USSR For the fighting in the USSR, see BARBAROSSA and German–Soviet war; see also entries for Baltic States, Belorussia, Bessarabia, Bukovina, Caucasus, Russia, and Ukraine.

1. Introduction

The USSR was an active participant in the Second World War from start to finish, from September 1939 until August 1945. Official Soviet propaganda, which came to be widely accepted in the West in relation to events in eastern Europe, made great efforts to conceal this fact. Soviet histories always preferred the label of ‘The Great Patriotic War, 1941–5’ and propaganda consistently maintained, for example, that the Soviet Union was neutral in the period before 22 June 1941, the date when Germany invaded the USSR (see BARBAROSSA), and that Soviet operations were defensive in nature throughout.

In reality, the Soviet Union supported Nazi Germany in a substantial way between the conclusion of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 and the German invasion. Also, the Red Army was heavily engaged against the Japanese in August 1939 (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns); against the Poles in September 1939 (see Polish campaign); against the Finns during 1939–40 (see Finnish–Soviet war); and was used in the forcible annexation of the Baltic States and the former Bessarabia in the summer of 1940. In fact, Soviet military operations represent an important component of the changing European scene during the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact; and the incorporation into the USSR of a broad belt of occupied territory formed an important political and military prelude to the German–Soviet war (see Map 107).

In September 1939, before it acquired any of that territory, the USSR's population was 170.5 million inhabiting an area of 21.4 million sq. km. (8.25 million sq. mi.). The country then consisted of several theoretically sovereign republics which were constituted on 29 December 1922 by the Union's founding members, the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian (White Russian), and Transcaucasian republics. When a new constitution was adopted in 1936 the USSR consisted of eleven member republics, some of which contained within themselves other autonomous republics and regions. The largest republic was the Russian Federation (RSFSR) with 63.8% of the total Soviet population. The RSFSR itself consisted of fourteen autonomous republics, including one for German colonists whom Catherine the Great had summoned to the country, and seven autonomous regions. Only 73.4% of the RSFSR's population were Great Russians who, within the USSR as a whole, amounted to 58.4% of the population, a percentage which dropped to 52.7% with the annexation of Polish territory (largely inhabited by White Russians and Ukrainians), of Moldavia, and of the Baltic States. The second largest Soviet people were the Ukrainians with 16.6%, followed by the White Russians (Belorussia) with 3.1%, and then there were the Uzbeks, Tatars, Kazakhs, Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, Lithuanians, Jews, and so on. There were at least fourteen nationalities with around one million and more members. Depending on definitions there existed more than 80, 120, or even 170 different languages within the USSR.

Thanks to its victory in the German–Soviet war, the USSR emerged in 1945 as the political and military master of eastern Europe. Soviet communism reached its zenith, for the western powers possessed neither the means nor the will to oppose Stalin's designs. In their eagerness to enlist Soviet support for the final phase of the Pacific war, they proved ready at the Yalta conference (see ARGONAUT) to sanction Soviet territorial annexations contrary to the Atlantic Charter and were in no position to extract more tangible guarantees from the Soviet Union to protect Polish independence. In fact, no effective steps were taken to challenge Soviet political machinations in countries recently liberated by the Red Army. Most of the new frontiers (see Oder–Neisse Line, for example) and new political regimes of eastern Europe, including the Soviet frontier itself (see Polish–Soviet frontier), were organized in the last year of the war according to Stalin's wishes. However, in the absence of a formal peace treaty, the settlement of 1945 contained the seeds of future conflict, fuelling the Cold War which did not cease until the terminal collapse of the USSR in 1991.

The Communist Party benefited greatly from the war. Military membership had been only 15% in June 1941 in the wake of the Red Army purges; just over half of party members were service personnel by the end of the war. The party began to grow in influence in 1943 and something like a revival occurred in 1944. Many members favoured a flowering of party debate and the updating of the ideology. Stalin appears to have considered this a threat to his authority and debate was stifled. He also viewed the increasing prominence of victorious Soviet generals as alarming and these heroes were dispatched to minor posts after 1945.

The war transformed the Soviet Union. It welded party and people together for the first time. The USSR was now a great power. However, the political and economic system which had been fashioned so successfully during the war was only permitted to evolve within narrow limits. This major flaw was later to become a fatal weakness.

Norman Davies, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, and Martin McCauley

2. Domestic life, economy, and war effort

From about 1929 the USSR went through major social and economic transformation even more traumatic than the 1917 revolution. A determined policy of collectivizing the peasantry and industrializing the country was pursued. This massive, accelerated development forced through from above may have been motivated by military considerations, but the system was also forced to balance the interests of the agricultural areas and those of the workers and the cities. Although the New Economic Policy ( 1921) had ended forced quotas and brought other concessions, which resulted in economic and political normalization, peasants were still disadvantaged through pricing and planning decisions. Serious crises in feeding the cities resulted, in 1922–3, 1925–6, and 1928–9, as the peasants seemed to withdraw from the market. The crises were not only economic, they reflected a deep crisis of legitimacy caused by the alienation and distrust between the rural classes and the urban-based communist system, threatening the very existence of the proletarian state. It seemed obvious that a policy which destroyed the peasantry as a social force and turned the agricultural USSR into an industrial state would solve this conflict for good and secure the ‘socialism in one country’ the system was bent on building.

Collectivization was meant to facilitate massive transfers of resources from agriculture to industry. Even Soviet historians of pre-perestroika times admit that this transfer did not take place. Rather, the state had to invest massively in agriculture. Only manpower transfers took place as millions of uprooted peasants moved to industrial centres. And this was of doubtful benefit because it reinforced the emphasis on quantity and the neglect of quality so characteristic of Stalinist industrialization and of Soviet industry later.

Still, in crude, quantitive terms, this ‘third revolution’—after the (by the Russian old-style calendar) February and October revolutions of 1917—starting with the first Five Year Plan in 1929, was fairly successful. Growth rates were considerably higher than those of capitalist countries at the time and they stand comparison with any major industrialization. During the first and second Five Year Plans the country developed an industrial base that enabled it to withstand the onslaught of the Wehrmacht in June 1941. None the less, industrialization was chaotic, belying the very idea of a planned economy. The industrial workforce became rather volatile, quickly moving from one factory or from one region to another, exacerbating the problem of low per capita productivity. Plans served mainly as tools to motivate. The regime reacted to difficulties with witch-hunts, show-trials, and death sentences for ‘saboteurs’. The balance between urban and rural sectors changed palpably; from 18% in 1929 the share of the urban population had risen to 33% by 1939.

Collectivization proved disastrous. Agricultural production sank dramatically between 1929 and 1933, only just regaining the 1928 level in 1939. Particularly drastic was the loss of livestock slaughtered by peasants in protest against collectivization. Official figures say that by 1933 livestock was reduced by half, to regain the level of 1926–7 only by 1953–4. Collectivization was pushed through brutally and peasants were forced to deliver more produce than they could afford. There were massive famines in the Ukraine and on the lower Volga, and millions of deaths followed. The famine in the Ukraine was possibly intentional and used to break the back even of passive resistance. Millions of peasants fled to the cities and further millions were deported to Siberia. Altogether, 15 million peasants perished or were killed in this most horrifying attempt at social engineering.

Under these circumstances the total subservience of the population could be taken for granted. But it also has to be stressed that industrialization was supported with great enthusiasm. Fast economic growth and schooling programmes created opportunities for hundreds of thousands to move into better jobs—a movement accelerated by the fact that the Great Terror emptied so many positions. Even for the dirty work of collectivization thousands of determined and hardened party and civil war veterans could be mobilized to apply themselves with their usual zest.

By 1939 the leadership had promised and granted an end to massive terror, though it continued on a reduced, less visible, level. Emphasis on ‘class warfare’ and the ‘class enemy’ was toned down and the ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 5 December 1936 no longer disenfranchised anybody on the basis of class origin. The Stalin cult helped to stabilize the system, however improbable that may seem. It gave an ideological coherence which appealed, if only in a superficial way, to the men of humble background and rudimentary education who by now had moved upwards into the higher regions of party and state bureaucracy. With them the belief in the scientific value of the maxims of Marxism-Leninism seems to have been strong.

Contributing to stability and cohesiveness was the fact that the cultural experiments of earlier Soviet years were abandoned. Now the new élites shared readily and willingly the values, attitudes, and tastes of ordinary people. This communality of largely conservative views was a very important element in holding the system together. Similarly, by the mid-1930s family values were re-emphasized. ‘Free love’ was condemned as a ‘bourgeois institution’, divorce was made more difficult, and abortion became illegal. Schools put emphasis on discipline and proper learning, and reintroduced examinations. History teaching had to avoid ‘abstract sociological schemes’ and to employ a ‘chronological …sequence…firmly fixing in the minds of the pupils important events, personages and dates’. School uniforms returned, with compulsory plaits for girls. In arts and literature a semi-religious cult of heroes and morality developed which catered to many tastes. The proclamation of Socialist Realism as the only acceptable, rather conventional, form of art also facilitated the return of Russian and foreign classics. A form of nationalism foreshadowed the unashamed rejection of internationalism and a return to Russian traditions, institutions, and values which took place during the war.

Society became characterized by an élite of technical graduates—represented by figures such as Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), Alexei Kosygin (1904–80), and Leonid Brezhnev (1902–82)—who rose quickly in the 1930s and were to remain prominent until the 1980s. This new élite was no longer composed of old revolutionaries of middle-class origin, but was drawn from the trained and educated offspring of peasants and proletarians who stood nearer to the masses. For the ordinary man the ‘Stalin Revolution’ brought the first, still patchy, elements of a welfare state, and he could also be impressed by the architecture of the time, clearly built to inspire awe. Edinonachal'e (one-man rule) enabled factory managers or officers to decide matters on their ‘technical’, rather than their ideological, merits and reduced the influence of party officials or political commissars. The system of bringing workers from the factory floor into higher education was discontinued, as was positive discrimination on entrance. Fees for higher education emphasized the increasingly hierarchical character of Soviet society.

If ordinary people were drawn nearer to the élite in terms of values, taste, and attitudes, this was not necessarily so in politics. True, most members of society became part of an institutional framework that mobilized them for carefully selected and carefully supervised political activities. But a full picture of events and the possibility of discussing them were not available to the masses or even to party members relatively high up. It was extremely difficult for ordinary people to follow the politics that led to war between Germany and the western powers, and to the German attack on the USSR; and the motives and actions, and the surprising about-turns, of their leadership also remained unclear to them. In 1938 the Soviet Union offered to fight against Nazi Germany in defence of Czechoslovakia. During the first half of 1939 Stalin criticized Germany for being the main aggressor and the western powers for not acting decisively. But the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 changed everything. Nazi Germany was now an ally and anti-German propaganda stopped. German–Soviet friendship was celebrated to suggest it was neither tactical nor short-term. At times the Soviet press seemed to appeal to the Germans to invade England (see SEALION), and newspapers stressed the support the USSR was giving to the Nazis. This did not change, though with the fall of France in June 1940 it was emphasized that Soviet neutrality was armed, and that the Red Army stood ready to repel any aggressor. While the battle of Britain was raging, reporting, always subordinate to the aims of official policy, became more objective and sympathetic towards the people of the UK. But no hint of the impending danger of a German attack could be found in contemporary Soviet newspapers. The Soviet people were completely surprised and deeply shocked when the Wehrmacht invaded in the early hours of 22 June 1941.

Soviet industrialization was always planned with one eye on the demands of any wartime mobilization of the economy. A special mobilization administration was formed, first under VSNKH (Verkhovnyi Soviet Narodnogo Khoziaistva, or Supreme Council for the National Economy) and then under the Commissariat for Heavy Industry. With the increase of tensions internationally economic mobilization became the centre of attention. On 30 April 1938 a military-industrial commission was set up under the Defence Committee of the USSR Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom (see Chart 1 for the USSR's party, armed forces command, and administrative structure). A Sovnarkom decree followed on 15 July 1939 appointing representatives of the People's Commissariat for Defence to major plants to check on the fulfilment of defence contracts and to develop plant mobilization plans. In September 1939 an experimental partial mobilization of industry was conducted, and after the Politburo's discussion of the Finnish–Soviet war, conversion planning was again reviewed in detail. None the less, mobilization plans for different industries and especially at plant level were not complete when the German–Soviet war broke out. In the crucial field of ammunition a mobilization plan was only approved on 6 June 1941.

Yet in many fields the conversion of civilian factories to military production had begun much earlier. A policy of subcontracting military production to civilian firms was used to spread expertise and to stimulate partial conversion. In some branches of industry reserve capacities had been created. In the first half of 1941, for example, 1,500 modern tanks (KV and T-34) were produced, with the two largest factories having the capacity to produce twice that number.

On 31 July 1940 the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, the state administration's highest legislature, introduced the seven-day working week and the eight-hour day. At the same time unauthorized changing or leaving of workplaces was made illegal. However, a nationwide plan for wartime economic mobilization was only botched together after the German attack. This was because the political climate before the war did not allow for the consideration of worst-case scenarios which were condemned as defeatist. Instead, economic planning for a war was largely based on the assumption of a Soviet offensive which would, as Field Regulations stressed and as Stalin had so often repeated, immediately be carried into enemy territory.

Because they had not developed a realistic framework of strategic expectations, Soviet authorities underestimated the economic burden of a war and its economy-wide dimensions. Plans for dispersing or relocating industries, for the accumulation of reserves, and for finding alternative resource and energy bases, were not persistently pursued.

From 1938 special emphasis was put on increasing the production and the reserves of strategic commodities. Stockpiling of strategic raw materials began seriously in January 1940. In 1939 and 1940 reserves of the main metals doubled. Between January 1940 and the outbreak of hostilities the rouble value of all strategic reserves also nearly doubled. But this was still inadequate for a long war. There were barely enough foodstuffs and fodder to last six months at wartime consumption levels. Under peacetime conditions the stockpiles of petro-chemicals would have lasted eighteen days, those of pig-iron four days, and those of rolled steel six days. Reserves of strategic materials were located too near to the western frontiers. The general staff wanted them safely stored behind the River Volga, but Commissar First Grade Lev Mekhlis, the chief of the Red Army's political administration (PURKKA), regarded the suggestion as defeatist and Stalin, in 1940, sided with his trusted henchman.

Despite these errors, rapid industrialization had greatly increased the abilities of the USSR to conduct a war. But the regional distribution of industries still resembled pre-First World War patterns, which exposed most Soviet production to German attacks. In 1940, less than 30% of steel and iron production came from the eastern territories and only 7% of aircraft, 26% of tank, and 34% of munitions factories were situated there; many specialized production processes were exclusively in the war zone (see Map 108). So when German forces invaded on 22 June 1941 they conquered an area containing 40% of the USSR's population, 60% of its armaments industries, 38% of its cattle, 60% of its pigs, 74% of its coke, 63% of its coal, 71% of its iron ore, 68% of its pig iron, 60% of its aluminium, 58% of its crude steel, 57% of its rolled steel output, and 42% of its electricity generation.

Evacuation was essential for survival. For this the State Committee of Defence (Gosudarstvennv Komitet Oborony, or GKO) set up a special Council for Evacuation on 3 July 1941, with L. M. Kaganovich as chairman and N. M. Shvernik (who soon took over as chairman) and Kosygin as deputies. The council had three sub-departments, for the evacuation of industries and their workforce, for refugees, and for transport. On 14 October, Kosygin was appointed to conduct the evacuation of Moscow. Another, general, Committee for Evacuation was also created, under Anastas Mikoyan (1895–1970), which worked alongside the old council until the middle of December to save stocks of producer and consumer goods. Theoretically all decisions should have been made by the council, but local initiative was considerable though it was frequently denounced from above as defeatism, as evacuations tended to increase panic.

Evacuation of the population from Minsk, largely women and children, began on the second day of the war, ordered locally by the Central Committee of the Belorussian Republic. But not many were evacuated in an organized way—only a few tens of thousands from the Baltic, a million from Belorussia—and tens of thousands simply fled spontaneously, clogging up transport and interfering with troop movements. On 6 and 7 July the evacuation council ordered children and women to be sent away from Moscow and Leningrad and then, in September, from Tula, Orel, Kursk, Voroshilovgrad, the Donbass region, Rostov-on-Don, and Murmansk. The council managed to evacuate 400,000 people from Leningrad and 1.4 million from Moscow during the autumn. But orders frequently came too late. Transport was violently disrupted, people (and matériel), were abandoned in the middle of nowhere or ended up back where they had come from. Passengers went for days without food and drink. Although cities in the east made great efforts to accommodate new arrivals, they often found the demand beyond their means.

Evacuation and flight have been put as low as 7.5 million and as high as 25 million. One estimate (see Harrison [below], p. 71 f.) arrived at 16.5 million, with 6.5–10 million having fled outside official channels. This was below one-fifth of the population of the territories overrun by the Germans. Large quantities of goods were lost and undamaged installations fell into German hands when Stalin refused Khrushchev permission to begin the necessary preparations in the Ukraine. From the Donets Basin only 17 out of 64 steelworks were successfully evacuated. At one Ukrainian depot alone more than 200,000 tons of rolled metals, ingots, castings, pipes, and so on were left behind, a loss comparable to the country's whole strategic reserves of 177,000 tons of pig-iron or 204,000 tons of rolled steel at the beginning of 1941. By the end of July 1941 only 20.3%, or 261,832 tons, of the grain earmarked for the interior was saved. Evacuation of livestock proved more successful in the initial phase, but then the problem of feeding it arose. However, the evacuation council was spared major catastrophes as the Germans did not take Leningrad or Moscow, where orders for evacuation had gone out too late.

On 25 December 1941 the first Council for Evacuation was supplanted by a Committee for Freight Dispersal under Mikoyan which had to deal with the chaos on the overburdened railways. Almost half the rolling stock was used for evacuation. The daily travelling distance halved from 160 km. (100 mi.) to 84 km. (52 mi.). By November 58,000 loaded trucks had piled up on the main lines to the eastern and south-eastern regions. Materials and machinery were often simply dumped and left to rot but at least the statisticians quickly conducted a census of vacant factory accommodation, and building space, to which plants could be moved. But not until November 1941 was a central schedule established for re-erecting the evacuated factories.

Altogether 2,593 plants were evacuated, 1,523 of them major ones. Of the latter, 226 were moved into the Volga region, 667 to the Urals, 244 to western and 78 to eastern Siberia, and 308 to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Of the 1,523 evacuated during the second half of 1941, 1,200 were in operation again by the middle of 1942. About 30–40% of the workers and technical personnel were also evacuated, together with their factories. Some factories were very quickly dismantled and reassembled: the first train with equipment from the Dnepropetrovsk tube-rolling mill left the original site on 9 August for Pervouralsk; production re-opened on 24 December of the same year. An evacuated tractor factory from Kharkov sent its first 25 tanks from the Urals to the front on 8 December 1941. Parts of the Leningrad Kirov factory that had been removed early in August began producing tank steel in Novo-Tagilsk in the Kuzbass Basin by 1 September.

Evacuation, because of the sheer volume and the organizational demands, was a tremendous task. For example, early in August 1941, 450 transports from Kiev evacuated parts of the equipment of 197 large factories, together with 350,000 people. In the middle of August the evacuation of the Zaporozhe and Dnepropetrovsk industrial complexes began (notably the hydro-electric power station), which had to take place under enemy fire. In Zaporozhe alone 5,500 workers and some 8,000 railway carriages were needed to evacuate the local population. Literally, workers had to evacuate their factories on one day and fight the Germans the next.

The first official decisions at the top to evacuate factories and reserves from front-line zones were made by the Politburo on 29 June 1941: eleven aircraft factories were to be moved. On 2 July the CC of the CPSU and the Council of People's Commissars ordered, for example, the Mariupol (Ukraine) ‘Ilich Tankplate Factory’ and ten munitions factories from Leningrad to Magnitogorsk. The Council for Evacuation ordered the relocation of 26 factories of the Commissariat for War from the centre to regions around the Volga, to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia, and on 7 August ordered the evacuation of the ‘Serp i Molot’ and ‘Elektrostal’ factories from the Moscow region. The part of the Kirov factory that produced steel for tanks was also evacuated and ordered to move to Novo-Tagilsk in the Kuzbass Basin. However, the swift advance of the Wehrmacht prevented any evacuations from the areas around Brest-Litovsk, Białystok, Baranovichi, and Pinsk. Only in the eastern parts of Belorussia were evacuations more successful, started on local initiative. The Homel party organization ordered and successfully executed the evacuation of 38 factories, among them the biggest factory of the area (‘Gomselmash’), the equipment of which was moved to the Urals.

A new wave of evacuations was made necessary by the German advance in 1942. On 22 June a Commission for Evacuation, again under Shvernik, was created to organize the relocations from the Don, Volga, and Caucasus regions. Another 150 enterprises were to be moved, but again, many trains could not leave the front areas in time. The evacuation of Stalingrad was not seriously undertaken, because Stalin opposed it: only one plant was saved. In spite of intense efforts and extreme hardships endured by those involved—more than 30,000 youth groups helped with the evacuation, the party and the Komsomol mobilized their members—32,000 enterprises of all sizes fell into German hands. Yet the one-eighth of productive capacity of the western provinces that was saved proved sufficient. For, low as this may seem, the most crucial industries had been successfully moved.

Transport problems, however, were not solved by these measures. The basic situation was that the radial system from Moscow—with the denser network to the west—was not suited to the task it had to perform. Also, the railways were hopelessly overloaded in trying to supply the armies, the cities, and industries while, at the same time, evacuating factories, materials, civilians, and soldiers from the front-line areas. In January 1942 the average daily haulage on the railways was down 50% compared to peacetime. Nearly 3,000 trucks were standing idle without locomotives, two-thirds of them loaded with evacuated equipment. Chaos reigned during the initial phases of the war, and threatened to bring the railways to a complete halt. At the most critical points during the war a few lines into the hinterland of Moscow had to carry most of the burden. New lines had to be built, especially when the German Army stood at the banks of the Volga and because new industrial centres in the east had to be connected. In the third quarter of 1941 the railways had received 90% of the 64,000 tons of rails they had asked for. But then supplies virtually broke down. In December 1941 they only received 8 km. of the 846 km. (530 mi.) of rails they had requested just to repair damaged track. For 1942 as a whole they were supplied with 300,000 tons of iron and steel (2.9 million tons in 1940), eight locomotives, and no new railway trucks.

The transport crisis was tackled by the usual dose of centralization. On 4 February 1942 the GKO formed a special transport committee under Stalin and from 25 March the head of army logistics controlled it. Military and civilian transport were thus put under one head. The situation then improved, only to worsen again by the end of 1942. The central authorities stepped in again and sent Central Committee secretary, A. A. Andreev, to the worst hit area, the Urals, to sort things out. A decree of 15 April 1943 put the railways under martial law, and a military code of discipline was introduced for railway workers, to tackle serious problems of indiscipline and morale. Perhaps in order to strengthen managerial powers, the political departments of the railway institutions were closed on 31 May 1943. At the same time martial law was also extended to river and sea transport—in other branches of industry it had been rescinded in the spring of 1942. A period of sustained improvement followed and lasted until the end of 1944. The reconquest of occupied territory also allowed the network to expand under Soviet control. In January 1943 it was possible to put back into operation 725 km. (450 mi.) of railway lines, in February 2,139 km. (1,328 mi.) in March 3,175 km. (1,970 mi.); in all, 18,800 km. (11,675 mi.) were restored in 1943—four and a half times what had been achieved in 1942. Double tracks and often treble tracks became widespread in the Urals during early 1942, and in general the situation there eased early enough not to hamper the war effort seriously. Still, the freight transport volume of the railways was down to 52% of the pre-war level, reaching only 58% in 1943, 68% in 1944, and 76% in 1945—and railways accounted for 83% of all freight transfers and 70% of military freight transfers.

Fuel, transport, and the production of pig-iron and steel became the major bottlenecks in the USSR's war production effort. The balance between the three sectors was particularly critical during the last months of 1941 and again in the second half of 1942. The decrease in the production of fuel was especially critical by the end of 1941, largely because of the German advance and the capture of the Donbass coal mines.

During the second half of 1942, the most serious crisis in production (except machine tools) was of basic investment goods and raw materials, especially fuels. In September 1942 the GKO ordered a crash programme for exploration and drilling in the oil regions of the interior. The party organizations of the Kuzbass and Karaganda coalfields received stinging rebukes, tens of thousands of workers were drafted into the mines, new machinery was earmarked for these regions, and new pits were opened. From October 1942 an upswing was noticeable in the Karaganda area, although mines in the Kuzbass basin showed hardly any improvement. For the north of European Russia the Pechora mines (Vorkuta and Itinsk) became the main source of coal (seeGUlag), after many new mines had been built and a new North Pechora railway line had linked this area to the areas of consumption. The reopening of the Moscow coal basin contributed most to the re-establishment of industry there and to providing the population of the region with a meagre ration of coal. During the fourth quarter of 1941 and in 1942 large investments in the oil industry were planned and carried through. By 1943 the output of coal was increasing nationwide, and oil soon followed suit. Although the fuel crisis seems to have been solved by that time, energy production—particularly crucial as the evacuation of industries had created new demands—fell further below capacity. The main reason was an imbalance between construction of new power-plants and the availability of equipment. Other reasons were the inexperience of a greatly altered or newly recruited workforce and the resulting inefficiency, particularly in the management of equipment and fuel stocks.

A great number of special metals had to be mined from new sites. Manganese now no longer came from Nikopol, but from the Northern Urals, to where the miners from Nikopol had been evacuated. Similarly, manganese from Eastern Siberia and Kazakhstan helped to fill the gap. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan the mining of wolfram, vanadium, and molybdenum had to be increased to compensate for the loss of sites in German-occupied territory. Production of aluminium was begun in the area of Sverdlovsk and the Kuzbass Basin. But by the second half of 1942 the situation in the Soviet war economy was still critical, particularly because the production of several sorts of steel and iron and of copper declined or stagnated. Only after 1943 did a general improvement set in and the newly constructed sites and plants were able fulfil most of the targets.

USSR, Table 1: Soviet arms production

USSR, Table 2: Lend-Lease v. home production of selected weapons. Arms balance for selected categories 1941–5

USSR, Table 3: Soviet and German production of selected raw materials (million tons)

USSR, Table 4: Index figures of economic development (1940 = 100)

USSR, Table 5: Index of goods available to civilians (1940 = 100)

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

3. Government and legal system

See also communism.
Between the two world wars the USSR experienced more violent changes and hardships than any other country in the world. The revolution of 1917 and a long civil war with foreign intervention had put a new class into power. The old élites emigrated, perished, or were submerged. The new, highly ideological, regime established a class-dictatorship of the proletariat through the party of the proletariat, the Communist Party. It abolished private ownership of land and industrial enterprises.

But in spite of its collectivist ideology the system rested on a charismatic leader and a personality cult around him. From the beginning terror was an integral part of it. The man who through skilful manipulation rose to absolute power after Lenin's death in 1924, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (born Djugashvili), both perfected the cult around his person and advanced the regime's indiscriminate terror to dimensions until then unknown by stamping out every form of open debate, public criticism, and opposition. He first defeated Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) and the Trotskyites, then the ‘Left Opposition’ and the ‘Right Opposition’. After the 1934 17th Party Congress, which probably tried to moderate party policies—and after the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party boss who had been regarded as the champion of moderation—the Great Terror unfolded indiscriminately. Hundreds of thousands of the political class, in particular old Bolsheviks, were killed or perished in the GUlag and prominent leaders such as N. A. Bukharin and G. E. Zinoviev, and others were condemned to death in show trials and then executed. Even before this, purges had already begun to affect the old intelligentsia and others, and in particular the technical intelligentsia. Peasants also fell victim to the GUlag in their millions when collectivization unfolded.

Stalin reigned supreme. Through his private secretariat (Poskrebyshev), and his cronies in important branches of the state machinery, he determined all major and many minor aspects of policy. This system of personal rule bred lack of initiative, a tendency to shirk responsibility, to refer matters upwards for decision, which led to often highly capricious and catastrophic decisions by the Velikii Vozhd (Great Leader).

In theory the Communist Party governed the country. Through its collective wisdom it was to arrive at scientifically correct decisions and to implement them in a rational way. Stalin, indeed, always took great trouble to posture as the representative and embodiment of party opinion, and as its defender against ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ deviations. Though internal democracy disappeared—on the basis of the anti-faction decision at the Tenth Congress ( 1921) which forbade the formation of groups inside the party—the now thoroughly hierarchical party always was, and remained, an important instrument of power, in particular an instrument of social transformation and mobilization. To some degree it had become ‘militarized’ during the Civil War when at least half of all party members were fighting in the Red Army. Even later the army remained the most important recruiting ground for the party. This reinforced its authoritarian streak and encouraged a certain predilection for pragmatic and radical solutions to political, social, and economic problems.

At the head of the party stood a general secretary who was also the head of the Secretariat of the Central Committee with its different departments which doubled up the different branches of the state administration (see Chart 1 for wartime organization). The office of general secretary had been created, and Stalin appointed to it, in April 1924. The party's leading body, the Politburo, in theory determined policy, though in fact Stalin controlled it from as early as 1930. From 1937, with the Great Purge, it had become totally subservient to him. It was ‘elected’ by the Central Committee which in turn was determined by the Party Congress. By June 1941 the Politburo only met irregularly and infrequently, and no minutes were kept. There was considerable overlap in terms of personnel between it and other high government offices. From time to time certain members took on the responsibility of overseeing certain branches of government or whole sets of ministries, or, in certain cases, of overseeing especially important tasks, such as the railways. During the war the Politburo was largely supplanted by the State Committee for Defence (Gosudarstvenny Komitet Oborony, or GKO, see below), but this did not meet in any regular and formal fashion either.

The party controlled every aspect of civilian and military life, actively governing, administering, and directing the country at all levels down to the grass roots. As the USSR boasted a planned economy, the role of the party became paramount in this field also. Every important organization, each factory, and each institution had a party cell which kept watch. The party had, as it claimed, become the ‘leading and directing’ force of Soviet society. It was extremely difficult for anybody to make a career without belonging to it or its youth organization (Komsomol). Tight censorship of broadcasting and publishing carefully filtered the information the public was allowed to receive.

The USSR did have a constitution, drawn up in 1936, but it cannot be compared to its western counterparts. It was not meant to limit the power of the state, or the party, or other organs. Its promises were not enforceable. It was not intended to secure the independence of the judiciary. Its stipulations about the procedures of government or the delineation of authority between different agencies were never really observed.

The ‘sovereignty’ of the Union Republics, of which the USSR consisted, had no real substance. For example, the constitution's Article 17, which theoretically gave the Union Republics the right of secession, was, it was explicitly stated, never to be used. Individual rights also lacked meaning, even in the realm of the so-called ‘social’ rights on which the regime often prided itself. Describing the all-important feature of constitutional reality, Article 126 declared ‘the most active and politically conscious citizens in the ranks of the working class, working peasants, and working intelligentsia voluntarily unite in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is the vanguard of the toilers in their struggle to build a communist society and is the guiding nucleus of all organizations of the toilers, both social and state.’ This made it clear that the party was not open to everybody and—as a monopoly party—was the one which called the tune.

The state administration, which ran parallel to the party, mushroomed into large numbers of very specialized and less powerful ministries called People's Commissariats. Its highest legislatures were the two houses of the Supreme Soviet: the Soviet of the Union, with one deputy for each 300,000 inhabitants; and the Soviet of Nationalities, with 25 deputies for each Union Republic, 11 for each Autonomous Republic, 5 for each Autonomous Region, and 1 for each National Area. In 1937 the two houses had 569 and 574 members respectively and they ran for four years concurrently. The constitutions of the Union Republics and Autonomous Republics were copies of the central constitution, with the exception that they were unicameral even where the Republics contained Autonomous Republics.

The governments and ministries of the Union Republics were subordinate to their counterparts at the centre, and their importance was further limited because no clear delineation of responsibilities, or power, existed. Also, the USSR Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom, had the right to suspend all decisions and orders of a Republic's Council of Commissars, and the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet could annul them. Probably such action was never taken.

The only area clearly reserved for one side was foreign policy, which remained the prerogative of the Union. The centre could and did absorb the ministries of Union Republics into its own administration or set them up itself. Ministries at the Autonomous Republic level were directly responsible both to their Union Republic's Council of People's Commissariat and to the central Supreme Soviet. Legislative powers belonged to the Supreme Soviet and its counterparts in the Union Republics. But it was by no means clear what a law was. The Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet could issue edicts (ukaz) and, according to Article 66, ‘the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR issues decrees (postanovlenie) and dispositions (rasporiazhenie) on the basis, and in pursuance, of the laws in operation.’

Defying all rules of incompatibility, the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet interpreted the laws, and it also exercised the right, between sessions of the Supreme Soviet, to pardon those found guilty under them, to ratify and rescind international treaties, to proclaim martial law, to issue mobilization orders and to declare war. It convened and dissolved the Supreme Soviet and fulfilled the role of head of state. The Supreme Soviet convened rarely—the constitutional minimum was twice a year—and for rather short periods. During the war it did not function in any serious sense. Even the Praesidium itself decided in 1938 to meet only four times a year and Stalin's appointment as Chairman of Sovnarkom did not lead to a meeting of the Supreme Soviet or its Praesidium. This clearly showed that all executive and administrative authority was vested in the Sovnarkom which, in theory, was responsible to the Supreme Soviet and its Praesidium.

Sovnarkom was not a western-style cabinet. Probably it never met regularly. In 1938 it met nine times. It had a Praesidium, also not a cabinet, rather a co-optive body providing a platform for individuals who were powerful because of their standing outside the government proper. Some Commissariats were clearly more powerful than others. Only the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, headed by Beria, had any real power, but this was tightly controlled by the Politburo and by Stalin himself. It had unrestricted powers to arrest, to send to the GUlag, and even to execute without trial. However, to a very large degree, death penalties were sanctioned at the very top by Stalin and other members of his Politburo, irrespective of court cases still pending and even if legal proceedings had not even been started.

The NKVD combined the normal functions of administering the country's internal affairs with the responsibility for the secret police and the ordinary police, or militsia. It commanded all penal institutions, the fire departments, the frontier guards, internal security troops, the highway administration and civil registry offices, and the ones responsible for statistics, surveying, and cartography. It also had a vast economic empire, based largely on the GUlag. The Commissariats apart, a host of commissions further reduced the power of Sovnarkom. Gosplan, nominally its organ, became a very powerful institution slowly assuming the functions of long-term economic planning. Below the commissariats a huge bureaucratic apparat had developed which in 1941 employed eight times more officials than in 1913.

Below the level of the Union Republics were both Autonomous Republics and oblast (provinces), okrug (districts), settlements and villages, towns, and districts within towns, which all had their own soviets which were ‘elected’ for two years. There were also Krai, large economic and administrative units in the RSFSR. Voting (in theory secret, in reality open) was, in contrast to earlier custom, direct. The local soviets ‘selected’ their executive committees (ispolkom) which were in theory dependent on them. Standing commissions of local soviets, to which non-elected personnel could be co-opted, played a considerable role in overseeing the work ordered by the soviets. There was never more than one candidate in any election and an unmarked ballot paper counted as a vote. Nomination of a candidate belonged to the so-called ‘social’ organizations of the working people, the factories and collective farms, and the Communist Party with its branch organizations. Pre-election constituency conferences were called to consider possible candidates, but final nominations would always be decided somewhere else beforehand. Very rarely were those nominated not elected—and this only locally. In 1939, out of 1,400,000 places to be filled, only 125 candidates did not gain the necessary absolute majority.

Local soviets met rarely and at irregular intervals, betraying their subordinate position to their Executive Committees. They were not instruments of representation, deliberation, and decision-making, but rather of control of subordinate agencies, of mobilization, and of measuring organizational efficiency. The Executive Committees met in private and did not publish minutes. They commanded large staffs and organizations, and according to Soviet sources they had the same tasks as central government with its emphasis on economic administration, especially in the countryside. However, in many instances, organs of local government were not responsible for what happened within their districts because large areas, industrial enterprises, and many other matters were under the jurisdiction of the NKVD, and factories and collective farms largely ran their own affairs. But there was still scope for local government agencies in public works and in food supply, and social aspects (like housing) and cultural affairs were an important part of their activities. They had to organize the military call-up and to keep records of defence obligations (for example, to provide horses or other forms of transport, especially in case of mobilization). But ultimately local government was to a considerable degree dependent on directives from above, and these had to be fulfilled without proper consideration for, and without regard to, local needs.

The court system paralleled the different levels of the Soviets which elected judges for a fixed time—usually five years. A 1938 law also gave them the right to supervise judges and to dismiss them. At the lowest level judges of People's Courts were popularly elected, but even they could be dismissed. In factories, more concerned with production than justice, special comradely courts functioned. After 1938 only one method of appeal was left and bias against those doing so was obvious, the statutes calling an appeal by an individual a ‘complaint’, one by the public prosecutor a ‘protest’.

The public prosecutor became completely independent from the Commissariat of Justice and the courts. His offices also had to check on all government departments, including the NKVD. During the great purges the jurisdiction of ordinary courts was restricted and special ‘colleges’ at all levels took over political trials. A ‘Lex Kirov’, issued after Kirov's assassination, rode roughshod over remaining procedural niceties: investigation and trial had to be finished within ten days, a summary of the accusation was handed over to the accused only 24 hours before the trial, and the proceedings would take place without public prosecutor or defence counsel. Appeals or petitions were inadmissible, death sentences had to be carried out by firing squad immediately after pronouncement. Political crimes were to be investigated by the NKVD and its ‘special councils’ could also pass judgement without any court proceedings. Torture was a common feature of political investigations.

No systematic reorganization of the country's government was undertaken during the war. The initial shock of the invasion and the lack of contingency planning led to ad hoc solutions which were altered in the light of experience. It was not institutions but individuals that were of paramount importance. The hallmark was personalized power. Perhaps this was not surprising in the light of Stalin's approach to decision-making. The specially created State Committee for Defence, GKO, with Stalin in the chair, played the key role. Its members were Molotov (deputy chairman). Budenny, Timoshenko, Voroshilov, Malenkov, and Beria, who were later joined by Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Voznesensky, and N. A. Bulganin (1895–1975). For pressing needs special ad hoc commissions were organized. The GKO was given unlimited powers and its decisions carried the force of law. It did not develop a local network, but relied on a host of specially appointed plenipotentiaries of party and industrial leaders who were superimposed on local governments but were formally independent of them. The GKO did not work as a normal bureaucratic organization. It had no formal agenda, no secretaries; no minutes were kept. It rarely assembled formally, attended by all its members. In this it was a true mirror of Stalin's leadership style, a style which was faithfully copied down the ladder. A sharp increase of personalized, dictatorial administration at all levels was the consequence.

Being a decision-making body without an executive arm, implementation of GKO's orders became the responsibility of the party, soviet, and government bodies. Here the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Sovnarkom, and the People's Commissariats were of key importance. GKO and the Stavka worked closely together. Members of the GKO delivered reports on the sector of the economy or problem area they headed and had direct access to the chairman of the GKO. Military leaders, people's commissars, and other responsible officials came and went and there was no formal agenda. It was like a permanently functioning think-tank. Each GKO official was responsible for finding a technical solution to his problem. This was often done by calling together a group of specialists and mulling over the problem until a solution suggested itself. Once a solution had been found, Gosplan, the people's commissariats, and other bodies were instructed to implement it. The GKO official played Stalin vis-à-vis other institutions. Stalin himself was a good chairman, thanks to his phenomenal memory and his ability to put rapier-like questions which penetrated to the core of the matter. Offsetting these qualities was his capriciousness. Nevertheless, he normally used experts to check on the officials and often sought out differing views. He appears to have favoured a discussion of conflicting opinions as a way of reaching a solution.

A new task confronted the regime when territory was liberated, that of reincorporating it into Soviet life. By mid-October 1944 Ukraine was wholly free of the Wehrmacht. Stalin chose Nikita Khrushchev as his plenipotentiary and ordered him to restore Soviet rule and its economy as quickly as possible. The NKVD swept through the republic but met stiff opposition from the nationalist Ukrainian insurgents. These were strongest in west Ukraine which had passed to the Soviet Union in 1940. In April 1944, 3,000 officials from the Russian east were transferred to Ukraine and given leading positions. Ukrainian nationalists continued their resistance from Polish territory. By the end of 1946 half of the leading party and government officials in Ukraine were new.

The Baltic States resisted incorporation in the Soviet Union even more vigorously than western Ukraine. Many Balts had served in the German forces and there were two Latvian and one Estonian SS divisions. Lithuania put up the strongest struggle, with partisans holding out until 1953. The NKVD systematically deported certain categories of persons from the Baltic States. In early 1945 those who had served in the Wehrmacht were dispatched east. They were followed by the intelligentsia and cultural élites. They were replaced predominantly by Russians, followed by Ukrainians and Belorussians.

However, in Moldavia, which the Red Army recaptured in late 1944 after driving the Wehrmacht out of Ukraine, there was almost no partisan resistance when the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was reimposed (see inset, Map 80). But as the indigenous Communist Party was minuscule large numbers of Ukrainian and Russian officials were posted to the republic and, unlike many other places within the USSR, there were no organized deportations after liberation.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe and Martin McCauley

4. Preparations for war and reaction to BARBAROSSA

It cannot be said that the Red Army command had failed to take preparatory measures for a war against Germany: formidable troop movements and a considerable military build-up were under way well before the German attack. On 15 May 1941 Zhukov suggested to Stalin that he forestall the Wehrmacht by attacking before it was properly deployed. Stalin's reaction is not known, but on 21 February 1941, the Soviet general staff had already passed the necessary documents for major troop transfers to the People's Commissariat for Railways. Many formations had already been moved into their locations by that date and others were in transit. By the end of 1940 Sixteenth Army of the Trans-Baikal Military district—where a war involving hundreds of aircraft and tanks and tens of thousands of troops had recently taken place (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns)—began secretly to move west. The Nineteenth Army, which had been formed in Trans-Caucasia, had also moved westwards, as did 57th Tank Division, 18th and 31st Rifle Corps, and 211th and 212th Airborne Assault Brigades. During May 1941 Twenty-Second and Twenty-Fourth Armies were also preparing to head westwards; by the end of May 1941 the 31st Rifle Corps had arrived in the Kiev Military District; and on 13 June the 62nd Rifle Corps of the Urals Military District received orders to move.

Altogether five armies moved westwards from the heart of the country, while three more were prepared for redeployment. In May and June 800,000 reservists were called up and brought to their units; on 13 May, Stalin ordered a further 28 divisions to the western borders; and in June he ordered an additional 25 divisions to the South-West front (army group). However, deployment by no means went smoothly. Troops and headquarters sometimes ended up in locations far from each other, artillery and anti-aircraft battalions found themselves at the front line without ammunition.

The policy of freeing high-ranking officers from the tentacles of the GUlag had also begun well before the outbreak of hostilities. Altogether about 4,000 were brought back. Prominent examples were General Aleksandr Gorbatov and the future Marshal of the Soviet Union Rokossovsky, who were sent to resorts to recover their health and given new command posts before war began. The most senior and able commanding officers of the east were secretly transferred to new positions in the west.

As early as February 1941 war councils of the frontier Military Districts had been ordered to set up front HQ and to move the fronts westwards. The last moved on 20 June 1941 from the Odessa Military District to Tiraspol with Ninth Army, whose HQ was also to serve as HQ for the South front. By the middle of June the structures of frontier districts had been divided into their military and administrative branches. A secret directive from the Politburo of 21 June ordered Marshal Budenny, who was to be their commander, and Marshal Timoshenko, then the commissar for defence, to set up HQ for the reserve armies at Briansk. This was the second strategic echelon for which, on 13 May, Stalin had ordered 28 divisions and four army HQ to move to the Mogilev region on the Dnieper Line from the Urals, the Caucasus, and the Far East. Also during May instructions went out to the Ural, North Caucasus, Volga, and Kharkov Military Districts to have elements of their forces ready for deployment to the line of the Dnieper and Dvina rivers.

Zhukov, while retaining his position as chief of staff, was instructed by the same Politburo directive of 21 June to oversee the South and South-West fronts, and during the first days of the war he took command in this region, in particular the forces around Lwów. General Meretskov had received a similar order for the North front. But when the Germans attacked the Red Army's deployment was by no means finished and many of its commanding staffs were, literally, trapped on the railways. As one Soviet historian has commented: ‘The Nazi command simply succeeded in forestalling our troops in the two weeks preceding the outbreak of war’ ( S. P. Ivanov, Nachal'nyi period voiny [‘The Starting Phase of the War’], Moscow, 1974, p. 212).

Soviet historiography has maintained that two plans had been worked out for the eventuality of war: a ‘special plan for the defence of the State frontier’ (in early 1941) and an ‘operational plan’ (in late 1940). The former included ‘active air operations’ to achieve air superiority, the liquidation of break-ins and, should general headquarters so direct, directives for carrying the war into enemy territory. Deployment was in any case offensive. The ‘operational plan’ dealt with counter-offensives and ‘possibly’ carrying the war into enemy territory before the main (Soviet) forces were assembled. In that event a ‘second strategic echelon’ would be formed behind the first to develop any retaliatory offensive ‘in accordance with the general strategic concept’ (ibid., pp. 204–6).

These plans meant that the deployment of troops and matériel did not meet the requirements of a defensive war. As the Stalin Line had been largely dismantled, there was no defence in depth. Also, far too many formations and supply dumps were positioned too close to the frontier. Men and matériel were not dispersed and stationed in depth, but were concentrated mainly in advance positions, making them easy targets for any surprise attack. Troops had not dug in and were concentrated where an attack was unlikely. For example, Twelfth and Eighteenth Mountain Armies were at the foot of the eastern Carpathians (useless, because of their light equipment, in defending the Ukrainian steppes) and massively at the Danube estuary. Ninth Army, probably the strongest formation of all, was concentrated in the south with a strong force of bombers to threaten the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. A German attack was not expected here because of the long lines of supply, and the difficulties presented by the Carpathians for any kind of transport. So when the Wehrmacht advanced Ninth Army had to beat a hasty retreat to avoid encirclement by German armies moving south from the centre of the front.

Deployment—and other indications which pointed towards the offensive character of Soviet intentions, such as Stalin's assumption of the chairmanship of Sovnarkom from Molotov on 6 May 1941—have been interpreted as a Soviet plan to conduct a massive first strike against Germany. But for almost all of its history the Red Army had singularly neglected defensive strategic thinking and defensive military training.

When it was attacked, on 22 June 1941, the Red Army had not only not completed its deployment and reorganization but, for reasons difficult to explain, Stalin had refused until a couple of hours before the attack to put the armed forces on full alert. The shortage of commanders was still acute, they lacked experience, and most of them had been in their positions only a short time. Tank corps and air force units had not been fully deployed or concentrated properly. No plans for strategic defence were available; all plans envisaged forward movement by the Red Army very soon; positional warfare had never been tested in exercises. Commanders thus found themselves at a loss, a situation which was compounded by totally unrealistic orders from Stalin to attack.

Top political and military echelons in the USSR were, of course, aware of the heightened danger of getting involved in the war, as is shown by the increased military production from 1937 and particularly from 1939 onward. Still, when the Germans attacked they were able to achieve a major strategic surprise.

This lack of preparedness could not have stemmed from a lack of information. The Soviet leadership had ample knowledge of the German preparations and had been warned of the impending attack through diplomatic and other channels (see Sorge, for example). It is difficult to believe that Stalin trusted Hitler. If for some time he thought a German invasion unlikely, it was because he could not imagine that Hitler, already stalemated in one war he could not win, would voluntarily embark on another. This could also go some way to explain the robustness, even aggressiveness with which Moscow pursued its interests in the Balkans—the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina; the military occupation of some Romanian islands in the Danube; the treaty concluded in 1941 with the new regime in Belgrade that triggered off the German attack on Yugoslavia—and the, by diplomatic standards, extraordinarily rude behaviour of Molotov during his visit to Berlin in December 1940. With the German invasion of the Balkans in April 1941 (see Balkan campaign) Stalin's attitude softened, because this extension of the war seemed to him irrational on Hitler's part and may have sown doubts in his mind about the improbability of Hitler attacking the USSR. If before he had slowed down delivery of goods to Nazi Germany, he now became extremely punctual. According to Soviet historians, in an attempt to stave off the German attack into the next year, he also avoided doing anything which Hitler could construe as provocation—and that was why he declined the request of the military to put the army on full alert.

One of Stalin's Soviet biographers ( D. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, London, 1991) says that Stalin believed a war between Germany and the USSR was inevitable, but would take place two or three years later because he could not imagine that Hitler would risk a war on two fronts. This presupposes, if the option of the USSR starting a war is excluded, that Stalin assumed a German victory over the UK, or at least a peace treaty between the two countries, was a certainty, a not very satisfactory interpretation.

According to some historians (see, for example, J. McSherry, Stalin, Hitler and Europe, vol. 2, Cleveland, Ohio, 1970), Stalin concluded the Nazi–Soviet Pact not in order to keep the USSR out of the war as long as possible, or to make the territorial gains which it brought, but rather to see France and the UK get entangled in a war with Germany. Even the Soviet argument, that Stalin wanted a breathing-space before a German–Soviet war broke out, presupposes war in the west, because his only safeguard would be the fact that the Wehrmacht was engaged in fighting the British and the French: a treaty alone would not bind Hitler. In a clear, logical calculation it must have been obvious to Stalin that after the British and French guarantees of Poland (see Poland, Guarantee of) and its borders a German attack on Poland meant war between Hitler and the western Allies. Through the Nazi–Soviet Pact Hitler received the freedom to attack Poland, as he had made clear he intended to. If he had wanted to prevent war, Stalin should have refrained from a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany because at that time Hitler still feared war on two fronts. But as early as 1925 Stalin had declared that a war between the capitalist countries was inevitable. What he did not say was that the USSR would keep out of it as long as possible and enter at its own choosing to maximize possible political gains. But evidence that he intended to follow this course is circumstantial and may never become available.

In 1939 and 1940 Stalin's major miscalculation lay in the underestimation of German military capabilities: Poland and France were overrun much faster than he had expected. The capitalist countries did not get bogged down in a war of attrition, as many had expected. This made his country vulnerable to an untimely German attack. According to some historians (see, for example, Werth, below) Stalin, in a speech given on 5 May 1941, even predicted that the USSR would take the initiative militarily to enter the war. In his biography, Volkogonov merely reports that Stalin hinted at the possibility of a German–Soviet war, implying that Germany would attack first. Yet in October 1938, Stalin had made clear that a socialist country was not a pacifist one and that circumstances might arise in which the Bolsheviks could attack first. But to see the Nazi–Soviet Pact, as one historian does (see E. Topitsch, Stalin's War, London, 1987), as a master plan to drive the Anglo-Saxon powers from the Continent in order to extend Soviet power all over Europe—and to portray Hitler as being tricked into attacking the USSR—is rather far-fetched.

First reactions of the political leadership after the German attack bordered on panic. Only on the evening of 22 June was the Soviet public informed officially of what had happened. Not Stalin, head of government, but Molotov, deputy chairman of Sovnarkom and people's commissar for foreign affairs, addressed the nation over the radio. Stalin did not speak until 3 July. One of the first measures of the government was to demand the handing in of private radios to the authorities. Information should only come through public loudspeakers and the official press. The NKVD deported and even killed ‘undesirable’ elements and civilians were threatened with the death penalty for spreading rumours or other minor misdemeanours. Considerable distrust of the Red Army was also shown. Dual command was reintroduced, that is commissars once again became the equals of professional officers, and thousands of reliable communist cadres were drafted into particularly sensitive units to intensify party work and boost morale. The arrest in June 1941 and subsequent execution of General D. G. Pavlov, the commander of the West front, and several of his generals was meant to stiffen resistance, but it also stemmed from a paranoid fear of espionage and sabotage which was characteristic of Stalin and his entourage.

On 22 June 1941 half of European Russia, from Archangel to Moscow and Krasnodar, was put under military law. Party control over public life was drastically reinforced. Thousands of party and Komsomol members were mobilized for the army. Party agitators swept the country. Heavy and war industries were put under direct party supervision. The political sections of the machinery and tractor stations in collectivized agriculture were reintroduced, and though many such measures were rescinded in May 1943, as was the dual command system in the army, Stalin's response to a harsh situation was, at the time, to make it even harsher. On 21 September 1941 he dictated: ‘They are saying the German swine who are advancing on Leningrad are driving old folk and women and children in front of them. They are saying there are Bolsheviks in Leningrad who find it impossible to use their weapons against such deputies (people). I think that if there are such people among the Bolsheviks, then they should be destroyed first, because they're more dangerous than the German Fascists’ (quoted in Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 420).

Stalin was equally harsh with his armed forces. On 16 August 1941 he dictated order no. 270: ‘I order that: (1)anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter, whose family is to be arrested as the family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot.(2)those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines. And those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance…This order is to be read to all companies, squadrons, batteries’ (ibid., p. 427).

He was confirmed in this rigorous attitude by reports that soldiers took fright too easily and magnified German successes and strength in their imagination. At critical moments the old tension between the military and the political leadership resurfaced. The commissar of the war council of the North-West front accused commanders of ‘defensive-mindedness’ and on 8 July advocated a counter-attack, asking the Stavka, the Red Army's GHQ, to order it. Things were different when the Kiev tragedy unfolded. The war council wanted to retreat in time, but Stalin threatened Khrushchev and Kirponos, to prevent them giving up the left bank of the Dnieper. He must therefore be given full responsibility for the ensuing catastrophe. But at least in military matters he soon learned to concentrate on general directives. Although petty meddling never stopped, he learned to accept the judgement of the military and to leave details to generals whom he trusted. There were not many of them, for Stalin distrusted even those who (following his orders) had fought their way out of encirclements. The same applied to soldiers who had fallen into German hands, but escaped or were liberated. These were either transferred to penal battalions or sent to special camps where the NKVD could ‘check’ on them.

Harsh measures originated from others, too. The war council of the South front demanded the expulsion of German settlers, reporting from the Dniester that they had shot at retreating Soviet soldiers and greeted the Wehrmacht with bread and salt. On 29 August 1941, the committee for the defence of Leningrad ordered the immediate expulsion of 96,000 Soviet citizens of German or Finnish descent to be resettled in Kazakhstan, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Altay, and Omsk oblasty (provinces) and only the swiftness of the German advance prevented this. On 31 August the Politburo ordered ‘Germans living in the Ukrainian SSR’ (i.e. Soviet citizens) to be arrested. The commissariat for defence was to mobilize all able-bodied German men between 16 and 60 into construction battalions and hand them over to the NKVD ‘to be used in the eastern regions of the USSR’. During the same month Moscow ordered the deportation of Germans in the Volga region to Central Asia and other eastern areas. In a small, but typical, incident Stalin ordered all 170 inmates of a prison near Orel to be shot without any trial after the NKVD's head, Beria, had reported on 6 September 1941 that prisoners had spread defeatist propaganda before preparing to flee. Among the high-calibre victims were two old communists and one old foe of the Bolshevik regime: Christian Rakovsky, Olga Kameneva (sister of Trotsky), and Maria Spiridonova.

Nonetheless, the regime felt forced to loosen, at least partially, the fetters with which Soviet society was held down so that the war effort could gain the widest possible support. Poets such as Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) and Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) were allowed to appear in public again. Official propaganda discarded Marxist elements, appealed to nationalist sentiments and made the war the Great Patriotic War on the model of 1812. Figures from Russian history, such as the princes Alexander Nevsky and Dmitri Donskoi who had beaten foreign invaders in previous centuries, became celebrated heroes and the subject of films. The state sought and found an arrangement with the Russian Orthodox Church (see religion). Atheist propaganda was discontinued and by the end of the war the church again had 46 bishops, 16,000 churches, and 30,000 priests.

Panic and confusion reached a high point as the Germans advanced rapidly towards Moscow. The evacuation of industries (see domestic life, economy, and war effort above) had already begun, and as early as 5 July the NKVD received orders to evacuate the state archives from the capital. First steps to defend Moscow were taken on 9 July, accompanied by special orders to foil German ‘diversionist’ activities. Many new units were created, always with an eye to political reliability. Air defence forces in particular had to be packed with party and Komsomol members. Beyond this, every battalion had to have fifteen NKVD men among their personnel. On 16 July Stalin ordered General Artemev, head of the Directorate of Operational Troops of the NKVD and also of the Moscow Military District, to organize ten divisions of the ‘Home Guards’ (Narodnoe Opolchenie; see defence forces and civil defence, below) and intermingle them with a further five NKVD divisions for deployment on the Mozhaisk front. But it still remained unclear that Moscow would and could be defended. On 8 October 1941 Stalin created a special commission under the Deputy People's Commissar for the Interior, General Ivan Serov, to plan the destruction of in dustrial enterprises. Local troikas comprising the party secretary, the chief of the local NKVD intelligence units, and a Red Army engineer, were to make the necessary preparations. The next day Serov presented to Stalin a list of 1,119 plants, 412 of them military, to be destroyed. Shortly afterwards the city soviet ordered all women with children under 14 to prepare for im mediate evacuation; and on 15 August Stalin ordered the evacuation of foreign embassies, the Supreme Soviet, and the government to Kuibyshev, and the general staff to Arzamas. This announcement created panic. The directive also ordered the NKVD to blow up all factories and power plants that could not be evacuated, should the Wehrmacht appear at the gates of the capital.

On 19 October Moscow was put under martial law. General Artemev, who wielded all military and civil authority, was under orders to suppress any outbreak of ‘panic’ by the severest measures. From 20 October to 13 December 1941 in the city of Moscow alone more than 47,000 deserters, or people who had somehow avoided military service, were detained. Sixteen people were shot on the spot for desertion, ‘fascist’ agitation, or ‘espionage’. A further 357 were executed after courts-martial. Deserters were shot in front of the troops, ‘to support the educational work’. Altogether during this time nearly 122,000 people were arrested in the city, for spreading rumours, for anti-Soviet pronouncements, and for other transgressions, and only 24,000 of them were released after their cases had been investigated. According to incomplete data 779 senior personnel—directors, chief accountants, and others—fled from 438 factories, many of them attempting to enrich themselves in the process. Still, discontent seems only to have really surfaced with grumbling and sullen faces. But the authorities did not take any chances and all public places were closely controlled. In particular the bomb shelters and the metro were supervised by the Komsomol, and the leadership, Stalin included, were informed that as a consequence of insufficient political education people had started to play cards for money in the shelters. Stalin's decisions to stay in Moscow, to hold the traditional military parade on the anniversary of the October Revolution, and to receive the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, did much to restore confidence.

At the top of government and party, centralization reached extremes. Stalin had already become chairman of Sovnarkom. On 30 June 1941, he assumed the chair in the specially created State Committee for Defence (GKO), and on 10 July he took over from Timoshenko the chairmanship of the Stavka, formed on 23 June, and on 19 July the People's Commissariat for Defence. On 8 August he became Supreme Commander of the Red Army and 14 February 1942, when a Transport Commission was attached to GKO, he became its chairman, too.

Particularly during the first phases of the war Stalin busied himself with minutiae mostly referred to him by others. On his desks landed reports on which trains had gone to the wrong places and where they had ended up. Ordinary soldiers wrote to him and he read their letters. Especially in the early stages he received reports minimizing Soviet losses and giving fanciful accounts of success. Local commanders pleaded with him for reinforcements and he would release them in small quantities. The chairman of the Moscow Soviet, Pronin, related a typical story. On 5 October 1941 the Germans had broken through between Vyazma and Kaluga and a tank column had appeared near Yukhnov. A member of the political administration of the West front, who nearly fell into their hands, got on the phone to contact Alexander Shcherbakov, Moscow's party boss. Shcherbakov immediately rang Stalin, who personally ordered the commander of Moscow's air defences to send two aircraft to reconnoitre, and then another two. The facts established, Stalin himself ordered all Moscow air defence aircraft to attack the German tank column and to deploy artillery against it.

Seen from below, this incident showed it would not do to go through the normal military channels. Everything had to be decided by the man at the top. The same Pronin brought Stalin's anger upon himself by distributing flour to the population of Moscow on Mikoyan's directive, to save it from German bombs. For this he was brought before Stalin, who saw the action as aggravating the general panic. Pronin's life hung on a thread, but Mikoyan owned up. During the ensuing altercations between Stalin's entourage (among them Beria) and Mikoyan, the latter, obviously frightened, repeatedly pleaded with Stalin: ‘Comrade Stalin, you know how I acted during the year 1937!’ (the worst year of the purges and of the decapitation of the army).

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

5. Defence forces and civil defence

The Local Air Defence (Mestnoe PVO) was responsible for air raid shelters, special preparations in case of enemy attacks and fire-fighting as a result of these, providing individual means of defence against air raids and fires, and for the anti-chemical defence of the population. Originally administered at the centre through the administration of the PVO of the People's Commissariat of Defence, in 1940 a Main Administration of the MPVO was created and integrated into the NKVD. Regionally, the MPVO was under the command of the Military Districts. Locally, the city and regional soviets had to organize all citizens between 16 and 60 for the purpose of civil defence. The work of the MPVO was very extensive and rather varied. According to Soviet sources it prepared shelters for more than 20 million people, fought more than 90,000 fires, defused hundreds of thousands of bombs and millions of mines, helped after innumerable accidents in industry, repaired thousands of buildings, and provided first aid.

The Narodnoe Opolchenie (NO, or Home Guards) were makeshift units recruited locally from men who had not been subject to the first call-up and women who not infrequently volunteered. Such units were as a rule formed in emergency situations, and they first appeared during the defence of Brest-Litovsk and Przemysl. They were often part of a spontaneous patriotic movement, but sometimes they were simply the state organizing something like the draft system locally through the party. In extreme cases NO units were sent into battle after only a few hours of training and sometimes not even that.

The Home Guards varied tremendously in shape, training, and the tasks they were given. For example, on 24 June 1941 a government order called for the creation of volunteer guards to fight Wehrmacht diversionary activities. By the end of July there were already more than 300,000 men and women in such units. The initiative for the direct recruitment of new troops through local channels was taken in Leningrad, with the approval of the Stavka, and Stalin, in a radio broadcast on 3 July, demanded the formation of Home Guards in every city where an enemy attack threatened. On 4 July GKO published an order ‘On the voluntary mobilization of the workers of Moscow and Moscow district into divisions of Home Guards’. Similar orders were given for the Ukraine, Karelia, and Belorussia. Local party units took on local recruitment and organization of the units and officers of the regular army took over their command. Factories formed regiments and brigades, cities or districts formed divisions. Workers and Komsomol members played a particular role and a troika of officer and party workers commanded the larger units. NO units were incorporated into the regular army and then complemented and filled up with regular units. But often there was no time for such preparation. Home Guards played a considerable role in the defence of Moscow and Leningrad. Altogether, 60 divisions totalling two million people were organized as NO during the war.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

6. Armed forces

(a) Background and High Command

From its formation in 1918 the Red Army was under the contradictory influences of ideological thinking and military exigencies. Initially, the revolutionaries who had just taken power aimed at the creation of a workers' militia, but the Bolsheviks were immediately confronted by the realities. The Red Guards that had successfully won and defended the revolution proved small fry for the German Imperial Army after a breakdown in the negotiations for what was to be the peace of Brest-Litovsk. The civil war finally made it imperative to build a more traditional army that would be able to defeat the Whites. It was Leon Trotsky who, with an iron fist, guided the Red Army on its path towards professionalism. A major step in this direction was the decision to accept officers of the old imperial army, and 48,409 officers and 214,717 non-commissioned officers joined between June 1918 and August 1920. Although always treated with distrust by functionaries and ordinary soldiers alike, some of the former tsarist officers were to have distinguished careers under the new regime, among them I. Vatsetis, A. Svechin, and Marshals M. Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) and Shaposhnikov. The distrust of these ‘military specialists’ (voenspetsy) found expression in a dual command structure unique to the Red Army: to every commander (the word ‘officer’ was banned until 1935) a political commissar was assigned who had to confirm orders before they became valid. This form of institutionalized non-confidence was scaled down during the years after the civil war until commanders became solely responsible for military matters, with the political commissar being responsible only for party work and political instruction. But at times of crisis (during the years of collectivization and terror, for example, and immediately after the German attack in 1941) the regime reintroduced dual control. Tensions between the two rather different groups of command personnel never quite disappeared.

The Red Army was always the army of a class and of the party. The Political Administration of the Red Army (Politicheskoe Upravlenie Respubliki, or PUR, then PURKKA) which directed and organized the work of the commissars, and which from 1925 was controlled by the Party's Central Committee, made sure it remained so. From 1937 on PURKKA was in the hands of one of Stalin's creatures, Commissar First Grade Lev Mekhlis, who presided over the purges in the army. The social composition of the Red Army, especially of the corps of commanders, was carefully watched and the party made sure that the proletarian element remained strong enough to secure its loyalty. Troops for use internally, especially the early motorized units, showed a particularly high percentage of workers and once the war had begun demoralized or unreliable Red Army formations would be swamped by mass drafts of reliable party workers.

Political instruction in the army put particular emphasis on winning supporters for the new regime and many of the former peasant-soldiers developed into the only important rural element the party could win. With the beginning of collectivization the party ordered the army to train peasant soldiers for political, administrative, and specialist work in the countryside. The army proved reliable against peasant unrest during collectivization as it been earlier, in 1920–1, during the risings in Tambov and other provinces.

Strategic and tactical thinking in the Red Army had been largely determined by the lessons drawn from the civil war. In particular the so-called ‘Red Commanders’—Bolsheviks who had mostly risen from the ranks of non-commissioned officers of the old army (among them Budenny, Voroshilov, Timoshenko, and Zhukov), or political commissars, such as Konev, who joined the commanding staff—fervently defended a military doctrine that saw in a war of movement and in an offensive spirit the essence of everything they thought was new in their ‘proletarian military doctrine’. They were supported in this by more senior officers such as Tukhachevsky. The representative of the Red Commanders, M. Frunze, who became Trotsky's deputy in 1924 and supplanted him in 1925 as People's commissar for war, fully shared the predilection for an offensive ‘proletarian’ strategy combined with a disdain for defensive thinking, and an unrealistic optimism that deemed the armies of the capitalist countries incapable of an offensive war of movement. The commanders and Frunze believed that once a war had been carried into enemy territory the oppressed workers would rise and ensure victory and revolution. Trotsky—the theorist of permanent revolution—warned against such facile optimism and denied a relationship between the class-character of the Red Army and its ability to conduct a war of manoeuvre. Frunze aggravated faulty strategic thinking by denouncing the blitzkrieg theory as a bourgeois deviation. The Red Army did not expect to have to face it.

Frunze and the Red Commanders insisted on keeping a professional army after the civil war, though Trotsky wished to create a militia army based on the centres of production, in keeping with the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat. The peacetime army that developed out of demobilization during 1924–5 was a professional army of the ‘cadres’, with a territorial militia element where recruits would be trained. The professional elements of the army provided two-fifths of the infantry, four-fifths of the cavalry, and all the technical units (air force, tank units, and engineers). Between one-sixth and one-tenth of the territorial militia units were regular cadre troops; the balance was composed of recruits who came for three-month courses but who had to be available to the army for five years. Every male, with the exception of members of the ‘exploiting classes’, had to do military service.

From 1939 on all male Soviet citizens were liable to the draft. At the same time commanders who had received only the barest military education during the civil war were dismissed—as were large numbers of ‘military specialists’—and a new corps of commanders developed. However, improvement proved slow in coming as educational qualifications for entry to military schools were lowered and deserving rank- and-file soldiers were moved up in order to strengthen the proletarian element among the commanders.

Something like a general staff had been nominally extant since 1921, but only when Frunze became commissar for war did it assume a leading role and begin to work on improving the army's training, tactical and strategic planning, and organizational structure. Under him the first, provisional, Field Service Regulations for the Red Army were issued. But the army had problems handling modern technology and strong elements of the general staff underestimated its importance. A soldier's day had three hours' less military training in it than in the old tsarist army, although this included four and a half hours of political and general education. Because of the low level of military spending more defensively-minded military men moved into the general staff, and the Stalin Line was built. However, this emphasis on the defensive was reflected neither in military teaching and practical training, nor in the new Field Service Regulations of 1929.

From the mid-1930s onwards the Red Army became a fully professional modern army. In 1935 officer ranks were reintroduced, though the title of general had to wait until May 1940. Pay for officers and pay differentials increased markedly between 1934 and 1939 and special shops and restaurants for officers were introduced. By January 1936 only 23% of the army were still of the territorial-militia type; by 1939, when its numbers had increased to three million, they had been phased out. Because of the vast size of the USSR and its underdeveloped transport system, two independent armies were created, one in the west and the other in the east, each of which could take on an opponent on its own.

During the 1930s technology and mechanization became major characteristics of the Red Army. Particular emphasis was laid on air and tank forces, but not yet on artillery. The brain behind this modernization was Tukhachevsky. He assembled a group of competent commanders who organized new branches such as a strategic bomber fleet which became the strongest in Europe, and a special tank corps to enable the army to conduct a modern war of movement. In developing modern tactics for these new branches the Red Army benefited considerably from its co-operation with the Reichswehr at the Soviet–German air base at Lipetsk and the Soviet–German Tank School at Kazan. Technical assistance was also given by the French and the Americans.

Although it has always been maintained that the military motive was a particularly strong factor in the USSR's rapid industrialization, it was a long time before the Red Army received an important share of the national budget (see Table 6) and new weapons in any sizeable number. A war scare like that of 1927, made much of mainly for internal reasons, did not make any difference. The reason may be that the industrial capacity had to be created first, before the army could even order more sophisticated weapons. The production of new weapons for the army developed as in Table 7.

USSR, Table 5: Index of goods available to civilians (1940 = 100)

USSR, Table 6: Percentage of the annual budget spent on the army

(b) Army

The war councils of the five military districts on the western frontiers had to assume, with their staffs, the role of fronts (that is, army groups) in case of war. Each front controlled a number of armies and each had a highly placed political functionary from the orbit of the Politburo added to it just before the Germans attacked. This policy somewhat obscured the chain of command. However, potential conflicts were mediated by Stalin who assumed all important political and military positions either before the war or during its first weeks. Thus the fronts were firmly under his control.

Below the military districts, or the fronts, armies were the largest military formations. Normally they existed only during wartime, but by 22 June 1941 there were almost 30 armies, and this number quickly grew. They were normally created on the basis of a military district, but there was no real continuity, as most armies were reconstituted during the war (or even before) by a different military district from the one which first established them. The word ‘Army’ could mean very different things. An ordinary army in 1940–1 might have two rifle—that is, infantry—corps, one cavalry corps, and one mechanized corps (see Chart 2), but it could be smaller or much larger depending on the theatre of war or the special role that it was assigned. Soviet military doctrine also recognized the so-called shock army (udarnaia armiia) which was trained and equipped to make large-scale attacks to punch through the opposing side's lines. It was much larger than a normal army and had between four and five rifle corps, one or two mechanized corps, a much higher share of artillery brigades, and more independent divisional tank and artillery units.

A rifle corps consisted of three rifle divisions, two corps artillery brigades, an independent anti-aircraft battalion, a pioneer battalion, a signals battalion, and service troops. A rifle division had three rifle regiments and two artillery regiments in addition to corps artillery, one anti-tank, one anti-aircraft, one engineer, and one signals battalion—all in addition to the corresponding units of the corps. Many rifle divisions still had their own tank battalion and rifle regiments also had their own artillery of fourteen guns of various calibres.

A mechanized corps consisted of two tank divisions and one motorized rifle division, a tank division of two tank regiments, one motorized rifle regiment, one artillery regiment, and one anti-aircraft battalion. A motorized rifle division had two rifle regiments, one tank regiment, one anti-aircraft battalion, and one anti-tank battalion.

Before BARBAROSSA, the shortcomings of the Red Army had already been exposed during the Finnish–Soviet war which started on 30 November 1939, even though this was fought only by the forces of the Leningrad Military District. The political and military leaderships attempted to address the apparent problems. Scrutiny of the German success against France initiated a major reorganization of the Red Army. The mechanized corps was reinstated so that armoured forces could be heavily concentrated to increase the army's mobility and offensive capabilities. Even then this return to Tukhachevsky's thinking ran into considerable resistance and the reorganization had not been completed when the Germans launched BARBAROSSA.

On paper the Red Army looked very impressive. More than 5.37 million men stood under arms; during the ten days following the invasion another five million were mobilized. It had more than 20,000 tanks, albeit mostly outdated models, but at least 1,861 (according to Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 375, about 2,000) of the newest make that were superior to anything the Wehrmacht could muster. The air force possessed about 10,000 aircraft of which 2,640—or even as many as 2,739—conformed to modern standards. According to Soviet historians there were at least 2.9 million men immediately facing the Wehrmacht, reinforced by 100,000 NKVD border troops and additional smaller units. It is quite possible that this number only included forces equipped by the local military districts and not the strategic reserve in the rear. As many as 8,000 aircraft, 1,450 of them modern designs, could have been deployed in the west, as were up to 10,000 tanks, of which 1,475 were of the KV or T-34 type, most of which were in forward positions. German and other forces amounted to some three million men equipped with somewhere between 2,800 and 3,580 (according to some Soviet sources 3,712) tanks and 2,740 aircraft.

It is not particularly meaningful when Soviet sources say that Red Army formations in the west were not fully equipped when BARBAROSSA was launched, because the planned strength of Soviet formations was considerably higher than in other armies. For example, a Red Army tank division (61 had been formed) was meant to have 375 tanks, a Wehrmacht tank division (21 were deployed in the east) had only between 135 and 209; a Red Army motorized division (31 had been formed) should have had 275 tanks, the Wehrmacht equivalent (14 at the Eastern Front) did not have any. Similarly, a fully equipped Soviet rifle division had 1,204 machine-guns, whereas a German infantry division had only 486.

Therefore, Red Army formations should have been sufficiently well equipped to repel any aggressor even if they were not up to planned strength. But the army did suffer from a shortage of traction power for its artillery and had only half the number of trucks envisaged for its motorized units. Another drawback was that radio communications had been sadly neglected; after the Germans launched their attack communications between Soviet commanders and their troops, and especially to headquarters, broke down because land-lines had been severed, a situation which could not be remedied for some while. Mistakes in training and in tactics produced catastrophic results.

The regime quickly drew a number of lessons from the initial disasters of BARBAROSSA. Co-ordination between fronts and large formations proved an immediate problem. Officers lacked initiative and a willingness to shoulder responsibility—a typical consequence of the conditions of the Stalinist command system—the staffs at corps level were found to be overburdened, while those at divisional level were also deemed unsatisfactory. The corps, as a level of command, were therefore abolished and the fronts received overseers in the form of three Main Commands for Strategic Direction; the Northern Direction co-ordinating the Northern and North-west fronts, the Northern (Atlantic) and the Baltic Fleets; the Western Direction in charge of the West front and the Pinsk River Flotilla; and the South-Western Direction overseeing the South and South-West fronts, the troops of the Briansk area, and the Black Sea Fleet. Lines of communication could have been shortened in this way and some decentralization achieved, but the Stavka, which meant Stalin, still insisted on directing fronts and even armies. Divisions were considerably reduced in size and for a while, particularly in the tank forces, were completely supplanted by brigades. To tackle the glaring inadequacies of the officer corps half a million men, often directly from the front, were given special courses for commanders.

Other changes were also implemented to improve the command system. The air force became independent of the army again and received its own commander, as did parachute and air defence forces, and formations and units from these forces were combed out of divisions and fronts—as were many artillery and tank units—and put directly under the Stavka. This put the Stavka in a position to intervene constantly in operational decisions of the fronts and individual armies which, of course, suited Stalin's habits. At the same time the Stavka created new guards formations as élite troops—something that had been ideological anathema until then (for airborne, cavalry, and guards units,see Special Forces, below).

Many of these changes did not last long. Over much of the war experimentation was one of the distinguishing features of the Soviet military system. The commands of the Main Strategic Directions were abolished during May and June 1942, and the ten to fifteen fronts (depending on military and geographical requirements) reverted to the Stavka's direct control. Occasionally the Stavka would send a plenipotentiary to co-ordinate two fronts, as was the case during the battle of Stalingrad. In August 1942 Marshal Zhukov became deputy commissar for war and deputy supreme commander, therefore the second man after Stalin in the Stavka and senior to the chief of the general staff. During 1942 the corps was reintroduced step by step as a command level as army staffs were obviously overburdened when attacks had to be organized, and 28 corps HQ were created during the year. The gradual and then fast-growing supply of technical weapons also suggested certain reorganizations had taken place. In March 1942 the formation of tank corps began first comprising two tank brigades, and one motorized rifle brigade, then with three tank brigades. From September, mechanized corps were formed with one tank brigade, three mechanized brigades, one anti-aircraft artillery regiment, and one anti-tank artillery regiment. But sufficient supporting units were still lacking, a structural fault that was rectified later. In May 1942 tank armies began to be formed for offensive actions, starting with the Third and Fifth Armies. Each comprised two tank corps, one independent tank brigade, one rifle division, one regiment of light artillery, one regiment of rocket launchers or katyusha (see rocket weapons), and one anti-aircraft artillery group. In July the formation of the First and Fourth Tank Armies with a similar organization began. But this structure still proved somewhat deficient and was modified later. Tank armies had their own HQ and war councils. By September the creation of 1st and 2nd Heavy Guards Rocket Launcher Regiments had started and at the beginning of 1943 tank guard armies also began to be formed, these initially belonging almost exclusively to the Stavka reserve.

From the first the Stavka had combed out artillery units from the fronts and had concentrated them in its own hands. Although artillery units were later built up within smaller formations the Stavka also started to create huge concentrations of artillery fire-power. By the autumn of 1942 it had begun to form whole artillery divisions as part of its reserve, which would only be incorporated into a front for special offensive or defensive operations and then withdrawn. There were two types: one for attacks, consisting mainly of mine-throwers, howitzers, and rocket launchers with only a few field guns; and one for defensive purposes consisting mainly of field guns and howitzers for counter-bombardment. In 1943 artillery corps were formed which had about 700 artillery pieces. At the end of the war there were ten of these.

During 1943 the fronts and armies in particular received special communications units and independent artillery units that were to increase efficiency considerably. Divisions received additional artillery on several levels and had their numbers of machine- and sub-machine-guns increased. But although the army's equipment became much better the Stavka still clung to the habit of building up all kinds of large reserves at its own disposal. However, as a sign of the growing trust in the army and its officer corps the number of political deputies of commanders was reduced considerably, a measure which at the same time provided additional officers.

Despite even the serious initial setbacks, at almost any time during the German–Soviet war Red Army forces must have been vastly superior in numbers to the Wehrmacht. The most comprehensive figures published by Soviet historians overestimate German strength considerably and understate the numbers for the Soviet side (see Table 8). A Soviet publication put Soviet tank forces at 20,500. German reports claimed that 13,405 had been captured and more than 9,372 destroyed up to 1 January 1942. Stalin told Roosevelt's envoy, Harry Hopkins, that the Red Army possessed 24,000 tanks at the time of BARBAROSSA. A figure well above 20,000 therefore seems more than likely. This picture is not changed by the fact that the majority of Soviet tanks were outmoded models, as a large number of German tanks were also obsolescent. The Soviet T-34 and KV tanks proved so superior to the most modern German models that German experts seriously considered copying them. But even as late in the war as the battle of Stalingrad the Red Army could not exploit this superiority to the full because of poor optical equipment and tactical ineptitude, and it was not until the end of 1943 that the Wehrmacht possessed sizeable quantities of the Tiger and King Tiger tanks, superior to the KV type, and also the improved Mark IV and Mark V, which were comparable to the T-34.

USSR, Table 8: Balance of personnel and selected categories of arms 1941–5

(c) Navy

From October 1939 Admiral N. Kuznetsov was both the navy's C-in-C and the people's commissar of the navy. Below him was a Supreme Naval Staff, headed from 1938 by Admiral L. Galler. The Soviet Navy was grouped into four principal fleets: the Pacific Fleet ( Admiral I. Iumashev), the Polar Fleet ( Rear-Admiral A. Golovko), the Red Banner Baltic Fleet ( Vice-Admiral V. Tributs), and the Black Sea Fleet ( Vice-Admiral F. Oktiabrsky). There were also a number of river flotillas, the two main ones being the Pinsk River Flotilla, and the Danube River Flotilla. The Caspian Sea Flotilla participated in the Anglo–Soviet invasion of Persia in August 1941 before moving, via the USSR's large river system, to help in the defence of Moscow. There was also the Volga Flotilla, which operated around Stalingrad; the Ladoga Flotilla, which helped defend Leningrad; the sea of Azov Flotilla; and the Dnieper Flotilla, which took part in the fall of Berlin.

The ocean-going fleets had their own war councils and staffs, which commanded warships, coastal artillery, marines and a naval air force. The navy had long been neglected and was seen as purely defensive. In 1938 this changed and a massive construction programme was decided upon. But only very few big units had been completed by the time of BARBAROSSA and the programme became irrelevant. During the course of the war 2 light cruisers, 19 destroyers, 54 submarines, and 900 torpedo-boats, minesweepers, and other small craft, were built, but many of the bigger warships were outdated, they were difficult to operate, and their crews were badly trained. Figures on the Soviet Navy vary: western estimates are somewhat higher than Soviet ones (in brackets) or they have a different definition of warship type.There were 4 (3) battleships, 1 (0) heavy cruiser, 7 medium cruisers, 5 (0) light cruisers, 78 (54) destroyers, more than 200 (212) submarines, 55 (80) minesweepers, 269 (287) torpedo-boats, some minor units, 2,800 aircraft, and 260 coastal batteries. The Baltic Fleet was the strongest. Only the submarine force played any substantial role in the war and major surface units were rarely engaged. The damage inflicted on Axis shipping was small (negligible with respect to warships), and even when the Allied Arctic convoys were being run the Soviet Navy played hardly any part in protecting them. According to German sources Soviet military forces sank 831,357 tons of shipping, with 272,203 tons being sunk by submarines and only 7,527 tons by surface units.

By the beginning of the war there was a brigade of marines (Morskaia Pekhota)—the largest unit employed—within the complement of the Baltic Fleet. After this a number of units totalling some 100,000 men were formed and trained. As a part of the fleets and flotillas they operated with land forces to defend ports and installations. When necessary these soldiers, and very often the sailors, fought as ordinary infantry. Mainly during a later phase of the war the fleets and river flotillas conducted more than 100 amphibious operations in which many thousands of marines took part. Not only the big ocean-going fleets had marines aboad their ships, but also the fleets of much smaller river boats. See alsoBaltic Sea and Black Sea.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

(d) Air Force

The Red Army Air Force and Long-Range Bomber Aviation were administered by Main Directorates of the people's commissariat for defence, while the Naval Air Forces were administered through a directorate within the people's commissariat for the navy. Operationally, the Red Air Force was subordinated at the outbreak of war to either army or front commands, and Naval Air Forces to their respective fleet commands. Long Range Bomber Aviation (DBA, subsequently retitled ADD) was directly subordinate to the Stavka. The largest tactical formation was the air division. Air divisions attached to the front commands each consisted of fighter, ground-attack, or bomber aircraft, with a single composite air division of mixed types provided at army level. Each division consisted of from four to six regiments, with fighter regiments made of four squadrons, each of twelve aircraft, and bomber regiments of four squadrons of fifteen aircraft.

The enormous Soviet air losses over the first six months of the war, the defects of the dual army—front command system, the unwieldy size of existing air regiments and divisions, and the need for more vigorous leadership, saw changes introduced into the Red Army Air Force in April 1942. General P. Zhigarev was replaced by General A. Novikov (air marshal from 1943 and air chief marshal from 1944) and a new tactical air command, the air army (vozdushnaya armiya) introduced. The new air army was a unified command supporting an army group on a designated front. In all, thirteen air armies were created during 1942 and committed to support Soviet fronts in the west, with three subsequently formed in the Soviet Far East and a further two in the interior.

As the supply of new aircraft improved after the industrial evacuations of late 1941 (see domestic life, economy, and war effort, above) obsolescent I16 and I153 fighters were increasingly replaced by new Yak1, Yak7, LaGG3, and MiG3 machines; the practical and rugged I12 Shturmovik ground attack aircraft was available in greater numbers as was the fast and manoeuvrable Pe2 dive-bomber. With the arrival of these more modern types of aircraft, though still in inadequate numbers, the air regiment was reduced to include, on average, three squadrons of ten aircraft in fighter and ground attack regiments, or three squadrons of nine aircraft in daylight bomber regiments. The remodelled air division now usually comprised two or three air regiments.

An air army consisted, on average, of a command staff, two or three fighter divisions, a Shturmovik division, and one or two night-bomber divisions, equipped with obsolete light bombers or adapted training aircraft, together with reconnaissance and liaison units amounting to some 400 to 500 aircraft. It could, however, be rapidly augmented to meet a strategic contingency with the addition of formations ‘loaned’ from the Supreme Command Air Reserve. This Air Reserve was developed from special Reserve Air Groups of the State Committee for Defence (GKO) which was formed in the autumn of 1941 to reinforce critical sectors. The Sixteenth Air Army formed to defend Stalingrad in August 1942 began its existence with no more than 300 aircraft, but had been expanded to field 2,183 machines by the opening of the battle which led to the fall of Berlin and was thus numerically superior to what remained of the Luftwaffe. The Air Reserve consisted of air corps, usually of two divisions, and contained most of the day light bomber formations available. It enabled massive concentrations of aircraft to be deployed for major offensives; 2,650 aircraft in three air armies at Kursk in July 1943; 5,700 in four air armies for the Belorussian offensive in June 1944; and 7,200 in three air armies for the fall of Berlin in April 1945. In these huge build-ups of air strength, the Supreme Command Air Reserve contributed, on average, half the aircraft required. By May 1945 twelve fighter corps, eleven Shturmovik corps, seven tactical day light bomber corps, and thirty independent divisions had been formed. Of the 17,000 Soviet Air Force combat aircraft then deployed in eastern Europe, 43% belonged to the Supreme Command Air Reserve.

Novikov, unlike his predecessor, took an active part in operational planning when major offensives were being co-ordinated. Together with his first deputy, General G. Vorozheikin, and his chiefs of air staff, Generals S. Khudyakov and F. Falaleyev, he served as a Stavka representative, closely consulted by front-line commanders and with his professional experience respected and utilized.

Long-Range Bomber Aviation suffered particularly in desperate and often unescorted raids against the advancing Wehrmacht during the first weeks of the war, with such heavy losses of its obsolete TB3 and DB3 bombers that it was soon compelled to fly by night only. In March 1942 the force was reconstituted as Long-Range Bomber Aviation under General (air chief marshal from 1944) A. Golovanov. The main bombardment function of ADD lay in the preliminary night bombing of Axis positions, railheads, and depots as a prelude to major ground offensives or counter-attacks. No less important was the part ADD aircraft played in flying supplies, ammunition, and reinforcements to isolated Soviet ground units or partisans when aircraft previously operated by the Soviet Civil Air Fleet (GVF) were pressed into service. The purely tactical role of Long-Range Bomber Aviation led to its redesignation as Eighteenth Air Army in December 1944. Equipped primarily with twin-engined Il4 bombers and armed Li2 (Soviet-built DC3) transports and with a handful of surviving four-engined TB3 and more modern TB7 bombers, Eighteenth Air Army possessed nine corps with some 1,600 aircraft by January 1945.

While aircraft of the Naval Air Forces were subordinated to the commands of the four Soviet fleets, overall administrative command was in the hands of C-in-C of naval aviation, General S. Zhavoronkov. Equipped primarily with land-based aircraft, Soviet naval air units were used mainly to support the flanks of the land war. Of all operational sorties flown by Soviet naval aircraft during the war, 31% were in air defence, 23% in support of ground forces and 14% for reconnaissance. Less than 10% were flown against Axis vessels or naval bases.

From November 1940 Soviet Air Defence (Protivo-Vozdushnaya Oborona or PVO) was an independent branch of the armed forces and its commander, General N. N. Voronov, was made a deputy people's commissar for defence. A new chief administration for air defence was created within the people's commissariat defence and made responsible for the administration of PVO's anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aviation units, whose role was to defend rear areas from attack. Operational control of the PVO was vested in military district commands, or fronts, and in the naval fleets. The PVO, which flew the same types of fighters as the Army Air Force also included the Soviet Union's observer corps. PVO zones of defence were formed with the military district structure and these were divided into regions and specific areas. Particularly important areas such as Moscow and Leningrad were defended by fighter corps. The corps was normally the largest formation except that in 1943 the First Air Defence Fighter Army was formed to defend Moscow.

Luftwaffe bomber raids on Moscow from July 1941 were opposed by 796 76 mm. (3 in.) and 85 mm. (3.3 in.) anti-aircraft guns, and by almost 600 mainly new fighters of 6th PVO Fighter Corps based on airfields guarding the approaches to the capital. Raids on Leningrad were similarly contested, although 7th PVO Fighter Corps defending the city was smaller, had fewer modern fighters, and was restricted by the smaller number of usable airfields available to it. Overall experience indicated, however, that the separation of operational direction into army-controlled A-A artillery and air force controlled fighters was unsatisfactory, and in November 1941 the Chief Administration for Air Defence was replaced by a National Air Defence Command, the Red Army Artillery Command assuming responsibility for front-line air defence.

The new National PVO Command was placed under General M. S. Gromadin as C-in-C with full operational control. Gromadin's deputies, General A. F. Gorokhov and General I. D. Klimov, headed directorates for anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aviation and were responsible respectively for some 3,300 anti-aircraft guns, 1,500 fighters in 40 air regiments, and some 182,000 men.

In the spring of 1942, the Moscow PVO zone was redesignated the Moscow PVO front and air defence armies were formed for Leningrad and Baku. Moscow, however, continued to receive the most—and the best—equipment available. The 102nd PVO Fighter Division confronting the Luftwaffe at Stalingrad in the late summer of 1942 could only field five fighter regiments flown by inexperienced pilots and equipped mainly with obsolescent machines.

Although the Luftwaffe had been slow to mount a campaign of strategic air attacks on Soviet armament factories relocated to the east, a number of bombing raids on key factories at Gorky, Saratov, and Yaroslavl were made in the early summer of 1943. These raids soon petered out as Luftwaffe bombers were switched to tactical targets in preparation for the battle of Kursk. None the less the threat was taken seriously and Soviet air defence resources were divided between two new fronts—a western covering Moscow and the industrial centre, and an eastern covering the Urals, the Volga, and the Caucasus. The Transcaucasus was, in itself, a special air defence zone. However, at this time, the post of C-in-C National Air Defence was abolished and merged with that of C-in-C Red Army Artillery, but the posts of PVO Chief of Air Defence Staff, Commander of PVO Fighter Aviation, Head of PVO Inspectorate, Head of PVO Operational Training and Head of the VNOS were retained.

At the conclusion of the European war in May 1945, the Soviet Air Defence Command covered four fronts with a force of some 3,200 fighters and 9,800 medium-calibre anti-aircraft guns. At the close of hostilities in the west it claimed 3,930 aircraft brought down by its fighters and 2,654 by its anti-aircraft guns.

Alexander Boyd

(e) Special Forces

Guards

The Red Army did not have guards or élite units before the Second World War. This policy may have been ideologically motivated, as Soviet military theorists stressed the superiority of mass armies over technical armies. When guards units came into being they did so in two different ways, perhaps wedding the concept of the superiority of an army of the masses with that of an élite. Units that had distinguished themselves in battle were honoured with the title ‘guard’. This happened first after the battle of Smolensk on 18 September 1941 when 100th, 127th, 153rd, and 161st Rifle Divisions were renamed 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Guards Rifle Divisions respectively. Technology and professionalism were also reasons for allowing a unit to have the prefix ‘guards’ and a number of special ones, such as the rocket launcher (katyusha) regiments, were given the title as were certain tank units. The title was also awarded to units of the air force and navy. However, guards units did not develop traditions and were not regarded as permanent.

Airborne troops (Vozdusno-Desantnye Vojska, VDV )

The Red Army was the first to experiment with dropping paratroops from aircraft and in April 1941 it began to form five corps which during the first weeks of the war had to be used mainly as infantry. This also happened later, during the battle for Stalingrad and the attacks on Prague and Vienna, but during the battles for Kiev and Odessa, and on the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea, smaller tactical airborne operations were undertaken. By August 1941 airborne units were taken out of the fronts and united under their own independent command. During September 1941 the formation of ten air transport squadrons began, which were later transformed into two glider and two air transport regiments. Corps formations of three brigades, one tank battalion, an artillery division, and air transport capacity came into being around the turn of the year 1941–2.

At the end of 1942 airborne corps were regrouped into divisions, but in the summer of 1943 these were supplanted by 20 guards airborne brigades. Parachutists and airborne troops were rarely used behind enemy lines in major operations. However, for crossing the Dnieper on the Voronezh front airborne operations were of great importance in 1943; here three brigades were again united into a corps. In October 1944 most VDV units were brought together into a Guards Airborne Army and in January 1945 this became part of Ninth Guards Army. Units of the VDV also played an important role in the rout of the Japanese Kwantung Army in August 1945.

Cavalry

The Red Army before the war still believed in the operational and strategic capabilities of the cavalry, although between the Finnish–Soviet war and BARBAROSSA this emphasis had been criticized. At the beginning of the war there were thirteen divisions organized into four cavalry corps. A division was equipped with 64 light tanks, 18 armoured cars, and a variety of small artillery units. By the end of 1941 the number of divisions had grown to 82, with a division on paper being more than 9,000 men strong (in reality about 6,000). Because of their high vulnerability these forces were reduced to 26 divisions or 8 corps in 1943, after which they were mainly used for diversionary tactics behind German lines, for attacking any retreating forces, and for mopping up dispersed German units in sudden advances. A short-lived attempt to form a force combining cavalry and a mechanized corps was not successful, but cavalry played a role in defeating the Kwantung Army in August 1945.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

7. Intelligence

The operation of intelligence is always two-fold: the gathering of information and its interpretation. Also, a distinction has to be made between military intelligence and political and economic intelligence. Of course, Soviet intelligence was not only collected on Germany, but also on Allied countries (see spies).

Economic intelligence was collected from many sources and Soviet organizations were extremely successful where political intelligence was concerned. For example, the GRU, the Red Army's espionage organization headed by General Golikov, collected highly reliable information on Hitler's intentions before the Nazi–Soviet pact was signed in August 1939. It was divulged by the German General Kleist during a visit to Warsaw and amounted to firsthand accounts of Hitler's conversations with Ribbentrop and an eastern specialist, Peter Kleist. In them Hitler disclosed his intention of conquering Poland and then defeating France and the UK in the unavoidable war that was to follow; only then would he attack the Soviet Union.

The GRU had an extensive espionage network in Europe. Called the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) by the Germans, its cell in Switzerland, known as the Rote Drei, was particularly effective as it obtained high-level intelligence from the LUCY Ring. In 1943 one of the Ring's sources disclosed the strategic direction of the German offensive (CITADEL) at the Kursk salient; and until the autumn of 1943, the same source passed other top secret information—including the daily Lageorientierung (situation reports)—which was transmitted to the USSR. However, other networks, which had been established in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, were quite quickly tracked down by the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (see RSHA), and eliminated.

The GRU also received abundant reports about German troop concentrations on the Eastern Front. On 15 June 1941 a GRU agent in Tokyo Richard Sorge, reported the precise date that BARBAROSSA would be launched. But Stalin distrusted agents' reports, and it was even dangerous to disclose such information to him. This innate suspicion of any intelligence which stemmed from the opposing side was characteristic of the Soviets during the war—it was one their Allies largely shared (but not the Germans: see XX-committee), except where ULTRA was concerned—and even the LUCY Ring's ‘Werther’, whose information had proved consistently accurate, was ignored over CITADEL. Even after a German aircraft with detailed plans of CITADEL abroad fell into Soviet hands, the Red Army preferred to rely on its own reconnaissance.

Soviet battlefield intelligence was very poor in the beginning, as air force losses and German air superiority rendered photographic reconnaissance flights practically impossible. The Soviet side could not even gain a clear picture of the strategic thrust of the German attack. This proved disastrous when, after the first phase of war, Hitler redirected Guderian's Panzer Army towards the Ukraine. Stalin refused to trust the patchy findings of army intelligence or to heed Zhukov's advice to take the necessary precautions against such a move. When the first major Soviet offensive around Kalinin succeeded in January 1942, the Soviet High Command did not see how well they had done and were not therefore able to exploit their operational advance fully. Similarly, in 1942, offensives were conducted on almost the whole front because German weak spots could not be detected in advance. The defeat at Kharkov in May 1942 must partly be explained by lack of intelligence because the Stavka had expected another attack on Moscow.

By the middle of 1942 the situation had begun to improve and Stavka correctly predicted the impending attack on Stalingrad. Both ‘Werther’ and British intelligence, based on ULTRA, had also predicted this offensive, but Soviet operational decisions were based only on information from the battlefield. It was then that photographic reconnaissance came into its own and 10% of all flights were now devoted to it (later this proportion rose to 40%). Another important factor in assessment of intelligence before Stalingrad was that Soviet traffic analysis (see signals intelligence warfare) had now reached a stage where the Soviet side could, for the first time, study the disposition of the German forces and pin-point the Romanian troops, who were regarded as inferior and therefore vulnerable. This was of critical value for the Soviet counter-offensive which destroyed not only the Romanian forces but the Sixth German Army as well.

During 1943 the Soviets fully developed their system of battlefield intelligence through reconnaissance in force (small units sent behind German lines) in co-operation with the partisan movement, radio interception, and the pin-pointing of German field headquarters and units through traffic analysis and photo reconnaissance. In addition to the normal military intelligence units—which were formed down to the regimental level and whose information was collated by the intelligence staff of the various fronts—special artillery intelligence and engineer intelligence units were formed, the former to target German positions accurately, the latter to predetermine the most promising axes of attack. Special counter-espionage units (see SMERSH) were also organized from the old Osobye Otdely (OO, or Special Departments) of the NKVD, and put under the commissariat for defence.

The first time that Soviet battlefield intelligence worked satisfactorily was during CITADEL, though the Soviet High Command still covered all possible advance routes, and from then on intelligence played an important and increasing role. In the battles on the River Vistula the Soviet command was able to pinpoint the location of German reserves and it also became highly accomplished at hiding its own intentions and deployment (see deception).

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

8. Resistance

Partisan warfare was not prepared in any significant way. The first steps to organize diversionary actions directed against German installations and the advancing Wehrmacht were taken by the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party, and for most of the war its head, P. K. Ponomarenko, commanded the movement. Initially, partisans—often Soviet regulars encircled or left behind the front—were soon cut off because of the moving front line and were faced with unsuitable terrain and the hostility of local populations. As 50% of all partisans were party or Komsomol members (that is, party officials and NKVD personnel ordered to stay behind) they had the additional disadvantage of being part of the regime and were regarded as aliens by the rural populations among whom they had to operate. In certain areas, such as the western Ukraine, they were completely wiped out because of the hostility of the inhabitants. Elsewhere, as in the steppes and particularly in the Crimea, they found it extremely difficult to operate for the whole period of German occupation. The harsh climate did not favour them, either. The terrain, the hostility of the population, and their reliance on air support, also forced partisans to operate in large groups.

What made partisan warfare particularly brutal was that neither of the opposing sides paid much attention to the needs of local people. Nor were they constrained by considerations of humanity or morality. However, the movement was strengthened in the early months by the way Soviet prisoners-of-war (POW ) were treated and this motivated many encircled Red Army soldiers to hide or fight on. For a while many settled down and formed relationships with local women. An example of relatively successful partisan activity during this first phase was the area around the cities of Yelnia and Dorogobuzh, east of Smolensk, where it was mostly undertaken by Red Army stragglers. But because these partisans were not trained in irregular warfare, the Wehrmacht found it relatively easy to wipe them out to prevent a resurgence of activity.

In the second phase, which lasted until the end of 1942, surviving elements of the Political Administration of the Red Army (PURKKA) managed to bring the roaming forces under their control. PURKKA personnel were also reinforced by trained party, Komsomol, and NKVD personnel brought in by air or through the German lines. This, and the continued existence of a dual command structure of commanders and commissars in the partisan forces, points to Stalin's overriding intention to demonstrate that Soviet power could not be permanently excluded from occupied areas. During this time the partisan movement developed a rather varied command structure which, however, bound the majority to higher echelons and to the underground party organizations.

In a third phase partisans undertook military activities to disrupt German communications. Considering the relatively large numbers of partisans involved, and the resources made available to them, the effect remained small. After the victory at Stalingrad partisans began to penetrate from the Briansk region, where they were strong around the fringes of the Pripet marshes, and they hampered German communications considerably during the battle of Kursk. They also infiltrated into the woods and swamps towards the River Dnieper, and into the forests of the northern Ukraine, which, up to then, had been free of them. However, they were loath to move south. Those who did faced extinction, for the Ukrainians did not welcome their presence. But the fact that the Germans had preserved the collective farms had angered the peasantry, and the growing likelihood of a German victory—and brutal German repression—induced many to turn to the partisans.

Before and during the Red Army's Belorussian campaign in 1944 partisans were used successfully to disrupt German communications. None the less, their impact was limited. Altogether 400–500,000 (German estimates) to 700,000 fighters were involved (one million according to Soviet sources), but they never exceeded 250,000 at any one time and only tied down a similar number of Axis forces. The losses they inflicted probably did not exceed 35,000. An important element of partisan activities was the gathering of intelligence. Although local populations, under the impact of the German regime, became more favourably inclined over time, partisans never received their full support. They had to force compliance and right up until the end of the war deserters turned bandits roamed the woods, refusing to come out in support of either side. The commissar system reflected the distrust the regime felt towards its partisans. Overall direction of the partisan forces rested with a special branch of the NKVD and from July 1941 onwards with PURKKA.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

9. Merchant marine

The Soviet merchant fleet did not have the same vital role to play as merchant ships elsewhere. In 1939, according to one source ( J. Meister, The Navy, October 1957, pp. 32–4), 716 merchant ships totalling 1,300,000 tons were registered in the USSR, and another 200,000 tons fell into Soviet hands when the Baltic states were absorbed in 1940. About 36% of the carrying capacity of this shipping was employed in the Caspian Sea, 25% in the Baltic, 24% in the Black Sea, 8% in the Far East, and 6% in the Arctic. Losses during the war amounted to 500,000 tons but the Soviet merchant fleet received more than this tonnage in Lend-Lease, including a number of Liberty ships, and after the war it acquired ships from Germany, Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

More important during the German–Soviet war was the USSR's inland fleet of small vessels and barges which worked on the country's large lakes and numerous navigable rivers. In 1936 this fleet comprised nearly 10,000 small self-propelled vessels and barges, 80% of which were lost during the war. When the railway network was interrupted, or stretched to its limits, the merchant flotilla on the Caspian Sea and on the River Volga had a vital role in transporting oil from the Caucasus to the north, or to the army. The volume of this traffic is difficult to gauge, but it can safely be said that without it the Red Army might have been immobilized at times.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe

10. Culture

Soviet writers and poets were active from the onset of the German–Soviet war, the ‘holy war’ as they called it. Almost all of them—more than a thousand—became war correspondents and went to the front and reported back in a concerted effort to strengthen the will to resist, and 417 of them lost their lives in doing so. They also took part in organizing and writing (not only in Russian) newspapers produced at the front for the soldiers, and, to boost morale, they held innumerable meetings with soldiers where they read from their work.

These wartime activities were organized by Alexander Fadeev who, with Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), had founded and run the Soviet Union of Writers. Alexei Surkov's poem ‘We swear Victory’ appeared the day after the Germans attacked, and on the day after that the poem ‘Holy War’ by Lebedev-Kumach (the pen name of V. I. Lebedev) was published. Set to music, it became the battle hymn of the Soviet people.

Many songs and poems were written that expressed the patriotic mood and showed its virulent loathing of the invader. ‘The Song of the Avengers’, whose first public performance was given in Moscow's Hall of Columns, became one of the most popular partisan songs. Mikhail Sholokhov wrote ‘A School of Hatred’ (published in 1942, and in English the same year), Aleksei Surkov the poem ‘I Hate’, and Konstantin Simonov—whose play The Russian People was published in Pravda and performed countrywide and at the front—wrote the poem ‘Kill Him’.

Well-known writers also participated in propaganda and what they wrote was widely read. A. N. Tolstoy, for example, produced such articles and sketches as ‘what we defend’, ‘The motherland’, and ‘Shame is worse than death’; while with others—‘The Russian Character’, ‘Russian warriors’, ‘To all Slavs’—he described the main sources of Soviet heroism as being the Russian heritage. The cruelties and crimes of the enemy were also, of course, a major topic.

In spite of the coarsening of tastes some great pieces of art were created. Alexander Tvardovsky's poem, ‘Vasilii Terkin’ was one example. The first serious attempt at depicting the war realistically in high literary form was V. S. Grossman's collection of short stories called The Immortal People ( 1942, translated into English in 1946 as The Years of the War). Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Fall of Paris received the Stalin prize in 1942, and Simonov's No Quarter and Days and Nights, both published in 1943, were received with acclaim. But the efforts of these writers to portray the war realistically were often thwarted and brought heavy criticism upon them after the war.

Officially prescribed glorification of the war posed a tricky problem for the authorities, because millions had experienced the unbearable hardships and the follies of the military and civil authorities. The post-war debate on how it should be presented seems to have been undecided for some time. In 1946, F. Panferov, editor of the journal October, who had himself written a trilogy on the ‘heroes of the home front’, wrote a ringing condemnation of the literary bureaucracy and its attempts to suppress the realities of war. Panferov wrote that Soviet writers had been told to forget the negative aspects of the war. ‘Forget how? It is possible to forget that the Germans were at Stalingrad, at Mozdok, at Moscow? How is it possible to forget the burdens our people shouldered during the war? Indeed, sometimes our shoulders cracked under these burdens.’ He went on to mock the way officials wanted to see the war pictured: ‘the workers arrived in the Urals and immediately settled into the best cottages; pork chops were immediately placed on their tables; they went at once into warm shops, immediately found what they wanted, and began at once to “fulfil and overfulfil”. But, Panferov continued, the Soviet reader was not stupid. He was not a non-participant ‘like you crocks and potsherds. He was at the front, he retreated, attacked, and he lived through terrors and joy’ (quoted in M. Gallagher The Soviet History of World War II, Myths, Memories and Realities, New York, 1963, p. 109 f).

Fadeev's novel The Young Guard ( 1945), which depicted the true experience of a partisan group, was attacked in November 1947 for not giving a prominent enough role to the party. This was understood, and meant, to be a directive to writers. Immediately afterwards Alexander Tvardovsky's Motherland and Foreignland: Pages from a Notebook was severely criticized for ‘pacifism’. At a public discussion many writers courageously defended the work, and honest accounts of the wartime experience found support from highly placed military leaders, partisan heroes, and writers of letters to the press. Panferov and Tvardovsky did not—yet—lose their positions. None the less, for a while it became very difficult for writers to present their views artistically. During the thaw of 1955–6 new accounts appeared, and writers or poets such as Simonov and Surkin recorded their ordeal of being prevented from writing the truth.

In spite of the restrictions placed upon it, literature provided for a long time the only outlet for an honest rendering of the war. Tvardovsky's poems, published in 1946, expressed eloquently and poetically the human sufferings and the feelings of those who had lost a loved one, and in 1956 Sholokhov published The Destiny of Man. But Simonov's literary account of the battle of Stalingrad, Days and Nights, which was published in 1943 (in English in 1945) probably became, because of its realism, one of the most widely read books of the Second World War.

Film directors were also fully integrated into the war effort. Their most common form of work was propaganda films, clearly intended to boost morale, and a kind of documentary which had of course, the same aim. But the documentaries did give some information and tried to convey the heroism of the front to the home audiences. The first films of this type, with titles like All Efforts for the Smashing of the Enemy and In the Defence of our Moscow, were released at the end of 1941, and others, such as The Smashing of the German Forces at Moscow, Leningrad at War, and Stalingrad followed.

Many feature films used the heroic exploits of the Red Army during the civil war as a subject to mirror their current bravery. The Defence of Tsaritsyn (the previous name of Stalingrad) was one example of this genre, and the great historic military figure, Kutuzov, also became the subject of a film of that name. Films appealing to the feelings of certain national minorities, such as the Ukrainians, the Armenians, and Georgians, also played some role; while others, which could claim some artistic merit, were based on wartime productions of Russian and Soviet writers. For instance, Raduga, about the Soviet resistance against fascist occupation, was based on V. L. Vasilevskaya's novel of the same name, and Wait for Me was based on Simonov's writings. Even satirical films were produced in considerable numbers—one described the further exploits of the Good Soldier Schweik—but the greatest artistic achievement of the war years in film-making was, without doubt, the first part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible which was produced in 1945.

The war also saw the creation of important music. Shostakovich's Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony, written in the besieged city of Leningrad, was first performed in Kuibyshev on 5 March 1942 and in Leningrad, under K. I. Eliasberg, on 9 August. It became a symbol of the will of the Soviet people to hold out under the most severe circumstances and it was immediately performed, with great success, in the West (in London first, on 22 June 1942, and in the USA, under Arturo Toscanini, on 19 August, as a sign of Allied solidarity. His Eighth and Ninth symphonies were also dedicated to wartime themes and proved very successful.

During the first months of the war Serge Prokofiev wrote his symphonic suite ‘The year 1941’, and later his Fifth Symphony, as did Aram Khatchaturian his Second. Also very topical was Prokofiev's monumental opera War and Peace, based on Tolstoy's famous novel. Dimitri Kabalevsky produced his cantata The Great Motherland, and a suite for choir and orchestra, The People's Avengers, in 1942, and his opera Under Fire, in 1943, a setting of the words of the poet E. A. Dolmatovsky and others. A number of lesser works were also composed, many of which imitated the cantata or oratorio style, which can seem somewhat embarrassing today in their vulgar plagiarization of religious styles.

Musical life continued not only in the big cities, even in Leningrad, but also for the soldiers at the front and in the rear. Tens of thousands of artists gave hundreds of thousands of concerts, which, must, of course, have included a large majority of concerts of more ‘popular’ music. These popular songs—still largely compositions by professional musicians who often put to music the words of their writing colleagues—played a major propaganda role and were regarded as a spiritual weapon in the fight against fascism.

Soviet war art was necessarily tied to official propaganda. Before the war reached Soviet territory, years of discipline had accustomed Soviet artists to painting in a style called Socialist Realism (remarkably similar to the realist paintings then fashionable in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). It was not hard to apply the same sorts of principles to pictures of soldiers, sailors, and weapons as had earlier been applied to proletarians, tractors and factories.

The horrors and tensions of war heightened the effects artists might obtain; several remarkable pictures resulted, such as Anatoley Smirnov's ‘The Last Stop’ of machine-gunners who have taken a Leningrad tram to the edge of their battlefield, or Mikhail Savitsky's ‘The Partisan Madonna’ of a young peasant woman feeding her baby while older women reap corn under militia guard in the background.

Artists were not exempt from call-up; lucky ones had notebooks with them at the front, and could make pencil sketches at least, which they could work up on to larger canvases at the end of the war, if they survived it—or much later. Yuri Neprintsev's popular ‘Resting after Battle’ was not painted until 1955; Savitsky's ‘Partisan Madonna’ not until 1967; and Tatiana Nazarenko, not born till 1944, did not paint her ‘The Partisans have come’, a deposition scene deliberately reminiscent of much religious art, till 1973. This was not the sort of war art as reportage that was being produced in western Europe in 1940–5. The war, in short, provided subject-matter for post-war Soviet painting rather more than it provided subject-matter for paintings done and reproduced at the time.

Similarly, sculptors were no more exempt from call-up than were graphic artists; but when their war service was done, there was plenty of work waiting for them in the design and carving of war memorials. Vast chunks of stone and marble were distributed, under communist party guidance, all over Soviet-occupied eastern Europe as well as within the USSR, as permanent reminders of the sacrifices made by the Red Army in order to free these territories from Nazi occupation. Such sculptors as Daniel Mitylanski (born 1924), with several years' fighting experience of their own and many dead friends, were well placed to design and carve these memorials; of which the artistic merits hardly came into question, compared with the importance the party attached to their lasting value as propaganda.

Heinz-Dietrich Löwe and M. R. D. Foot

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Linz, S. J. (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Princeton, 1985).
Moscoff, W. , The Bread of Affliction: Food Supply in the USSR during World War II (Cambridge, 1990).
Voznesensky, N. A. , The War Economy of the USSR in the Period of the Great Patriotic War (Moscow, 1948).
Werth, A. , Russia at War 1941–1945 2 vols (London, 1964).

EMPIRE, USSR AS

The understanding of the concept of empire depends on time and space. During the nineteenth century the terms empire and imperialism were associated with the spread of progress by countries claiming to represent civilized forms of existence. By the end of World War II the emergent superpowers, the United States and the USSR, adhered to an anti-imperialist, anti-empire ideology and thereby ended the colonial empires of countries such as Britain and France.

According to Leninist thought, empire and imperialism represented the highest and last stages of capitalist development after which socialism would emerge. Therefore the Soviet leadership never considered the multinational USSR, the leader of socialist revolution, to be an empire. This Leninist ideological definition of empire, while providing a framework for comprehending the Soviet leadership's approach to governing, fails to describe the dynamics of the USSR as an empire. As shown by Dominic Lieven (2000), a country must fulfill several criteria to be considered an empire. It must be continental in scale, governing a range of different peoples, represent a great culture or ideology with more than local hegemony, exercise great economic and military might on more than a regional level, and arguably govern without the consent of the people. According to these criteria the USSR was indeed an empire, however not without certain characteristics distinguishing it from other empires, such as the British, Ottoman, or Hapsburg.

The USSR was the world's largest country, extending from Europe in the west to China and the Pacific in the east, its southern borders touching the boundaries of the Middle East. Given this geographic position, Moscow was a player in three of the world's most important regions. The Soviet Union's population consisted of hundreds of different peoples speaking a myriad of languages and practicing different religions, including Judaism, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Sunni and Shia Islam. Such diversity was reminiscent of the great British and French maritime empires.

Josef Stalin's brutal industrialization policies and victory in World War II paved the way for the Soviet Union's emergence as a superpower with global reach and influence. The Soviet economy was the second largest in the world despite its many deficiencies and supported a huge military industrial complex, which by the 1960s had enabled the USSR to attain nuclear parity with the United States while maintaining the largest armed forces in the world.

Ideological power accompanied this military and economic might. The Cold War between the USSR and the United States was rooted in alternative visions of modernity. Whereas the United States held that liberal democracy and capitalism ultimately represented the end of history, the Soviet Union believed that an additional stage, that of communism, represented the true end of history. Many across the globe found Soviet communism's claims of representing a truly egalitarian and therefore more humane society attractive. In other words, the ideological and cultural power of the USSR exercised global influence.

In the midst of war and revolution many areas of the former tsarist empire became independent. With the exception of Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Poland, the Bolsheviks, through the effective and brutal use of force and coercion and under the banner of progressive Soviet communism, resurrected the empire they once called "Prison of the Peoples." In 1940 Stalin invaded and occupied the Baltic States, which subsequently, according to Soviet propaganda, voluntarily became part of the USSR. Until the late 1980s during the reform process of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leadership governed without the direct consent of the people.

land-based empire

The Soviet Union was a land-based empire encompassing all the territories of its tsarist predecessor— except Poland and Finland—while adding other areas such as western Ukraine and Bessarabia. The dynamics of a land-based empire differ greatly from those of maritime empires, such as the British and French. Before embarking on maritime empire building, countries such as Britain, France, and Spain already had a relatively solidified national identity. In tsarist Russia, empire and nation building commenced at roughly the same time, thereby blurring empire and nation. To determine where Russia the nation ended and where the empire began was difficult. This theme would continue in the Soviet era.

Given the geographical distance between the metropole and its maritime empire, a clear division remained between colonized, most of whom were of different races and cultures, and colonizer, and therefore the question of assimilation of different peoples under a single supranational ideology or symbol never arose. The metropolitan British identity was neither created nor adjusted to include the peoples of the vast empire ruled by London. In tsarist Russia the emperor and the crown represented the supranational entity to which the various peoples of the empire were to pledge their loyalty. Here, terminology is important. Two words for the English equivalent of "Russian" exist. When discussing anything related to Russian ethnicity, such as a person or the language, the word russky is used. However the empire, its institutions and the dynasty, were called rossysky, which carried a civil meaning designed to include everyone from Baltic German to Tatar. The emperor himself was known not as the "russky" tsar, but vserossysky (All-Russian).

The Soviet leadership faced the same problems of governing and assimilation associated with a multiethnic land empire. While Soviet nationality policy, in other words how Soviet leaders approached governing this large and diverse empire, varied over time, its goals never did. They were (a) to maintain the country's territorial integrity and domestic security; (b) to support the monopolistic hold on power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); and (c) create a supranational Soviet identity, reminiscent of the civil rossysky. On one hand the Soviet leadership in line with Marxist–Leninist thought believed that nationalism, the death knell for any multinational empire, was a phenomenon inherent to capitalism and the bourgeois classes. Therefore, with the advent of socialism, broadly defined working class interests would triumph over national loyalties. In short, socialism makes nationalism redundant. On the other hand, the reality of governing a multiethnic empire required the Soviet leadership to pursue several policies reminiscent of a traditional imperial polity, such as deportations of whole peoples, playing one ethnic group against another, and drawing boundaries designed to maintain the supremacy of the central power.

Unlike previous empires, the USSR was a federation that had fifteen republics at the time of its dissolution in 1991. Confident in the relatively speedy victory of socialism and communism over capitalism, in the 1920s the Soviet leadership followed a very accommodating policy in regard to nationalities. Along with the creation of a federation that institutionalized national identities, the new Soviet authorities supported the spread and strengthening of non-Russian cultures, languages,

and identities. In areas where a national identity already existed, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, great ethnic cultural autonomy was allowed. In areas where no national identity yet existed, as in Central Asia, Soviet ethnographers worked to create peoples and national borders, based on cultural and economic considerations. The Soviet drawing of borders is comparable to the creation of states by European imperial powers in Africa and the Middle East. Each created republic had identical state, bureaucratic, and educational structures, an Academy of Sciences, and other institutions whose responsibility was the maintenance and strengthening of the national identity as well as propagation of Marxist–Leninist teachings. Therefore the Soviet Union supported and gave birth to national identities, whereas other land-based empires, such as the Ottoman and Habsburg, fought against them. At the same time the central Soviet authorities recruited indigenous people in the non-Russian republics to serve in local, republican, and even all-union institutions.

Alongside nation building went social and economic modernization, and a requirement for the emergence of socialism, which would bring an end to strong national feelings. Unlike French and British colonial rule, the Soviets made dramatic changes of the societies and peoples of the USSR— one of the main thrusts of their nationality policy. While Central Asia and the Caucasus were the most economically and socially "backward," through rapid industrialization and collectivization of peasant land all societies of the USSR endured dramatic change, surpassing the extent to which France and Britain had affected their colonial possessions. Importantly, the Soviets strove to modernize Russia, which many regarded to be the imperial power. There is no such analogy in regard to the maritime European empires, whose metropole was considered to be at the forefront of modernization and civilization.

The rule of Josef Stalin brought changes to this policy. Regarding cultural autonomy a threat to the integrity of the Soviet state, Stalin imposed very strong central control over the constituent republics and appointed Russians to many of the high posts in the non-Russian republics. The biggest change, however, was in regard to the position of the Russian people within Soviet ideology. The Russians were now portrayed as the elder brother of the Soviet peoples whose culture and language provided the means for achieving communist modernity. Appreciation and love of Russian culture and language was no longer regarded as a threat to Soviet identity, but rather a reflection of loyalty to it.

From Stalin's death to the collapse of the USSR, Soviet nationality policy was an amalgamation of the policies followed during the first thirty-five years of Soviet power. The peoples of the non-Russian republics again filled positions in republican institutions. Through access to higher education, privilege, and the opportunity to exercise power within their republican or local domain, the central leadership created a sizeable and reliable body of non-Russian cadres who, with their knowledge of the local languages and cultures, ruled the non-Russian parts of the empire under the umbrella of the CPSU. However, Great Russians, meaning Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians, usually occupied military and intelligence service positions.

The Soviet command economy centered in Moscow limited the power of the local and republican authorities. Through allocation of economic resources, goods, and infrastructure, the central Soviet authorities wielded a great degree of real power throughout the USSR. Moreover, in traditional imperial style, Moscow exploited the natural resources of all republics, such as Russian oil and natural gas and Uzbek cotton, to fulfill all-union policies even to the detriment of the individual republic.

The problem of assimilation of varied peoples and the creation of a supranational identity remained. After the death of Stalin, the Soviet leadership realized that ethnic national feelings in the USSR were not dissipating and in some cases were strengthening. The Soviet leadership's response was essentially the promotion of a two-tiered identity. On one level it spoke of the flourishing of national identities and cultures. The leadership stressed, however, that this flourishing took place within a Soviet framework in which the people's primary loyalty was to the Soviet identity and homeland. In other words, enjoyment of one's national culture and language was not a barrier to having supreme loyalty to the progressive supranational Soviet identity.

Nevertheless the existence of national feelings continued to worry the Soviet leadership. During the late 1950s it adopted a new language policy, at the heart of which was expansion of Russian language teaching. The hope was that acquisition of Russian language and therefore culture would bring with it the spread and strengthening of a Soviet identity. The issue of language is always sensitive in the imperial framework. Attempts by a land-based empire to impose a single language frequently results in enflaming national feelings among the people whose native tongue is not the imperial one. Yet every land-based empire, especially one the size of the USSR, needs a lingua franca in order to govern and ease the challenges of administration.

russia and the soviet empire

One of the more contentious issues concerns the extent to which the Soviet Union was a Russian empire. The USSR did exist in the space of the former tsarist empire. The Russian language was the lingua franca. From Stalin onwards the Russians and their high culture were portrayed as progressive and therefore the starting point on the path toward the modern Soviet identity. Great Russians held the vast majority of powerful positions in the center, as well as sensitive posts in the non-Russian republics. Many people in the non-Russian republics regarded the USSR and Soviet identity to be only a different form of Russian imperialism dating from the tsarist period.

On the other hand the Soviets destroyed two symbols of Russian identity—the tsar and the peasantry—while emasculating the other, the Russian Orthodox Church. During the 1920s Lenin and other Bolsheviks, seeing Russian nationalism as the biggest internal threat to the Soviet state, worked to contain it. The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, by far the largest of the republics of the USSR whose population equaled all of the others combined, had no separate Communist Party and appropriate institutions in contrast to all of the other republics. The Soviet regime used Russian high culture and symbols, but in a sanitized form designed to construct and strengthen a Soviet identity. The Russian people suffered just as much as the other peoples from the crimes of the Soviet regime, especially under Stalin. Already by the 1950s Russian nationalism was on the rise. The Soviet regime was blamed for destroying Russian culture and Russia itself through its reckless exploitation of land and natural resources in pursuit of Soviet goals. In the closing years of the USSR the symbols of Russian identity, the tsarist tricolor flag and the double-headed eagle, were commonly seen, while cities and streets regained their prerevolutionary Russian names. For many Russians, a distinction existed between Russian and Soviet identity.

collapse of the soviet empire

Debate continues over the causes of the collapse of the USSR and specifically the extent to which Soviet handling of its multiethnic empire was responsible for it. The Soviet federal structure, although leaving real power in Moscow, nevertheless institutionalized and therefore strengthened national identities, which are lethal to any multinational empire. Yet the goal of nationality policy was the creation of a supranational Soviet identity. Despite this contradiction, Soviet nationality policy when compared to that of other imperial polities enjoyed a relative degree of success. By encouraging dependence on the state and protecting the educational and occupational interests of the local political elite and educated middle class, the central Soviet leadership blunted aspirations to independent nationhood and integrated groups within the Soviet infrastructure. While the use of local elites to govern the periphery is a traditional imperial practice, providing a degree of legitimacy to the imperial power, Soviet non-Russian elites achieved powerful positions within their respective republics, wielding power unattainable by the colonized local populations in the French and British empires.

Ideological power is as strong as its ability to deliver what it promises. Disillusionment with the unfulfilled economic promises of the Soviet ideology weakened loyalty to the Soviet identity. Gorbachev's economic policies only worsened the economic situation. At the same time, Gorbachev ended the CPSU's monopoly on power. Faced with growing popular dissatisfaction with the economic situation and loss of guarantee of power through the CPSU, regional and local political figures became nationalists when the national platform seemed to be the only way for them to retain power as the imperial center, the CPSU, weakened.

Russia itself led the charge against the Soviet center, thereby creating a unique situation. The country that many people inside and outside the USSR considered to be the imperial power, revolted against what it regarded to be the imperial power, the CPSU and central Soviet control over Russia, leading to the collapse of one of the world's great land-based empires.

See also: colonial expansion; colonialism; nationalities policies, soviet; nationalities policies, tsarist; union of soviet socialist republics

bibliography

Barkey, Karen, and Von Hagen, Mark, eds. (1997). After Empire. London: Westview Press.

Dawisha, Karen, and Parrott, Bruce, eds. (1997). The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective. London: M. E. Sharpe.

Lieven, Dominic. (2000). Empire. London: John Murray.

Nahaylo, Bohdan, and Swoboda, Victor. (1990). Soviet Disunion. London: Penguin.

Pipes, Richard. (1964). The Formation of the Soviet Union. London: Harvard University Press.

Rezun, Miron, ed. (1992). Nationalism and the Breakup of an Empire: Russia and Its Periphery. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Rudolph, Richard, and Good, David, eds. (1992). Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Suny, Ronald. (1993). The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Szporluk, Roman. (2000). Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Zhand P. Shakibi

KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, USSR Committee of State Security)

█ K. LEE LERNER

The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti or Committee of State Security) was the preeminent Soviet intelligence agency and Soviet equivalent of the American CIA. The KGB was the primary organization for intelligence and counterintelligence matters during the later Soviet period. Although the NKVD was tasked with internal security, the KBG role in political security and counterintelligence was so broad that its operations often touched on internal security matters. For example, in 1957, Soviet border guards were placed under KGB supervision.

The KGB and Western intelligence services played a continual deadly game of "cat and mouse" (both as pursuers and the pursued) throughout the Cold War, with some of the most intense activity centered on Berlin (e.g., Operation Gold and the Berlin tunnel episode). In 1967, Yuri Andropov, then head of KGB and later Soviet premier, described the role of the KGB and other state security bodies as "a bitter and stubborn battle on all fronts, economic, political, and ideological."

Origin and formation of the KGB. The first Soviet state security organization, the Cheka (aka, Vecheka or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage) was created by the new Soviet leaders almost immediately following the November revolution in 1917. In 1922, the State Political Directorate (GPU) succeeded the Cheka and was then placed under the control of the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs).

When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formally created the next year, the GPU became the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate) and was made an independent directorate (disassociated from the NKVD) of the Soviet Council of People's Commissars. In the political infighting and turmoil of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union, the OGPU was renamed the GUGB (Chief Directorate of State Security) and simultaneously placed under the control of the also reformed All-Union NKVD.

This fusion of state security and intelligence functions produced powerful influence embodied in a string of leaders that included G. G. Yagoda, N. I. Yezhov (1936), and Lavrentii Beria (1938).

In 1941, during World War II, the GUGB was split from the NKVD and granted equal status as the NKGB. The first NKGB director, V. N. Merkulov, had worked directly with Beria and followed similar brutal methodologies. The NKGB was tasked with conducting both external espionage and counter-espionage activities as well as guaranteeing Communist Party rule by suppressing counter-revolutionary organizations.

As the Nazi invasion pushed deeper into Russia, the NKGB was once again briefly fused with NKVD under its old title as the GUGB to streamline efforts to coordinate an effective defense against the Nazi forces. As the front stabilized and the Soviets began to push the Germans back, the GUGB was once again given independent status as the NKGB.

Derived from special sections of the NKVD Army (NKO) and Navy (NKVMF), a powerful new element,

SMERSH (SMERrt SHpionam or "Death to Spies") became a forerunner to KGB assassination teams. In 1940, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by SMERSH. Trotsky had long been a rival of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who recognized that Trotsy's role in launching the Bolshevik takeover of Russia alongside V. I. Lenin gave him much greater revolutionary legitimacy. SMERSH agents tracked Trotsky for more than a decade before the assassination.

Following World War II, the Soviet government renamed the People's Commissariats as ministries and the NKVD became the MVD and the NKGB became the MGB. In March, 1953, the day after Stalin died, Beria united the MGB and MVD into one organization (retaining the title MVD). After Beri's trial and execution in 1954, espionage activities were assigned to a reconstituted unit designated as the KGB and placed under the direction of the Soviet Council of Ministers. In 1978, the KGB chairman was assured a place on the Soviet Council of Ministers.

As part of his attempted reforms of the Soviet Union (e.g., glasnost ), the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev also attempted to reform the KGB before it was dissolved in 1991 but these attempts were met with resistance within the KGB hierarchy and eventually created tension significant to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fate of the KGB was sealed when its leader, Colonel General Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered KGB agents to participate in the failed August, 1991, coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. KGB-directed forces surrounded Gorbachev's Crimean dacha (house) for three tense days before the coup collapsed.

The Soviet Union collapsed and splintered in 1991. The KGB was dissolved and the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service (FSB), Russian Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK), and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) were formed (from resources that included some former KGB elements) to serve the intelligence needs of the new Russian Federation.

KGB tactics. KGB operatives were masters at tactics ranging from disinformation (in Russian, dezinformatsiya ) to assassination. As did their Western counterparts, KGB operatives also employed technology specifically designed for espionage operations. KGB agents employed a range of weapons, including exotic devices like poison pens that fired hydrocyanic acid gas or pellets of ricin. Another celebrated example involved the KGB development of the lipstick pistol, or "kiss of death." Created by KGB scientists, the lipstick pistol contained a 4.5-mm single-shot pistol encased in rubber and disguised as a tube of lipstick. The deadly poison ricin came to widespread public attention in 1978, when it was used during the KGB assassination of Bulgarian dissenter Georgi Markov in the United Kingdom. Markov, a BBC broadcaster, died several days after being jabbed by an umbrella at a bridge in London. The poison-tipped umbrella injector was designed by KGB scientists.

KGB operatives used disinformation not only directly against Western governments, but also against governments not following pro-Soviet policies. For example, KGB operatives used disinformation tactics in attempts to destabilize Egyptian president Anwar Sadat for his increasingly pro-Western policies by issuing false statements and writing attributed to Islamist fundamentalists. The disinformation not only contributed to the assassination of Sadat, but also helped fuel Islamist terrorism.

To avoid direct conflict with the U.S., the KGB funded subversive groups and domestic terrorists within the United States (e.g., the Weathermen, a 1960s radical group) through intermediaries such as Cuba.

Spy vs. spy. As did their Western intelligence counterparts, KBG officers continually attempted to recruit agents and plant moles in Western intelligence organizations. The KGB's success in this effort was unparalleled, the most infamous success coming with the compromise of British intelligence by the Cambridge University spy ring and mole Kim Philby.

KGB methods of suppression of moles and traitors could be brutal. According to one eyewitness account, when KGB officers discovered a fellow officer had provided information to the CIA, he was thrown feet first into a roaring furnace while his colleagues watched.

The most well known mole for Western intelligence operating within the KGB was Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky initially served the Soviet regime faithfully, but when he became disillusioned with communism and the Soviet leadership, Penkovsky ultimately offered his services to British intelligence. United States President John F. Kennedy used information provided by Penkovsky during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The KGB subsequently arrested Penkovsky. After being convicted of treason, Penkovsky was executed.

The Legacy of the KGB. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the KGB, access to secret archives and testimony of former KGB officers and agents has exposed several double agents. The extent of the Walker family espionage activities became apparent, and specific sensitive U.S. Navy and National Security Agency documents were discovered in the KGB archives.

In 1994, long-time CIA veteran Aldrich Ames was discovered to be a KGB mole. The information he sold to the KGB included the names of Russian double agents and operatives working for the U.S. within the Soviet intelligence community, ultimately leading to their capture, imprisonment, or execution by Soviet authorities.

In 2001, FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen was arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage. Hanssen eventually pled guilty to charges that he had spied for the KGB.

Although the predominant sentiment in contemporary Russia is one of relief from fear of the KGB, some express the sentiment that the once omnipresent intelligence-gathering entity was so powerful and invasive that it minimized the commission of ordinary crimes, which now plague Russia.

Some of the bizarre disinformation created by the KGB has become a source of urban legends occasionally regurgitated by ill-informed or profoundly anti-U.S. critics. For example, documents in the KGB archives provide evidence that operatives mounted a disinformation campaign laden with pseudo-scientific "proofs" that the United States had deliberately created the AIDS virus in the laboratory to use as a biological weapon.

The KGB mounted a major disinformation campaign during the Korean War that resulted in lasting influences on North Korean and Western relations. KGB operatives disseminated information that accused U.S.-led United Nations forces of using biological and chemical warfare against North Korean civilians, information that is still propagated by the North Korean government and so continues to poison public opinion against the U.S. and other Western powers.

█ FURTHER READING:

BOOKS:

Bittmann, Ladislav. The KGB and Soviet Disinformation. Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers, 1985.

Kessler, Ronald. Moscow Station: How the KGB Penetrated the American Embassy. New York: Scribner's, 1989.

Mitrokhin, Vasily, ed. KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer's Handbook. London: Frank Cass, 2002.

PERIODICALS:

Gordievsky, Oleg. "The KGB Archives."Intelligence and National Security 6, no. 1 (Jan. 1991): 7–14.

Waller, Michael J. "State within a State: The KGB and its Successors" Perspective IV, no. 4 (1994).

OTHER:

Romerstein, Herbert. "Disinformation as a KGB Weapon in the Cold War." Prepared for a Conference on Germany and Intelligence Organizations: The Last Fifty Years in Review, sponsored by Akademie fur Politische Bildung Tutzing, June 18–20, 1999.

SEE ALSO

Ames (Aldrich H.) Espionage Case
Assassination
Assassination Weapons, Mechanical
Berlin Tunnel
Biochemical Assassination Weapons
Cambridge University Spy Ring
Cameras
Cameras, Miniature
CIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency)
CIA, Formation and History
Cold War (1945-1950), The Start of the Atomic Age
Cold War (1950-1972)
Cold War (1972-1989): The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Concealment Devices
Crime Prevention, Intelligence Agencies
Cuba, Intelligence and Security
Czech Republic, Intelligence and Security
Dirty Tricks
Disinformation
Document Forgery
Double Agents
Hanssen (Robert) Espionage Case
Intelligence Agent
MI5 (British Security Service)
MI6 (British Secret Intelligence Service)
Propaganda, Uses and Psychology
Rosenberg (Ethel and Julius) Espionage Case
Soviet Union (USSR), Intelligence and security
Stasi
Ukraine, Intelligence and Security
Venona
Walker Family Spy Ring

USSR (also U.S.S.R.) hist. • abbr. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

USSR Abbreviation of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, see Soviet Union

USSR see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics .

USSR See SOVIET UNION.

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics