style="font-size:15px;"> By 28 June when Minsk fell, such fantasies were dispelled. Stalin suffered a collapse of nerve which caused him to retreat to his dacha in the forest outside Moscow. When a Kremlin delegation headed by Anastas Mikoyan visited him on the 30th, he greeted them with obvious unease, asking sullenly, ‘Why have you come?’ He appears to have anticipated his own overthrow by the minions whom his vast misjudgement had betrayed. Instead, those irredeemably cowed and subservient men besought their ruler to lead them. This, at last, Stalin roused himself to do; on 3 July, he broadcast to the Russian people. In a notable break with the uncompromising authoritarianism that defined his rule, he began with an emotional appeal: ‘Comrades! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and fleet! I address you, my friends!’ He called for a ‘Patriotic War’, the pre-emptive destruction of everything useful in the enemy’s path, and partisan warfare behind the front. Implicitly recognising the British as allies, without irony he declared the war to be part of ‘a united front of peoples standing for freedom’. Then he threw himself into personal direction of every detail of the Soviet Union’s defence as chairman of the Stavka (Staff HQ), the State Committee for Defence, the People’s Commissariat for Defence and the Transport Commission. On 8 August, he also appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Red Army.
Stalin would ultimately prove the most successful warlord of the conflict, yet no more than Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt was he qualified to direct vast military operations. Ignorant of the concept of defence in depth, he rejected strategic retreat. His insistence that ground should be held to the last, even when armies faced encirclement, precipitated their destruction. Following the early battles, thousands of officers and men deemed guilty of incompetence or cowardice were shot, including Western Front commander Dmitry Pavlov. Stalin responded to reports of mass surrenders and desertions with draconian sanctions. His Order 270 of 16 August 1941 called for the execution of ‘malicious deserters’, and the arrest of their families: ‘Those falling into encirclements are to fight to the last…Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by all available means.’ Order 270 was read aloud by commissars at thousands of soldiers’ assemblies.
In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion; many more were shot out of hand, without a pretence of due process. A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders – more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war. Even Russians who escaped from captivity and returned to the Soviet lines were seized by the NKVD and dispatched to Siberia or to staff battalions – suicide units – which became institutionalised a few months later, in the proportion of one to each Soviet army – the equivalent of a Western Allied corps. As Hitler’s spearheads approached Moscow, more than 47,000 alleged deserters were detained in the city; hundreds of people were executed for alleged espionage, desertion or ‘fascist agitation’. Political officers at every level were granted powers matching those of operational commanders, a grievous impediment to decision-making on the battlefield. Stalin sought to manage personally the movements not merely of armies, but of single divisions.
The German invasion prompted a modest surge of popular enthusiasm for Mother Russia: some 3,500 Muscovites volunteered for military service within thirty-six hours, as did 7,200 men in Kursk province in the first month. But many Russians were merely appalled by their nation’s predicament. The NKVD reported a Moscow legal adviser named Izraelit saying that the government had ‘missed the German offensive on the first day of the war, and this led to the subsequent destruction and colossal losses of aircraft and personnel. The partisan movement which Stalin called for – that’s a completely ineffective form of warfare. It is a gust of despair. As for hoping for help from Britain and the United States, that’s mad. The USSR is in a ring, and we can’t see a way out.’
Correspondent Vasily Grossman described an encounter with a cluster of peasants behind the front: ‘They are crying. Whether they are riding somewhere, or standing by their fences, they begin to cry as soon as they begin to speak, and one feels an involuntary desire to cry too. There’s so much grief!…An old woman thought she might see her son in the column that was trudging through the dust. She stood there until evening and then came to us. “Soldiers, take some cucumbers, eat, you are welcome.” “Soldiers, drink this milk.” “Soldiers, apples.” “Soldiers, curds.” “Soldiers, please take this.” And they cry (these women), they cry, looking at the men marching past them.’ Yevgeni Anufriev was one of a host of messengers delivering call-up orders to the homes of reservists: ‘We were surprised how many of the recipients tried to hide so that they wouldn’t have to accept the papers. There was no enthusiasm for the war at that stage.’
The overwhelming majority of the Red Army’s soldiers were conscripts, no more eager for martyrdom than their British or American counterparts. Some arrived drunk at mobilisation centres, after long trudges from their villages. Soviet educational standards had risen since the Revolution, but many recruits were illiterate. The best human material was drafted to units of the NKVD, directed by Lavrenti Beria, which eventually grew into an elite enforcement arm 600,000 strong. Men from Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic republics were deemed too politically unreliable to serve in tank crews. As a consequence of Stalin’s purges the Red Army suffered a critical lack of competent officers and NCOs.
Infantrymen in the first months of war were taught only how to march, wearing portyanki – footcloths – to compensate for the shortage of boots; to take cover on command; to dig; and to perform simple drills with wooden rifles. There were insufficient weapons, no barracks or transport. Each man learned to cherish a spoon as his most useful possession – veterans said they might throw away their rifles, but never the spoons tucked into their boots. Only officers had watches. In the desperate days of 1941, many recruits were herded into action within a week or two of being drafted. A regimental commissar named Nikolai Moskvin wrote despairingly in his diary on 23 July: ‘What am I to say to the boys? We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us?’
Moskvin did his best in a harangue to his unit, but next day acknowledged its failure: thirteen men had deserted during the night. A Jewish refugee, Gabriel Temkin, watched Russian troops advancing to the front near Białystok, ‘some in trucks, many on foot, their outdated rifles hanging loosely over their shoulders. Their uniforms worn out, covered with dust, not a smile on their mostly despondent, emaciated faces with sunken cheeks.’ Self-inflicted wounds were commonplace. When a war correspondent sought to flatter a Soviet commander by asserting that casualties looked astonishingly cheerful as they arrived at hospitals from the battlefield, the general responded cynically, ‘Especially those wounded in the left hand.’ Self-mutilation declined sharply after suspects began to be shot. Beyond sanctions for failure, on 1 September the Stavka introduced the only comfort ever provided to its soldiers: the legendary ‘hundred grams’ or ‘product 61’, a daily allowance of vodka. This proved important in sustaining men’s will to resist, but reinforced the Red Army’s pervasive, self-immolatory culture of drunkenness.
A critical strand in the Soviet Union’s response to Barbarossa was a commitment to the doctrine of total mobilisation, first articulated by Mikhail Frunze, the brilliant war minister under Lenin. Michael Howard has observed that, while the Russians suffered a stunning tactical surprise in June 1941, strategically and psychologically they had been preparing themselves since 1917 to fight a big war against Western capitalism. It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the eastward evacuation of key factories and workers, the fortitude of those who carried it out, and the importance of its success. Russia’s industrial migration eventually embraced 1,523 undertakings, including 1,360 major plants. Fifteen per cent were transferred to the Volga, 44 per cent to the Urals, 21 per cent to Siberia and 20 per cent to Soviet Central Asia, in 1.5 million railway wagon-loads. Some 16.5 million workers embarked on new lives in conditions of appalling privation, labouring eleven hours a day, six days a week, initially often under open skies. It is hard to imagine that British or American workers could have established and operated production lines under such
