Red Star at War: Victory at All Costs

By Colin Turbett

This pictorial history captures the humanity and sacrifice of ordinary Soviet citizens during WWII.

Russian losses during the Second World War were beyond imagination. Caught between a brutal invader and a ruthless leader, millions of Soviet citizens committed themselves to saving their motherland at any cost. Soviet victory over the Nazis, which effectively won the war, came about through their effort and sacrifice.

With photographs taken during and after the Second World War, Red Star at War puts a human face on the immense Soviet war effort. The Russian men and women who fought side by side are show in photographs taken for their families and friends, along with the personal messages that came with them. The photographs and captions are supported by text drawn from writings of the period as well as more recent historical accounts and research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526763297

Colin Turbett

A keen motorcyclist and social historian, Colin Turbett is the author of Motorcycles and Motorcycling in the USSR 1939-1990 (Veloce) and Playing with the Boys – Olga Kevelos Motorcycle Sportswoman. During his career as a social worker and frontline manager he had a number of academic papers published alongside two books: Rural Social Work Practice in Scotland (Venture Press 2010) and Doing Radical Social Work (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). He has long held an interest in the history of the Soviet Union and its people. This is his first book for Pen and Sword.

Book preview

Introduction

Lydia Spivak, Berlin, May 1945. (Alamy Stock Sputnik)

Newsreel audiences around the world were treated to a very human image of the Red Army soon after war’s end in Europe in May 1945. A pretty, smiling and vivacious woman traffic controller, rifle over shoulder, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of captured Berlin pirouetting like a ballet dancer whilst commandingly directing crisscrossing military vehicles. The newsreels named her ‘Anna Pavlova’ after the famous nineteenth-century Russian ballet dancer. Her real name was Lydia Spivak, she was 20 years old and she was invited to speak to the camera:

Here we are in Berlin: the Reichstag is just over there. The Brandenburg Gate is opposite. The Germans tried to block it but we went right through it … What am I? I’m just an ordinary country girl. I did my ten years at school and then I joined the army and went to the front. I went to the Crimea then the Ukraine and then here.

Beneath this modest unscripted account of several years of a long and difficult but no doubt exciting experience lies a story that represents the wartime life and struggle of millions of Soviet citizens. As a traffic ‘regulator’ already awarded an Order of the Patriotic War, Lydia would have been exposed to regular danger; leaving her post was not an option even when being shot at, bombed and shelled.

The German forces in Berlin had surrendered to the Soviet Union’s Red Army on 2 May 1945 after an assault that began on the city’s outer boundaries on 16 April. The final fight for the Nazi capital was equal in ferocity to the many battles that had taken place after Germany’s eastward invasion on 22 June 1941, and it cost over 80,000 Soviet lives in addition to the multiple civilian and military casualties on the German side – which include the suicide of their leader, the ‘Führer’ Adolph Hitler. The war had ranged across vast swathes of the Soviet Union: from the Ukraine and Belorussia in the west to the Arctic Circle in the north and the Caucasus in the south. During the intervening years there was no period of peace at any time on either the front line or within the occupied territories. Ordinary people like Lydia were swept up in events and their lives transformed for ever.

After the war Lydia Spivak became a school teacher in Donetsk in her native Ukraine and apparently died there aged 59 in 1984. During those post-war years she would have suffered the hardships and shortages encountered by all the returning war veterans, including the particular indignities reserved for women. Immediately after the war she would have been discouraged from telling her story, probably reserving it for informal meetings with other veterans. In the years before her death, as the Soviet Union went into political and economic decline, she and her fellows at last became feted and their memories, medals and memorials glorified – because it suited the purposes of a state whose citizens were losing faith in its ideals. Lydia’s generation witnessed some of the most momentous events in human history and their images, stories, poems and letters are of great interest to a generation in the West who have enjoyed peace and relative prosperity.

The enormity of the Soviet effort in what quickly became known as The Great Patriotic War cannot be understated. Soviet people were used to hardship, some of which, prewar, must have seemed pointless and avoidable even to those who agreed with the ideals of the state. Criticism, however, was not permitted and could cost freedom if not life. The hardships of war took on a different dimension and such was the threat caused by Nazi invasion that most citizens willingly gave everything they could, including their lives, to ensure victory. This was on a scale that is almost unimaginable – in terms of both human and material losses as well as simple mass engagement in the conflict over a front that stretched for almost 4,000 miles. The total population of the Soviet Union in 1941 (including the newly annexed states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) was approaching 197 million. By 1946 this had reduced to less than 171 million, with surviving women outnumbering men by a staggering 22 million. Soviet losses are still disputed but are officially estimated to include over 25 million dead. Civilian deaths in the city of Leningrad alone outnumber total losses (civilian and military) for the US and British in the Second World War.

It is entirely true to say that the Soviet Union, who until 1944 faced 90 per cent of Axis forces, won the war, albeit with the welcome help from their Western allies, beating down a fascist threat to humanity. In the previous two centuries Russia had been invaded, with comparatively similar enormous loss of life, by the Swedish and the French. The Russian experience in 1914 and again in 1941, ensured that victory would be one that would help ensure that borders were secure and any potential threat removed from immediate neighbours – an analysis that is missing from most Western accounts, especially those written during the Cold War period when the USSR was deliberately and unreasonably characterized as a threatening menace to the ‘free’ world. As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the 1945 victory much will be written about the Second World War. Some unfortunately will describe the Soviets and their Nazi opponents as one and the same – invaders and occupiers. This is an interpretation of history not just reserved for the holocaust deniers of the far right, but shared in most popular accounts now written in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and even by some respected western military historians such as Christopher Duffy. Also, just as it suited Western protagonists during the Cold War to have historians write of the Soviets in unfavourable terms, there is at least an element of that in the Putin era of today: Russian foreign policy provides justification to some for continued high levels of arms manufacture in the West. Conversely this book falls into the camp of those who variously describe the war as having been won by British tenacity in the 1940/41 period and US dollars after that, but above all, by the blood of the Soviet people.

Air raid, Minsk, 24 June 1941. (Yaroslavtsev RIA Novosti / Wikimedia Commons)

Wartime experiences were bound to lead to anti-climax for participants once the war was over: as much in the Soviet Union as for the same generation of British, US and other allied servicemen. Never again would life involve the same levels of danger, excitement, comradeship and purpose. In the West though, there was growing prosperity that made the horror and sacrifices seem worthwhile. This was not the case for returning Soviet war veterans: hardships included hunger, absence of the most basic elements of life like decent shelter, and continued paranoia on leader Stalin’s part that completely removed the freedoms that war had brought temporarily. Evidence of the conflict, particularly in the former battle theatres, was everywhere: disabled veterans (who were poorly treated in the wake of the conflict) were a big feature of life until the end of the Soviet era, and the war-damaged cities and ravaged countryside took years to rebuild. Much of the country was one big graveyard with the hastily buried bodies of combatants of both sides starkly visible in many areas. Despite all this, veterans had every reason to feel proud of their achievements and to eventually enjoy the veneration of the next generation – even if this had worn off considerably by the time of the Glasnost period – mainly due to its over-emphasis by the state which caused inevitable reaction by the young against the sombre memorials and repeated, and therefore boring, stories of heroism.

Germany, summer 1945. (Author’s collection)

This book will try and rescue images and scraps of information about some ordinary men and women who lived through those times – not through detailed descriptions of war and its machinery, but through stories they told about their experiences, and letters, poems and photographs they left behind them. In his memoirs, Marshal Konev, a Soviet general more considerate of the lives of his troops than many of his contemporaries (and of course Stalin the supreme leader), talks of his admiration for journalists and writers who were able to describe the ordinary soldier and the beauty of the human soul. Whilst this did happen in wartime, it was absent by official decree afterwards, unless describing some especially heroic deed that might inspire Soviet citizens to work harder for the motherland. Indeed, the epic post-war novel Life and Fate by wartime journalist Vasily Grossman which carried out Konev’s implied request to the letter, was banned, and would remain so for a thousand years. Grossman died in 1964, unaware that a surviving copy of his masterpiece would be smuggled to the West. This eventually successful book stands as one of the best descriptions of ordinary people at war, Soviet or otherwise, ever written.

There is always a question of accuracy when retelling stories and showing images of the war. In the Soviet Union, even more than with allies who were not above putting a morale-boosting spin on events, frontline correspondents might not let the truth get in the way of a good story. The protagonists themselves could also exaggerate their first-hand accounts. Add to this the retelling of such stories, the natural faltering of personal memories over time (with differences emerging between witnesses to the same events) and issues of accuracy become inevitable. Add to all that the profusion of often unreliable information now available online, and the result is confusion which historical researchers have to pick their way through. An unfortunate example is a recent English language edition of the immensely powerful collection of first-hand accounts of Soviet women veterans, by Svetlana Alexievich, first published (but not fully) in the ‘Glasnost’ period of the 1980s: the cover has a striking portrait of a woman flyer but wrongly names her as Natalya Meklin – her actual name was Nadezhda Popova; both women were highly decorated pilots in the same unit but such confusion is abundant. Alexievich’s book was a game-changer – one of the first in the Soviet Union to honestly tell women veteran stories, warts and all, and those interested in the Soviet era owe her a great deal for this and her other works. Studies and written accounts of similar stature have followed, some of which are listed in the bibliography. Whilst this book does not claim anything particularly original in terms of factual historical research – it is more a compendium of stories and images that reflect ordinary lives and extraordinary heroism – every effort has been made to be accurate.

When looking at the lives of Soviet people in wartime it is worth commenting that the right-wing fascist and far-right nationalist ideologies they fought so hard to defeat, are enjoying a resurgence in Western Europe as well as in the former USSR and its satellites. One of the reasons for this might be the passing of the generation who made wartime sacrifices – in the West but especially in the Soviet Union. If the bringing out of their humanity and love of life help us see beyond the barriers created by the Cold War and ignorance down to this day, their stories are worth the telling and their images, a look. Some of these have been told elsewhere – particularly if they involve unusual experiences and acts of heroism; many others are presented here for the first time. Researching for the book was something of a journey: chance encounters of various types with Ukrainians and Russians led to fascinating stories that revealed much about wartime experiences and their impact down the years to today. It is simply not true (as is sometimes contended) that memories of the war feature simply because they are deliberately used by those whose interest lies in fomenting patriotism. They are in fact deeply embedded in the national psyche of those territories of the former Soviet Union who were most affected.

The chapters that follow look at life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s (on the eve of war), chronological accounts of the war’s principal events for the Soviet people, various aspects of wartime itself, the victory and its immediate aftermath in 1945. The final chapter will examine the legacy of war and what it meant for veterans in the Soviet Union and its successor states. The war on the Eastern Front was primarily fought on land by ground troops with air support and this fact is reflected in the book’s emphasis and content.

Lydia Spivak and her generation might have passed, but what they have left still has much to tell us about suffering, survival and humanity.

Chapter 1

Life in the Soviet Union on the Eve of War

… there’s all kinds, and they’re thick as nettles: kulaks, red tapists, and, down the row, drunkards, sectarians, lickspittles.

We’ll lick the lot of ’em – but to lick ’em is no easy job at the very best.

Conversation with Comrade Lenin by Vladimir

Mayakovsky (1893–1930), Stalin’s favourite poet

The Special Generation

It has been said that the Soviet citizens who fought the Second World War were remarkable for their determination and resilience – a ‘special generation’. They snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, drove out a merciless invader, and, with Allied help, won the war against fascism. Even though they were under orders that insisted that capture was tantamount to betrayal, that personal sacrifice was expected as a matter of course, and that hesitation might mean arrest and punishment if not death at the hands of their own side, still their enthusiasm for what they were being asked to undertake was strong and genuine. This was a generation that had survived a state that had murdered millions of its own citizens – some by policies that resulted in famine and starvation (as in the Ukraine in the early 1930s) and some by execution for imaginary crimes against the state (the purges that gathered force through the 1930s). Others were arrested on trumped-up charges and condemned to imprisonment in the Gulag system – in effect a vast system of enslavement that released labour resources for the rapid industrialization and development of the country in the same era. The ones that made it to war were perhaps the lucky ones, and those touched by such awful adversities were certainly toughened by their experiences. Others were educated into very strongly held beliefs in the rightness of the Soviet cause and the anti-capitalist ideals that lay behind it.

The USSR was founded after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, only twenty-four years prior to the war. The new state was based on very high aspirations for the human race – a society that would rest on equality of opportunity, contribution according to ability, and shared wealth – rather than the concentration of power and riches in the hands of a privileged minority through a capitalist system based on competition and inequality. The new society would be led by the workers rather than a comparatively idle wealthy ruling class. Its founders, Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades, considered that their revolution could only succeed in its task if it was accompanied by others in the developed world – Germany, France, Britain and the US etc. In the unstable wake of a wasteful and fruitless world war that had slaughtered millions and brought an end to empires, that seemed not unrealistic. However, all these other nations did not opt for revolution (or they failed as in Germany in 1918/19) but instead chose a course of continuing with a capitalist system, or, in the case of defeated Germany and those it influenced, an eventual turn to right-wing nationalism based on xenophobia, antisemitism and of course anti-communism. The seeds for future conflict were well and truly sewn.

Not only was Russia left isolated in its aspirations, but a devastating civil war from 1918 to 1921 killed millions and destroyed what was left of the economy. Those who fought the Bolsheviks – they changed their name to Communists at this time – were supported by Western armies from Britain, the US and other nations who wanted to see this threat to their security destroyed at birth. Although the Communists won, the Civil War killed off many of the idealists who had driven the revolution, and the freedoms that had been promised in 1917. This left