Stalin: A Biography полностью

Nor did the USSR lack citizens who were pleased with what seemed to be happening. Many in the western borderlands welcomed Wehrmacht troops as liberators. Ukrainian peasants greeted them with the traditional bread and salt. Stalin’s aim to extirpate the possibility of a fifth column by means of the Great Terror proved ineffective. All he had achieved was a stoking up of the fires of embitterment with his rule. The peasantry longed to be freed from the torments of the collective-farm system. They were not the only ones. In towns and cities, especially among people who were not Russians or Jews, there was much naïveté about Hitler’s purposes. This was not surprising since German occupation policy had yet to be clarified, and some Nazi functionaries saw advantage in seeking voluntary co-operation in the conquered regions of the Soviet Union by dismantling the entire order constructed since 1917. Churches were reopened. Shops and small businesses began to operate again. Hitler foolishly overruled any further proposals in this direction. All Slavic peoples were to be treated as Untermenschen, fit only for economic exploitation on behalf of the Third Reich. Wehrmacht and SS were instructed to squeeze labour and raw materials out of Ukraine as if the country was a lemon.

The war effort in the USSR began to be co-ordinated. Party functionaries were ordered to address factory meetings and to tell the workforces that the Germans were about to be halted. Huge demands were to be made of Soviet citizens. Working hours were lengthened, labour discipline tightened still further. The menace of Nazism would be dispelled. The USSR was going to win and the Third Reich, despite current appearances to the contrary, to lose. The Soviet regime would act as ruthlessly in war as it had done in peace.

Yet it was difficult to believe the few real optimists. Official spokesmen were assumed to be saying only what they had been ordered to say. The Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow by 21 July. A month of fighting had brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Army Group North was approaching Leningrad and, with the fall of Moscow apparently imminent, Hitler and his generals began to contemplate switching forces to Army Group South to secure the coming conquest of Kiev. The Soviet refugees streaming into central Russia brought with them tales of German military success which undermined Pravda’s insistence that the Red Army was ceasing to retreat. What Hitler was achieving was what German commanders Ludendorff and Hindenburg had threatened to do if Lenin and the communists had failed to sign a separate treaty at Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. Vast economic resources had come under German occupation for use in the war against the USSR. Evacuation of factories and workforces was attempted on Stalin’s orders; and Red troops and the NKVD, as they retreated, implemented a scorched-earth policy to minimise the benefit to the Wehrmacht. Hitler prepared himself to be master of the East.

Autumn 1941 was grim for the Russians. The United Kingdom had stood alone against Germany for over a year and now the USSR joined it in even greater peril. The British could not send much aid in finances, armaments or troops. Although the front between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was but one of the fronts in the Second World War, it was at this time virtually a separate war. The front had yet to be stabilised by effective Soviet defence. In October the German forces, having lunged across the plains and marshes to the east of the River Bug, were massing outside Moscow for a final thrust at the USSR’s capital. Critical decisions needed to be taken in the Kremlin. The initial plan was for the entire government to be evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Stalin was set to leave by train — and Lenin’s embalmed corpse, reinfused with chemicals, was prepared for the journey to Tyumen in west Siberia. Moscow appeared likely to fall to the invader before winter. Not since Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 had the Russian capital faced such a plight — and Stalin, unlike Alexander I, could scarcely expect that Hitler would grant him his life in the event of the increasingly probable German victory.

Yet the line held. Zhukov, Stavka’s Chief of Staff, was transferred to the field for the defence of Moscow. At the last moment Stalin decided to stay in the capital. While sanctioning the departure of several People’s Commissariats to Kuibyshev, he decided that Zhukov might pull off victory and instructed the leading politicians to remain with him in the capital. He could not have dreamed up a better piece of propaganda. The word got out that the Leader was refusing to forsake the capital. Resistance was going to be shown by everyone from Stavka members down to the ordinary infantryman and factory worker.