Stalin as war leader. Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili-Stalin (1879–1953), was the only leader on the Allied side who dominated the war machine of a major power throughout the Second World War. His military experience was limited. He was exempted in the
First World War on grounds of physical unfitness. In the Russian Civil War, after the Bolsheviks had seized power, he was appointed as a political
commissar on the southern front; he also worked in the Red Army in the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920. While he had never been a soldier, he had always fancied himself as a commander. He had interpreted his political duties in 1918–20 very broadly and had intervened on strategical and tactical questions. The death of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) opened the doors to a struggle for political power which, by the end of the decade, Stalin had convincingly won; and military matters continued to engage him as master of the Kremlin. The First Five Year-Plan, with its forced-rate dash for industrialization, contained an emphasis on military production. Stalin also stressed the need to produce a young generation of Soviet commanders: his suspicion of the existing officer corps was such that he exterminated most of them in the bloody purges of 1937–8.
Throughout the 1930s he and his government confronted threats to the USSR's security from Japan in the east and Germany in the west; and he could draw no comfort from the reluctance of the democratic western states to combat the advance of
fascism energetically. His worries were, however, underpinned by a judgement that the next world war would probably be between coalitions of capitalist powers. He declared a belief, in line with Lenin's predictions, that the world's only socialist state ought to be able to stay out of such a conflict.
It was with this mental framework that Soviet diplomatic manoeuvres were undertaken in 1939, the year when a short but intensive war was fought in Manchukuo against the Japanese (see
Japanese–Soviet campaigns). Therefore, the search for security in the west seemed a logical priority and there have been suggestions that Stalin had always favoured a pro-German orientation in international relations. The merely tentative overtures of the UK and France in the summer of 1939 put the matter beyond doubt. Stalin had never had moral scruples in foreign policy. Relations with Italy, for example, had not been adversely affected by Mussolini's fascism. Nevertheless, Nazism had been castigated as a transcendent evil in the Soviet press and the sudden signing of the
Nazi–Soviet Pact in August 1939 therefore took Soviet citizens, as well as the rest of the world, by surprise.
Stalin's military and political dispositions once the war started have incurred odium. He completed the seizure of eastern Poland before Hitler had captured Warsaw, and a Nazi–Soviet friendship treaty on 28 September (see
Nazi–Soviet pact) consolidated his gains as falling within the new formal boundaries of the USSR. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were swiftly forced into the USSR in June of 1940. Finland, too, was invaded by the Red Army, and the bitter
Finnish–Soviet war of 1939–40 ensued to the north of Leningrad.
The resistance in eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia was short-lived and brutally repressed. The Great Terror in the USSR had abated by 1939, but now it was repeated in the newly incorporated territories. Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians suffered as others had before them. Particularly vulnerable to arrest and execution were persons from professional, commercial, and cultural strata. Officers in the old armies of the republics were also searched out, captured, and either sent to the
GUlag or killed. Stalin had determined on the decapitation of the nations he had conquered. This was war in every sense except that most of the victims were not soldiers and the killing was in the main done not by the Red Army but by the
NKVD.
Finland, however, resisted strongly. Stalin sought a redrawing of the boundaries as the minimum aim and the establishment of a Finnish Soviet republic if all went well. But incompetence and complacency pervaded the Soviet military effort. The commanders co-ordinated the attack badly; they also evinced little understanding of the superiority of mechanized units over infantry. Finland capitulated in March 1940, but on terms which involved chiefly a shifting of the Soviet–Finnish border at Finland's expense.
The difficulties that his force had in subduing a small state annoyed Stalin (and cheered Hitler). His personal and political hostility to his first deputy commissar for defence, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937), whom he had had executed in 1937, had induced him to overlook the marshal's merits as a military thinker—Tukhachevsky, had been a long-term advocate of tanks and other mechanized formations. But finally Stalin learned the necessary lesson. Cavalry and infantry, so much touted by cronies of Stalin like
Voroshilov and
Budenny, could no longer be accepted as more useful than tanks and other modern weaponry. This in turn pushed Stalin into redoubling his programme of aircraft and tank production. Factory output quotas were raised still further. Labour disciplinary codes were tightened even more. Stalin wanted to be ready for the contingency of war, be it against Japan in the east or Germany in the west.
The rapidity of the
fall of France took him unawares, and his medium-term planning was thrown into disarray. In particular, his insistence on rebuilding Soviet defences at the extremity of the territory newly incorporated in the USSR left the country with the worst military scenario: the old defence system was half-dismantled (see
Stalin line), but the new one had not been built. Stalin, of course, was not the only political or military figure to have overestimated French power. German generals had doubted Hitler's optimism. Japan's absorbtion in the extension of its Pacific empire diminished its threat to the USSR; but, through the first half of 1941, Stalin talked privately about the strong possibility of an eventual war with Germany. Even so, he believed that his diplomatic deal with Hitler would hold for longer than it did. Indeed he was unrivalled in his obtuseness about the precise and accurate intelligence he received regarding the nature of German aggressive plans. Not only his spy
Richard Sorge in Tokyo but also a series of informants, from German soldier-defectors through to Churchill, warned him about them. He even contrived to overlook the significance of German reconnaissance flights over Soviet soil.
The burden of his effort was to appear conciliatory to Hitler. In 1940 he had prevailed upon the Germans to accept that the USSR's interests in the Balkans and Turkey should be respected; but in the following year he softened his tone in messages to Berlin. Shipments of grain and oil to Germany continued to be arranged in strict accordance with the official trade agreements, even though the Germans stopped supplying their set quotas of machinery in return.
In addition, Stalin turned down the request of
Timoshenko and
Zhukov to order mobilization in mid June 1941. Subsequently Stalin was to remark that, if Germany and the USSR had stuck together, they would have been invincible. His prognosis, then, was based upon the hope that Hitler would—at least for a time—share his own perspective on political and military realism in Europe. In the meantime he sent frenzied messages out to his subordinates to raise output levels for tanks and aircraft, to maintain morale in the armed forces, to indicate to an anxious (but, because of the heavy state censorship, ill-informed) populace that nothing could trouble the friendly relations between Germany and the Soviet Union.
The
blitzkrieg across the River Bug on 22 June 1941 (see
BARBAROSSA) astounded him. For hours he refused to sanction retaliation: he still hoped against hope that what was happening was a mere ‘provocation’. Eventually he came to his senses; but, although he participated in the emergency decision-making, several days passed before he recovered from the shock. He left it to
Molotov to broadcast the appalling news to the public. Stalin's private thoughts were despairing: ‘Everything which Lenin created we have lost for ever!’
Stalin pulled himself back from what was nearly a complete mental collapse. In the first month of the war he operated cautiously and without his previous confidence. The débâcle of Soviet arms was awesome to contemplate, let alone to reverse in practice. The German advances were so rapid that towns and villages in Soviet-held territory were overrun before the inhabitants knew that a war was in progress. By the end of 1941 the German Army had lodged itself only a few dozen kilometres from
Moscow and in the suburbs of
Leningrad; and the south of Russia, including the entire Transcaucasus, lay in imminent danger. Half the industrial and agricultural resources of the USSR had been seized; half the population had been caught in the wake of the rapid German invasion. Stalin, self-styled military and political genius, had led his country to a greater defeat even than had been suffered by Alexander I at the hands of Napoleon in 1812.
Yet Stalin recovered his confidence to some extent within a fortnight of the invasion. On 3 July 1941 he agreed to address the public by radio. Careful listeners could discern a vocal tremulousness as well as the sound of clinking glass as he refreshed his throat. Yet his iron determination was also on display. Hitler was to be resisted with all the resources, human and material, at his command.
The speech began with the invocation: ‘Comrades! Friends! Brothers! and Sisters!’ These words were notable for including the whole population and not merely the supporters of the Communist Party. Class struggle, Bolshevism, Marxist terminology: these were largely missing. To the fore was the call to arms, to the unity of all patriots, to the defeat of the hated invaders. Stalin, man of steel (as his name implies in Russian), had come through his personal trauma. He had little choice but to make this endeavour: neither he nor his regime would survive defeat by Hitler. The facts about the genocide and mass starvation practised by the
Gestapo and the German Army were not yet widely known, but enough information was available to inspire Stalin and his confederates to stiff resistance.
Not that public statements were the whole story. In July 1941 a meeting took place between Stalin and the Bulgarian envoy Stamenov.
Beria and Molotov were in attendance. Stalin proposed that an overture should be made to Hitler offering a separate peace with Germany involving the cession by the USSR of vast areas then under German occupation. It would be an arrangement similar to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk accepted by Lenin in 1918. The Bulgarian refused to make the overture, and the idea was dropped. Thereafter an unequivocal policy of resistance was pursued.
A state committee of defence, uniting the organs of army, party, government, and police, was formed on 30 June 1941. All other public institutions were subordinated to it. Stalin was its chairman and remained in the post throughout its existence. He refused at first to assume the title of Supreme Commander. Probably the knowledge that further grievous disasters would befall the Red Army discouraged him from identifying himself too closely with military leadership. Possibly he also bore in mind that Tsar Nicholas II had attracted nothing but grief from a similar decision in 1915. But other counsels prevailed in the state committee of defence. If he wanted popular support, he had to take a fuller obvious responsibility. On 10 July he appointed himself Supreme Commander.
Stalin's formal qualifications were much greater than Roosevelt's and Hirohito's, but weaker than Hitler's and Churchill's. He had plenty to learn. At the beginning of his political career he had been a party functionary. In 1912 he had risen, by co-option, to membership of the Bolshevik faction's Central Committee and after the October Revolution he had entered the Bolshevik-led government as People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs. Subsequently he became the chairman of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate. His activities as a political commissar had not increased his reputation for military competence among those who worked with him; indeed he was blamed by Lenin and Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) as a major reason why the Red Army's advance on Warsaw was botched in mid- 1920. Thereafter, he concentrated his career inside the central party apparatus. Giving up his governmental jobs, he became the party's general secretary in 1922. Since the party controlled and directed the government, his power was immense as soon as Lenin, the chairman of the government (or Sovnarkom), died. And yet it was only on 6 May 1941, a few weeks before Hitler's invasion of the USSR, that Stalin took up the governmental chairmanship for himself.
Stalin's limitations as military expert did not inhibit him. He had anyway thoroughly intimidated his command staff by means of the recent bloody purges; and the Red Army's forced retreat towards Moscow was blamed by the Supreme Commander not on himself but on his commanders. General D. G. Pavlov became his scapegoat and was summarily shot. Stalin took control. By November 1941, he was already demanding that the Red Army should launch a counter-attack on the German forces as they dug in for the winter short of Moscow. This request was regarded as a military nonsense by the Soviet High Command. Their battered forces needed to be re-grouped, re-equipped, and re-trained for the battles in prospect along the front that sprawled from Leningrad in the north down towards the Black Sea. But Stalin had his way, and some kilometres of ground were won back in severe wintry conditions. He was unworried by the human cost. He considered that, in demographic and industrial capacity, the USSR could afford to be much more wasteful than Germany and intended to show that the Germans were not invincible. Hitler's forces, moreover, were going to be denied a winter of leisurely reinforcement, and he also rightly foresaw that an improvement in civilian as well as military morale would occur if even a small victory could be extracted.
By early 1942 he was telling his commanders that Hitler was doomed. Always driving the Red Army ever forward, he had insisted in September 1941 that
Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, should not be surrendered. This was the utmost folly. As was anticipated by his generals and political commissars, the result was that hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were trapped in a German pincer movement.
But the defensive mode remained uncongenial to him. In the spring of 1942 he ordered preparations to be made for a Soviet offensive to the south of Moscow in the direction of
Kharkov in the eastern Ukraine. Again he trampled on informed advice. Again the amassment of troops, machines, and
matériel was insufficient. Despite
Shaposhnikov's last-minute remonstrations, the offensive took place. Defeat followed, with large Soviet losses, and the German Army could move still more freely in the region of the River Volga. The experience sobered Stalin somewhat. His Commanders noted that his military knowledge increased substantially by the end of the first twelve months of the
German–Soviet war. He had bought this knowledge at huge cost, but it was to be put to good use in the ensuing period.
Stalin felt that the key to victory was as much political and economic strategy as military. The integrity of his system of power was crucial to him. But he changed style considerably. His appeal to his listening public as brothers and sisters was an attempt to appear homely, patriotic, and even rather non-political. Despite his Georgian accent, he wished to appear a fitting leader for Russians.
For Churchill or Hitler, such a
démarche was unnecessary. For years they had used the forms of national pride without equivocation. Stalin, however, led the
Comintern which directed the activities of communist parties around the world and which was committed to ‘proletarian internationalism’. Russian nationalism had grown in the 1930s, but had been handled with some finesse. Yet the wartime emergency threatened the regime's collapse and Stalin wrapped himself unashamedly in the flag of Russian nationalism. Tsarist commanders from previous centuries like Suvorov and Kutuzov were elevated in esteem (see
decorations,
USSR). Traditional Russian values were stressed. Stalin did not quite strut the stage as a tsar—for instance, he appealed in his broadcast to his ‘brothers and sisters’ rather than to mere lowly subjects—yet the patriarchal style was otherwise prominent.
On the whole, Stalin conducted his propaganda at long range. Unlike Churchill or even Hitler, he rarely appeared in public. The great exception was the annual parade on the anniversary of the October revolution, when he saluted troops and tanks heading directly out to the front. But he visited the front itself only once, and then only fleetingly (although he made much of it in his letters to the Allies).
Among his other devices to rally popular opinion was a relief of pressure on the Orthodox Church (see
religion). Inviting the patriarch to the Kremlin, he had the gall to enquire why so few priests were available. The patriarch refrained from replying that Stalin had killed thousands of them in the GUlag. Tanks were now paid for and blessed by priests as they rolled off the factory assembly lines. Cultural self-expression also became somewhat freer. Poets like Anna Akhmatova were allowed to broadcast, so long as they did not stray into commentary prejudicial to the regime. Composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich produced symphonies which inspired everyone, regardless of faith or political opinion, behind the war effort (see also
USSR, 10).
The official cult of Stalin as an omniscient leader was not dismantled. His ludicrous autobiography, which he had secretly edited, was printed in millions of copies; and the history of the Communist Party, written in his image (and again under his attributed supervision) continued to be published. Only in out lying villages was the apparatus of official propaganda weakly established.
Things also changed in the daily press.
censorship in the Soviet-held areas was never removed, and lies, big and small, were told daily by the regime's spokesmen; but the contents of newspapers and radio broadcasts became more believable than for many years. The truth of Nazi
atrocities was seen by Stalin to be a highly effective means of summoning up national support, and
Pravda was allowed to reduce its previous quotient of ideology.
war correspondents such as Vasili Grossman toured the frontal areas and recounted how the German invaders were exterminating Jews and communists wherever they caught them and reducing the rest of the population to levels below those of human subsistence.
Other relaxations, too, were allowed. There were food shortages in the towns of central and northern Russia, even though the quotas of procurements were maintained at a high level. Consequently a blind eye was frequently turned to the urban black market: getting the population fed by any means to hand was considered the priority. Stalin could bide his time until, with the defeat of Hitler, he could reimpose the old forms of control.
And, if there were wartime relaxations, there were also measures to increase the demands on society. Stalin was aware of historical precedents. He knew from the textbooks that few tsars had been unwilling to sacrifice vast material resources (as had Alexander I in the retreat before Napoleon in 1812) or vast numbers of people (as had Peter the Great in his several wars or Nicholas II in 1914–17). The ruthlessness of Ivan the Terrible was greatly to Stalin's taste. At a banquet in 1937 he had declared—off the record—that, if anyone thought of betraying the country's cause, he would ‘physically destroy him together with his clan’. Like Ivan, he considered that people worked best when they walked in ‘holy terror’ of what would happen to them if they failed to fulfil their duties to the state.
Accordingly two infamous instructions were given to Red Army generals by Stalin. The first was Order No. 227, issued on 28 July 1942. It bluntly demanded that no further territory whatsoever, once the initial German invasion had been halted, should be surrendered. To give up territory even for sound strategical reasons was considered treason.
The other had been issued earlier, on 16 August 1941: Order No. 270. It stated that any Soviet soldier taken prisoner should be deemed a traitor. Men were required to die fighting rather than fall into enemy hands. Not even Hitler was so ruthless. Stalin could not trust his men to face up to the horrors of Hitler unless they knew they would surely otherwise encounter the horrors of Stalin. The risk he ran became obvious in the summer of 1942 when
General Vlasov's forces, about to be cut off and captured by the Germans in northern Russia, asked Stalin's permission to effect withdrawal. Vlasov's bravery and competence were beyond question, but Stalin would not yield; the forces were duly overwhelmed and taken prisoner.
Vlasov's fury was such that he offered to form units from Soviet
prisoners-of-war to fight on the Eastern Front against the Red Army (see
Soviet exiles), his immediate aim being the overthrow of Stalin. But he also intended, as a patriot, to turn on Hitler whenever he had the chance. Thousands of Russians, starved and demoralized in German
concentration camps, joined him. They sensed there was little to lose since Stalin already regarded them as
traitors for allowing themselves to be captured. In fact both Vlasov and his men were cruelly deceived by Hitler, for few of them were allowed to fight on the Eastern Front as they had wanted.
But the episode indicated that Stalin, while cognisant that a war must be fought politically as well as militarily, made some egregious mistakes. His own son Vasili was captured in the middle of the war. Strictly speaking, compliance with Order No. 270 would have entailed that members of Vasili's family in Russia, including the supreme commander, should have had their rations withdrawn. But nobody pointed this out to Stalin; and, in any case, he got round the problem with glacial aplomb by simply disowning his son. When Hitler arranged for approaches to be made for a bartering of Vasili Stalin in return for some German generals, Stalin felt no need to respond. Thus he stressed that his will to defend every inch of Soviet-held territory to the last drop of blood of the last Red Army infantryman was infrangible.
The situation in mid-1942 still seemed far from promising from the Soviet viewpoint. Various meetings between representatives of the Allies had evinced no firm promise by the UK and the USA to launch a rapid invasion of France. The brunt of the war against Hitler would therefore be borne by the USSR for the foreseeable future. Supplies were in the meantime sent to Moscow. Crucial to the Soviet war effort were the
Lend-Lease jeeps, the canned beef, and the sugar shipped, often by the
Arctic convoys in danger from German aircraft, submarines, and surface warships.
The Eastern Front was fought over intensively. The siege of Leningrad grew tighter; and, on the Volga,
Stalingrad became a cockpit of the struggle between the Soviet and German armies. The fact that the city bore Stalin's name added to its singularity as a prize of war. Stalin favoured Stalingrad as the springboard for a strategic counter-attack in mid-summer 1942.
Zhukov firmly faced him down on operational grounds. But in September 1942 Stalin got his way. Stalingrad was fought for to the last square metre. The city became a huge, baking graveyard. As German forces steadily lost the battle under weight of Soviet superiority in numbers and equipment, so Hitler—like Stalin before him—refused to sanction retreat. By the end of January 1943 Stalingrad was again a Soviet city.
By then the USSR's output of tanks and aircraft was vastly greater than Germany's. In the summer of 1943 the Germans tensed themselves for one last massive offensive. They chose a bulge in the Soviet line of defence near
Kursk and hurled their tanks at it. Stalin and his commanders threw men and machines into the gaps made by Hitler's forces. As usual, Stalin advocated counter-attack as the best means of defence. But now he hearkened to advice. A defensive posture, aimed to defeat the Germans by remorseless attrition, was adopted and was effective. And defeat at Kursk was the death-knell of Nazism on the Eastern Front.
Still Stalin drove his men on. Not sparing his own health, his working day lasted twelve to fourteen hours, and he continued to toil into the small hours of the night. This had become natural for his body clock, but he imposed his habits on everyone else: his colleagues had to be ready to receive a call from him at any time of night. His memory was as impressive as his resilience. Commanders and politicians were frequently surprised by his detailed recollection of the names of middle-ranking officers and their geographical locations. His growing technical comprehension had not altered a reliance on his tried and tested methods of rule. He harangued his colleagues in person and, in case they should fail to remember who was boss, he usually kept one of their close relatives in a
GUlag. It was as if Churchill had taken the precaution of holding Mrs Eden in the Tower of London on below-subsistence rations while his foreign secretary,
Anthony Eden, conducted state affairs.
This was an unusual pattern of governance. No other Allied, or indeed Axis, leader so humiliated his colleagues. He would not tolerate high-ranking functionaries meeting in groups away from his presence. Nobody was to have the chance to plot against him. Stalin also had the habit of inviting the members of the state committee of defence to country dinner parties where he would get them drunk (and perhaps make them do a dance) so as to loosen their tongues.
He frequently reinforced any decisions with telephone calls to impress urgency on his subordinates. But systematic and intimidatory informality was part of the pattern of his rule. And yet even he needed a regular administrative centre, and successive chiefs of staff (particularly
Vasilevsky) were empowered to keep tight control over communications and files. His commanders grew to respect as well as fear him. Not only Vasilevsky but a large number of other youngish commanders earned promotion at his hands:
Timoshenko, Zhukov,
Rokossovsky,
Konev. Zhukov made a name for himself by daring to say the unsayable to the supreme commander. As his trust in their expertise increased, their scope for initiative was expanded. Success was be rewarded with fame, medals, and privileges. Epaulettes, titles, modes of address: all reverted to the tsarist customs. In October 1942, Stalin demonstratively abolished the system of political commissars in the Red Army in order to exhibit his confidence in the High Command.
Not that Stalin's hyper-centralized oversight was dispensed with. The Soviet bureaucracy, civilian and military, had always been very chaotic; and resistance to Moscow's instructions had typically taken the form of time-wasting and the formation of local cliques. The terror inflicted on the administrative strata of state and society in the late 1930s had increased this tendency. Only fools were unaware of the possibilities of being purged. Prudence induced people into making ‘arrangements’ with dependable friends and associates.
Stalin persisted in trying to eradicate these trends. He did not succeed: they were inherent to the nature of his regime. And yet, whatever his difficulties may have been, he virtually always got his way in matters of domestic or foreign policy which were thought by him to be crucial. In other matters, too, he frequently interfered. For example, he offered authoritative judgements on both biology and linguistics in the 1940s. Yet he recognized that he needed active assistants to break through the lines of bureaucratic retrenchment, and he often used plenipotentiaries to investigate, control, and bully on his behalf. The state committee of defence was in some ways like an 18th century royal court. Stalin had
Beria to run the security policy, Georgy Malenkov (1902–79) to co-ordinate the party, N. I. Voznesensky to handle the economy. These vigorous, ambitious, and merciless men were employed to shake up their respective bureaucracies and to act as a counter to the authority of the military High Command. And among themselves they engaged in competition for Stalin's favour, for he cunningly arranged for their various areas of competence to overlap. They consumed themselves in mutual exhaustion and had little time or energy to plot against him. Stalin, by his own lights, was loyal to them in wartime, but they all had vivid memories of the recent purges. Ruthless in the performance of their tasks, they could never forget that they served a ruthless terrorist as their master.
In fact Stalin had slackened the pace of arrests since early 1939, but he did not empty the GUlags of their surviving victims. The generals who were released at his whim in order to fight the Germans were the exceptions, and the millions of other convicts toiled on with nothing but death to look forward to. And while repression on the scale of the Great Terror did not return to the Soviet population as a whole, it was applied intensively to certain large groups. The Poles and Balts in Stalin's prisons continued to be treated vengefully; and all nationalities suspected by Stalin and Beria of a probable pro-German orientation were uprooted
en masse and transported by cattle trucks into the inhospitable depths of the country. Such was the fate of the Chechens and other peoples of the north Caucasus; of the Crimean Tatars; of the Volga Germans (see
deportations).
Not that the rest of the population had an enviable life. Consumer needs were subordinated to the demands of the armaments industries under Voznesensky's direction. Tanks and aircraft were being speedily produced from the Urals and western Siberia after the feats of evacuation achieved in 1941. Soviet prospects had improved to such an extent by the winter of 1942–3 that the contingency plans for the transfer of the capital from Moscow to Kuibyshev on the Volga were never carried out, though the staffs of foreign embassies were moved there.
After the battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Germans were constantly on the retreat. The Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic republics: all were steadily hauled back into the zone of Soviet administration under Stalin. His reprisals against those who had collaborated with the Germans were as terrible as they were predictable. On and on he drove his commanders through the last months of 1943 and the spring of 1944. Repeatedly he indicated to the Allies that it was the blood of the population of the USSR that was winning the war and conserving the blood of others. Only in June 1944 did he obtain what he had been demanding since 1941: the opening of a so-called ‘Second Front’ (see
OVERLORD), though the western Allies had been engaged against German troops on mainland Europe since September 1943 (see
Italian campaign). The British were especially galled by his use of this term since they had fought Nazi Germany for nearly two years before the USSR's entry into the war. Even so, the crucial and predominant contribution made by the USSR to Allied victory over Germany was beyond dispute.
As Hitler's imminent demise was scented, Stalin rose to new heights of prestige at home and abroad. He made himself Marshal in 1943. His fame among western Allied troops as ‘Uncle Joe’ the indefatigable anti-Nazi was understandable but exaggerated: it had been he, after all, who had sanctioned the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression and friendship treaty in 1939, and had contemplated suing for peace with Hitler in July 1941.
There were others fighting against Hitler who had a realistic viewpoint of him, chief among them the Poles. Stalin's fears about a resurgent Poland had led him to order the massacre of thousands of defenceless Polish army officers in
Katyń forest and elsewhere in the year following the Nazi–Soviet Pact; and his will to stamp Poland under his heel was undiminished as Soviet troops again advanced on Polish territory in 1944. Poland's future had already been discussed, much to Stalin's chagrin, at the first meeting of the main leaders of the Allies—Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt in Teheran in November 1943 (see
EUREKA). Stalin wanted no further interference in his dirty business. His intentions were revealed implicitly when, on the first major occasion since Soviet entry into the war, he stopped his forces from advancing. This occurred in summer 1944 as they reached the River Vistula. Instead of crossing the banks to help the
Warsaw rising, the Red Army was ordered to wait while Hitler carried out Stalin's butchery for him.
International issues were now at the top of Stalin's political agenda. Despite what he said to his fellow Allied leaders, he wanted his forces to be the first to enter Berlin. At the Teheran conference he had proposed the extermination of 50–100,000 German officers. Roosevelt diplomatically assumed that he was joking, but Churchill felt physically sick: he saw all too clearly that Stalin was proposing the geographical extension of methods of dominion which had served him effectively for more than a decade in his own country.
Nevertheless, the frightful chaos and carnage that awaited their forces in the final campaigns against the Germans, put enormous pressure on his allies to come to terms with Stalin. At their Yalta conference in February 1945 (see
ARGONAUT) an agreement was made about spheres of military and political influence. Stalin was left in potential control of all eastern and east-central Europe. The period of operation of the agreement was left unclear, but Stalin discerned no reason why it should not be made permanent. He even managed to extract concessions for the USSR in the Far East, including the promise of a military base in China. Reparations, too, were to be secured from Germany. Characteristically Stalin attributed his own deviousness to his rivals: ‘I think that Roosevelt won't break the Yalta agreements; but, as for Churchill, that one might do anything!’
As the Yalta conference broke up, Soviet armies stood on the Oder and the Danube and the armies of the western Allies on the Rhine. The race was on, as Stalin saw things, for the
fall of Berlin. If he had been deliberately dilatory before Warsaw, he was recklessly demanding of his commanders now. Drawing a line on the German map between the forces of Zhukov and of Konev, he left them to compete for the honour of entering the German capital first. The various forces converged in April 1945, and the Berlin garrison commander capitulated on 2 May. The official national surrender to all Allied forces followed, and was ratified on 8 May.
Stalin, his regime, and his country had been pulled back from the brink of disaster in four years. Defeat would have brought swift death, slow starvation, or a lifetime's gruelling servitude to the entire Soviet population under Nazi domination. Stalin's personal contribution to victory was double-edged. The contemporary official praise in the USSR was extreme and would be merely comic if it had not been inflicted on millions of people while Stalin lived. His determination to win the war, to drive his colleagues and subordinates to the utmost, and to inspire his society is well-attested. His capacity to intervene decisively at the points of military or economic bottleneck was abundantly in evidence. He also learned fast how to run the war machine more or less competently and even to hearken to advice.
And yet the price was high for his leadership. The miscalculations before and during BARBAROSSA were stupendous. The subsequent human and material losses caused by his rigid insistence that no unit should retreat and no soldier surrender were awesome. The liquidation of generals who sustained defeat and of ‘suspect’ ethnic groups was gruesome. The peoples of the USSR would have fought hard against Hitler because they knew what Hitler would do to them without the necessity for Stalin to outmatch Ivan the Terrible in brutality.
The manner of Stalin's victory, furthermore, left a murderous regime intact at home and able to replicate itself in eastern and east-central Europe. At the very end of the war, as the Americans moved in to defeat Japan, Stalin declared war on the Japanese and seized some of their islands (see
Japanese–Soviet Campaigns). He would undoubtedly have imposed Stalinism as widely in the Far East as in Europe if only he had had the opportunity. As it was, his desires were unopposable only in the West. With his backing, mini-Stalins seized power in most countries to the east of the line drawn down the middle of Europe at the Yalta conference and set the scene for the
Cold War.
The Allies met again in Potsdam in July (see
TERMINAL). By then Roosevelt had died and his successor,
Harry Truman, took a stronger line against Stalin. Churchill, too, was replaced, by the Labour leader
Clement Attlee who hated
communism as much as Churchill did. Yet Stalin's power was untouched by them. His image as a war hero was assiduously cultivated. He agreed, with sham modesty, to accept the title of Generalissimo as a token of reward for his services. Not all the acclaim for him, however, was forced. Despite the repression he had organized and maintained against his own citizens, he also enjoyed widespread respect and admiration. The demonic figure in the Kremlin was secure in power until his death in March 1953.
Robert Service
Bibliography
Deutscher, I. , Stalin (Oxford, 1949).
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