remainder ran away. No one broke through over the border.

Iosif Vissarionovich was quite satisfied by the fact that no one ran away to Romania, but on 2 April he criticized Nikita Sergeevich a little in a comradely fashion: ‘Overall, it is clear from your message that your work in the frontier areas is going very poorly. One can, of course, shoot at people, but shooting is not the main method of our work.’¹⁰ In this instance it’s sufficient to arrest the ‘instigators’, and then perhaps you don’t need to shoot anyone. On the whole, however, the task facing Khrushchev and his subordinates was a very difficult one. It was necessary to convince the Ukrainian and Romanian peasants that in ‘boyar’ Romania, where landowners in the usual sense of the word were no more, and where the state took only the smaller part of the harvest, it was harder to make a living than under the Soviets, when they took almost the entire harvest.

The Russian historians Lev Lopukhovskii and Boris Kavalerchik admit:

Despite all the attempts to more broadly inculcate German methods of training and German tactics into the Red Army, the results achieved were somewhat different than in the Reichswehr.¹¹ The difference between the two armies was too great and in the human material from which they were created, and in their equipment, and in their living conditions and work. In his summary report on his study in Germany, Uborevich wrote about this sufficiently frankly:¹² ‘German specialists, including the military ones, stand immeasurably above us.’ None the less, the positive effect on the RKKA from the prewar Soviet-German military cooperation is difficult to overestimate.¹³

Stalin, as did Hitler, wanted to create a multi-million combat-effective army in a short time. At the same time, the USSR, unlike Germany, was not constricted by any limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, and in 1935, when Hitler set about to openly remilitarize Germany, the Red Army already numbered 930,000 men, equipped with tanks and heavy artillery, and combat aircraft and submarines, that is, everything that Hitler still lacked.¹⁴ During 1930–3 9,224 aircraft and 7,865 tanks and tankettes were built in the USSR. The Reichswehr at the time numbered 240,000 men, and by the end of 1933 it disposed of eight training tanks without turrets.¹⁵

However, having maintained right up until 1941 a quantitative advantage in men and weapons and not being too inferior to the main potential enemy in the quality of armaments and combat equipment, the Red Army could not compare with the Wehrmacht in the quality of combat training of its troops and commanders and therefore lost the main battles in the first year of the war.

It should be noted that the Red Army grew even more rapidly than the Wehrmacht. During 1935–8 its strength rose almost four times, to 3.5 million men. However, at the same time the level of training, both of individual soldiers and commanders, as well as of entire units and formations, fell considerably because of the low quality of the NCO contingent and commanders at the platoon – company – battalion level.

The difference in the educational level of the two countries’ population also told. In 1939 only 7.7 per cent of Soviet citizens had completed seven or more grades, while only 0.7 per cent had a higher education. However, for men of draft age, 16–59 years, these indices were twice as high, 15 per cent and 1.7 per cen respectively. In Germany there existed practically universal secondary education. On the eve of the war only a little more than 7 per cent of the Red Army’s commanders had a higher military education, while among the Germans this index was closer to 100 per cent.¹⁶

The Germans had a significant superiority not only in general, but in functional, literacy among the rank and file of the armed forces. Thus, for example, in the Wehrmacht the repair of tanks and other damaged equipment was organized far better. In the Soviet Union they failed altogether to devote appropriate attention to the training of draftees, and in the beginning of the war they utterly amazed the Germans with their ‘know-how’ of sending completely untrained reinforcements into battle.

There was a strategic theory in the Soviet Union analogous to the theory of the modernized blitzkrieg – the theory of the deep offensive operation, which was developed by Vladimir Triandafillov and Konstantin Kalinovskii.¹⁷ This theory also called for the broad employment of mechanized units and armoured equipment, supported by aviation. However, as opposed to the German theory, the Soviet one in practice devoted clearly insufficient attention to the problems of cooperation of the various combat arms, as well as to all-round training and the rear support of a strategic operation. In the first Soviet armoured formations – brigades, as opposed to the German tank divisions, there was no infantry and very little artillery, which rendered them incapable of operating independently. It was planned to simply attach them to the rifle divisions and corps, which would limit the tank units’ mobility and reduce them to being employed primarily as direct infantry support tanks. However, taking into account the level of training for the Soviet tank troops and the tank commanders, it’s possible that this form of employment would have been the best. But at the beginning of the Second World War, under the influence of the German tank formations’ victories in France, mechanized corps were formed in the USSR, and subsequently tank armies, which were designated for independent operations, primarily for developing the success while breaking through the enemy’s defence. However, the effectiveness of their operations compared with that of the Germans’ tank formations was low, while their equipment losses were too high.

An important role was played by the fact that the Germans’ tank units were far better than the Soviet ones, being equipped with radios, which were also of a higher quality. By the close of 1942 all of the German tanks were outfitted with proper radios, while radio receivers predominated among the Soviet tanks. And the level of training for the German tank crews was completely beyond comparison with that of the Soviet crews and remained such until the end of the war.

Hitler could have been stopped as late as 1938, if the Western powers had exhibited firmness and demonstrated a true readiness to fight. But in 1939, when the Polish crisis began, no amount of firmness could have stopped Hitler, who had embarked on a course of achieving world dominance and a world war.

Emboldened by his success at Munich, on 14 March 1939 Hitler forced the president of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hacha, under the threat of war, to agree to the annexation of the Czech lands to Germany as a protectorate.¹⁸ The Western powers could in no way justify aggression as the realization of the Germans’ right to self determination and issued guarantees of territorial integrity to the next potential victim of German aggression – Poland. On 21 March 1939 Ribbentrop presented the Polish ambassador with an ultimatum to transfer to Germany Danzig and an extraterritorial highway and railroad in the ‘Polish corridor’, linking East Prussia with the major part of the Reich. Insofar as Poland rejected the ultimatum, Hitler began to prepare for a world war. He believed that the powers, having given guarantees to Poland this time, would fight. The German press began a propaganda campaign about the supposed ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Germans in Poland, which had supposedly caused a flood of refugees, but no proof of this was offered either at that moment or after the occupation of Poland. And so in order to create an excuse for the war, a provocation was arranged at Gleiwitz. As a result, 120 SS men, dressed in Polish military uniforms and speaking Polish, attacked a radio station in Gleiwitz, in German Upper Silesia and, upon capturing the transmitter, called upon the local Polish population to rise up. To make it convincing, several corpses of concentration camp prisoners, who were dressed in Polish uniforms, were left by the radio station building.

The idea for such a provocation proved infectious. Stalin already had a ready plan for occupying Finland, and in order to secure a pretext for an attack, arranged a provocation near the frontier village of Manaila on 26 November 1939. Seven artillery rounds were fired against the Red Army’s positions, and according to the official version four men were killed and nine wounded. However, in his memoirs Khrushchev admitted that the bombardment was carried out on Stalin’s orders. The Russian historian Pavel Aptekar has found in the archives documents from the 68th Rifle Regiment, which was stationed in the Manaila area, which show that during the 25–9 November period the regiment suffered no losses among the rank and file.¹⁹ Stalin here proved to be more humane than Hitler and did not kill anyone. And when the USSR attacked Finland and the question was being discussed in the League of Nations, they declared in Moscow that they were not fighting against anyone, but quite the opposite, and lived in peace and friendship with the Finnish Democratic Republic, against which it not only had no territorial claims, but on the contrary, was preparing to cede significant territory in Soviet Karelia. The government of the FDR was created on Stalin’s orders in the village of Terioki, which had been occupied by Soviet forces, and was headed by Otto Kuusinen, a secretary of the Comintern.²⁰ To be sure, the trick with the FDR did not work out and the Soviet Union was nevertheless excluded from the League of Nations as an aggressor.

Stalin was in no way prepared to conclude a military alliance with Great Britain and the USA in the summer of 1939, as such an alliance could have prevented the Second World War, and Stalin was not interested in this. He conducted the negotiations with British and French delegations in Moscow only in order to make Hitler more conciliatory as regards Soviet territorial demands.

Did the Poles have a chance of withstanding the German and Soviet aggression? Here we can only enter the sphere of alternative history. Let’s imagine that Jozef Pilsudski had not died in 1935, but had lived to at least the end of 1946.²¹ In principle there is nothing unlikely in this. Pilsudski would have been 79 years old. He could not have prevented the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the partition of Poland, just as he could not have forced France and Great Britain to undertake an immediate offensive on the Western Front. Both London and Paris were aware of the secret partition of Poland between Stalin and Hitler, while the French army was neither morally nor materially prepared for an offensive. But here Pilsudski, possessing no small amount of military and political talent, could easily not only have guessed that such a partition had been agreed on, but also chosen the most rational defensive tactic against the two enemies – Germany and the USSR. While leaving powerful garrisons in a number of fortresses, such as Poznan, Warsaw, Brest, and L’vov, and perhaps some others as well, the Polish army’s main forces should have been concentrated on a small bridgehead near the Romanian frontier, establishing their main defensive line along the Dnestr River and the Slovak border, which ran along the Carpathian Mountains. Then the garrisons of the fortresses might have held out a few weeks, while the main forces could have held out a month-and-a-half to two months. The Wehrmacht and the Red Army would have suffered significantly higher casualties in frontal attacks against the Polish army’s main forces defending along a short front and with a high operational density of forces, and while storming the fortresses, than was the case in the actual Polish campaign. The Polish army’s main forces, having fired off all of their ammunition, would have been interned, along with the Pilsudski government, in Romania. Then the number of interned Polish service-men would have been higher by an order than the actual number of Poles interned in the autumn of 1939 in Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, and Latvia. The majority of Poles would probably have been able to reach France from Romania together with Pilsudski, and far fewer Polish officers would have fallen into Soviet captivity and been executed at Katyn’.²² A far more numerous Polish army would have been recreated in France than was actually the case in the spring of 1940 and London and Paris would have been forced to take it into account as an important ally, particularly after France dropped out of the war and the Polish army was evacuated to the British Isles. Pilsudski also enjoyed far greater international authority than Wladyslaw Sikorski, Stanislav Mikolajczyk and the other leaders of the Polish government in exile.²³ Given such a turn of events, there would have been a greater chance that Great Britain and the USA would have more decisively supported the Polish government in its conflict with Stalin due to Katyn’ and he would have had a much more difficult time in forming a Polish government and army controlled by the USSR. Thus the Poles would have had a definite chance of preserving an independent Poland after the war. However, once again, this could only have taken place in an alternative reality.

In regard to the Second World War, it is often said that Stalin’s chief mistake was in concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany. In this manner he not only opened the path to the Second World War, but also created conditions for Germany’s surprise attack on the USSR. However, this was a crime, but not a mistake, and the Soviet dictator was never embarrassed by such crimes. Stalin was working hard so that the Second World War would begin with Germany against Poland and its Western Allies. The non-aggression pact would open the path to the Second World War and would pit Hitler against the Anglo-French coalition and give the Red Army a convenient jumping-off place for a subsequent attack on Germany. Stalin foresaw the rapid collapse of Poland, which he was ‘fraternally’ preparing to partition with Hitler and which was fixed in the secret supplementary protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The treaty on friendship and borders with Germany is often referred to as Stalin’s mistake. However, from the point of view of Stalin’s policy, there was no mistake. The treaty not only concluded, thanks to the secret supplementary protocols to this treaty, the delineation of spheres of interest in Eastern Europe, but also gave Hitler to understand that he could freely attack France without fear for his rear in the East. He himself was preparing to knife Germany in the back at that moment when the Wehrmacht, as he hoped, got bogged down at the Maginot Line. Here Stalin really did make a mistake, having underestimated the Wehrmacht’s combat capability and overestimated the French troops’ combat capability and toughness. So, Stalin was not a professional military man and the majority of his errors concern military affairs. In particular, he overestimated the combat capability and readiness of the Red Army, which got stuck at the Mannerheim Line, which was far less powerful than the Maginot Line.²⁴ Thus in March 1940 a compromise peace had to be quickly concluded with Finland, in order to have the opportunity to throw the Red Army’s main forces toward the Soviet-German demarcation line. Otherwise, the war with Finland could have dragged on until summer following the onset of the spring thaw.

In the same way, Stalin overestimated the Red Army’s combat capability and underestimated the Wehrmacht’s combat capability. Thus he trained his troops only for the offensive, and not for defence. And because of this, Stalin did not expect a German attack in 1941 and the Red Army suffered very heavy defeats. If it had adhered to defensive tactics and employed its tank formations in a more dispersed fashion, its losses would probably have been less and its defeats less disastrous. However, Stalin was sure that, possessing a significant superiority in men, tanks and aircraft, the Soviet forces could quickly crush the enemy and place the greater part of Europe under their control. At the same time, he failed to take into account the troops’ severe shortages in communications equipment and, what is still more important, the significantly lower level of training both of the command and the rank and file, particularly in the navy, air force and tank troops, compared with the Wehrmacht. This circumstance predetermined the fact that victory was achieved at a very dear price and that the war stretched out a lengthy four years.

Stalin sincerely believed that the Soviet Union had caught up with the capitalist West in terms of the level of economic development, which meant that the Red Army could not be weaker than the German army. If only for this reason, he could not adopt defensive tactics. On the other hand, Stalin understood that a prolonged defence, as the experience of the First World War showed, demoralizes the troops and may lead to revolution.

In spite of the military defeats of 1941–2, in political terms Stalin, having unleashed the Second World War, won it, having acquired, thanks to the military political situation that took shape in 1941, British and American allies, which guaranteed the final victory.

The Russian historian Andrei Smirnov proves that the level of the Soviet forces’ combat training and that of the command was quite low both in the first half of the 1930s, as well as during 1939–41 and was significantly inferior to the chief potential enemy – the Wehrmacht. The repressions of 1937–8 did not have any kind of material influence on these indices. One may contest this conclusion only in the sense that as a result of the repressions the troops’ lack of faith in their commanders increased and the fear of the commanders to make independent decisions increased, although they were not particularly distinguished earlier by a propensity for independence. Smirnov also points out that the Red Army’s backwardness vis-à-vis the German army was conditioned by a number of features inherited by the Red Army from the Russian imperial army, particularly the great predominance of theoretical knowledge over practical knowledge, by the low functional literacy of the soldiers and officers, and the inability to train the soldiers to do what would be realistically required in war. It is possible that the reasons for this lie in the deep feudal hierarchy of both pre-revolutionary Russian and Soviet (and post-Soviet as well) society. The mass of the people was not accustomed to independent actions and did not particularly strive to acquire practical skills, which meant significantly less than one’s place in the social hierarchy, which for the most part was not dependent upon practical achievements. And following the Great Terror there were no major changes for the better in the Red Army’s level of combat training all the way up to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, and this revealed itself most negatively in the size of Soviet military losses.²⁵

In Smirnov’s evaluation, by the middle of 1937 the level of the Red Army’s combat training could be rated at between two and three on five-point scale and in 1940 it had, at best, only inched toward a three. Smirnov ties the chief reasons for the low level of combat training in the Red Army to the fact that they did not train soldiers and commanders for the conditions of actual combat, but for the collision with a relatively weak enemy, probably from those of the small border states or a German army limited by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. He emphasizes that:

The famous theory of the deep operation and the concept of the deep battle, which were developed by Soviet military theoreticians, really did reflect the nature and demands of modern war, but the RKKA was not in a condition to realize this theory and concept in practice and inculcate it even at the end of the epoch of Tukhachevskii, Yakir and Uborevich (that is, by the middle of 1937).²⁶ The reason for this was the poor training of those who were to put these military theories into practice–the commanders, staffs and troops.

The main part of the command element lacked the desire for decisive manoeuvre, for operations against the enemy’s flank and rear, and the display of initiative, which was, in Smirnov’s opinion, the result of the overall weakness of the army’s operational-tactical thinking. Also, commanders from the battalion level upwards did not know how to organize cooperation among the various combat arms. Many commanders at the tactical level were not possessed of any kind of tactical thinking. The overwhelming majority of commanders poorly controlled their troops. As Smirnov notes:

It’s not accidental that cooperation between the combat arms during 1935 through the first half of 1937, if it was achieved, occurred only in the opening stage of the battle or operation, and when the altered situation demanded the organization of cooperation once again, it disappeared. The commanders and staffs were not capable of once again carrying out the work of organizing cooperation in an intense situation and with tight deadlines.

It should be noted that the same thing happened, unfortunately, in the years of the Great Patriotic War.

Another obstacle to success was the poor level of troop training. As Smirnov emphasizes, the lone RKKA infantryman

did not have the necessary training either in entrenching, masking, or in observing the battlefield, nor in choosing a firing position, nor in making rushes and crawling, nor in throwing himself into the attack, and was completely untrained to throw a grenade or in using the bayonet. He knew how to ‘handle’ a rifle and machine gun to the extent that he could shoot at the second or third level on a scale of one to five; as a rule, he could not find a target independently and quite often he reduced his gun to a state of technical disuse due to corrosion in the gun barrel . . . The mechanic-drivers in the tanks had little experience in driving, even by the middle of 1937, and did not know how to drive their combat vehicles in realistic field conditions, but only level ground at the tank training centre!

Smirnov further quotes Marshal Budennyi’s brilliant words, which were uttered at a session of the defence commissar’s military council on 21 November 1937: ‘At times we wander around on a great operational-strategic scale, but how will we conduct operations if the company is no good, the platoon is no good, or the squad is no good?’²⁷ What can one say? Semyon Mikhailovich was not quite as stupid as we are accustomed to think.

The same situation prevailed in the other combat arms. Numerous similar examples are put forth in a monograph which cites papers and reports on the troops’ condition. When comparing the level of the RKKA’s training with that of the armies of the likely enemies, the author sums up the situation as follows: ‘Of course, in the quantitative sense, neither the Reichswehr, nor the Wehrmacht which grew