Stalin: A Biography полностью

Yet the patriotic spirit was unquenchable. Propaganda stiffened the resistance by publishing details of German atrocities. Pravda did not become a ‘paper of record’, yet it did not have to concoct falsehoods about the Wehrmacht and the SS. Once the Soviet military resistance began to stiffen, Moscow’s media concentrated effectively on German atrocities. Jews, Roma and communists were being shot out of hand. Murder and pillage were ravaging the USSR’s western borderlands. Although the Germans allowed most churches and some private shops to be reopened in Ukraine, they generally treated the country as a place for plunder. Harvests were routinely seized, and the German occupiers found the collective farms too useful an instrument of grain procurement to be abandoned. Early in Operation Barbarossa there had been debate in Berlin about policies of occupation. Several officials had urged the prudence of seeking to neutralise opposition in the western regions of the USSR by granting economic and social concessions. Hitler quashed this talk. For him, the whole purpose of the invasion was to realise his ideological dream. The Wehrmacht, SS and civilian administration were ordered to treat the Slav Untermenschen as a human resource exploitable to the point of death.

This apparently had no effect on Stalin. He had failed to anticipate the intensity of Nazi brutality; but even when reports reached him from behind the German lines, he held his tongue about them. He spoke only in general terms about German atrocities (whereas Churchill and Roosevelt emphasised the massive disregard for international laws on war). Stalin himself waged war, as he conducted politics, with his own immense savagery. The NKVD had rampaged across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania killing or arresting whole strata of the population. It was through Operation Barbarossa that for the first time since the Civil War he confronted an enemy as willing as he was to use terror against innocent non-combatants.

Stalin in any case gave little thought to the matter.³ Calling on his compatriots to fight a bitter war regardless of cost, he had no interest in focusing attention on the horrific strength and ruthlessness of the Wehrmacht. He and Stavka got on with planning, organising and supervising the war effort. They were hard men by any standards. Those communist leaders with a soft side to their thinking — Bukharin, Kamenev, Tomski or Ryazanov — had perished in the Great Terror. There were no such spirits in Stavka or the State Committee of Defence. If any of them had reservations about Stalin’s severity towards his own forces, they kept quiet about them. Both sides in the German–Soviet conflict went at each other without regard to the Geneva Convention. Prisoners-of-war were treated atrociously. Strategy and tactics were developed which spared neither soldier nor civilian. The restraints which characterised the fighting between Germany and the Western Allies never prevailed on the front with the Red Army. Warfare reverted to the colossal brutality last seen in Europe in the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and Stalin was in his element.

The USSR’s survival of that first terrible winter of 1941–2 seemed a miracle at the time. The USA entered the war against Germany in 1941. Stalin’s Western Allies, despite their public bravado, had not given him much of a chance; and although Washington promised arms and other supplies through the system of Lend-Lease (which postponed any payment till the end of hostilities), little reached the USSR until the later months of 1942. The Soviet Union had had to cope with Nazi Germany on its own, while Hitler could draw upon increasing support from Italy, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

Sober assessment was less unfavourable to Stalin’s chances. The pre-war analysis, shared in Berlin and Moscow, held that the Germans needed to attack by early summer if they were to conquer. The actual military campaign validated this analysis. The Wehrmacht, after massive advances into the western borderlands of the USSR, was halted outside Leningrad and Moscow; it had failed to overrun the Russian heartland, oil-rich Baku and the Volga transport routes. The USSR retained adequate human and material resources to go on resisting the aggressor. The Wehrmacht operated in bleaker conditions than Hitler had anticipated. The last months of 1941 were bitterly cold. German lines of communication and supply were overstretched: Hitler had not got far enough to have final success but had gone too far to maintain his armed forces in a decent condition. Germany’s military equipment, moreover, had not been built to specifications for the rigours of the Russian winter. The odds began to turn in the USSR’s favour despite the enduring impact of Stalin’s miscalculations about Operation Barbarossa.