of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, at the cost of imposing misery and death on millions of dispossessed peasants, alone made it possible for the country now to build the tanks and planes to resist Hitler. His prioritisation of heavy industries capable of undertaking weapons manufacture reflected his acceptance of Frunze’s total war concept. An American diplomat evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga was one day astonished to find himself in the midst of a vast, unidentified industrial area a few miles from the city, which the Russians had ironically christened Bezymyanny – ‘Nameless’. On a nearby airfield stood hundreds of newly completed aircraft, produced in its plants. The 1941 industrial evacuation proved one of the crucial achievements of Russia’s war. Every Soviet citizen over fourteen was declared eligible for mobilisation for industrial labour. With civilian rations cut to starvation levels, only the produce of private vegetable gardens enabled millions to survive. The nation was officially informed that squirrel meat contained more calories than pork, and those who could catch such prey ate it.
Though astonishing industrial output was achieved amid chronic hunger, it would be mistaken to idealise this: production of a Soviet aero engine required five times as many man hours as its US counterpart. Yet the evacuation represented part of what a British intelligence officer once called ‘the Russian genius for piecemeal improvisation’. Another feature of total war was the wholesale deportation of minorities whose loyalty was deemed suspect. Stalin accepted the drain on vital transport resources needed to remove – for instance – 74,225 ‘Volga Germans’ from their own little republic to remote Kazakhstan. Later, they would be followed by many more such outcasts, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars.
In western Russia, the invaders’ juggernaut still rolled forward, sustaining complacency in Berlin. Hitler busied himself with detailed planning for his new empire. He decreed the permanence of occupation, guided by three principles: ‘first to rule, second to administer, third to exploit’; all dissent was to be rewarded by death. As early as 31 July, Goering ordered preparations for a ‘total solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. Tens of thousands of Russian Jews were slaughtered where they were found by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads which followed the Wehrmacht’s spearheads. Nazi officials began drafting plans for a transfer east of thirty million Germanic colonists. Hundreds of thousands of young women were shipped to the Reich from Ukraine and the Baltic states to become domestic servants and farm labourers. Some went not unwillingly: amid the ruin of their shattered homes and communities, they faced destitution. On 19 August, in his diary Goebbels expressed surprise that Hitler thought the war might end soon and suddenly: ‘The Führer believes a moment may come when Stalin will sue for peace…I asked him what he would do if that happened. The Führer replied that he would agree to peace. What then happened to Bolshevism would not matter to us. Bolshevism without the Red Army does not represent a threat.’
Since the 1917 Revolution, the population of the Soviet Union had endured the horrors of civil war, famine, oppression, enforced migration and summary injustice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the absolute human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake, and eventually became responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven million of Stalin’s people, of whom sixteen million were civilians. A soldier named Vasily Slesarev received a letter, carried to the Soviet lines by partisans, from his twelve-year-old daughter Manya in their home village near Smolensk: ‘Papa, our Valik died and is in the graveyard…Papa, the German monsters set fire to us.’ The family home was burnt, and Slesarev’s son Valerii died of pneumonia while hiding from the invaders. Manya continued: ‘Many people have been killed in the villages round here. And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can’t even call them humans, they’re just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!’ If such missives were cynically exploited by the Soviet propaganda machine, they reflected real circumstances and passionate sentiments in thousands of communities across vast expanses of Russia.
Sergeant Victor Kononov wrote to his family on 30 November, describing his experiences after being taken prisoner by the Germans: ‘The fascists drove us on foot to the rear for six days during which they gave us neither water nor bread…After these six days we escaped. We saw so much…The Germans were robbing our collective farmers, taking their bread, potatoes, geese, pigs, cattle and even their rags. We saw farmers hanging on gallows, corpses of partisans who had been tortured and shot…The Germans fear every bush, every little noise. In every collective farmer, old or young, they see a partisan.’
The partisan movement, sustaining armed resistance behind the German lines, began in June 1941 and became one of the most notable features of Russia’s war. By the end of September the NKVD claimed that 30,000 guerrilla fighters were operating in Ukraine alone. It was impossible for the invaders to secure the huge wildernesses behind the front. But bands of desperate men, conducting a campaign dependent on starving civilians for food, were by no means acclaimed by them as heroes. One of their commissars, Nikolai Moskvin, wrote: ‘It’s not surprising that local people run off and complain to the Germans. A lot of the time we’re just robbing them like bandits.’ Later in the campaign he added an emotional postscript: ‘I am writing for posterity that partisans undergo inhuman sufferings.’ So did civilians. The struggle for survival, in a universe in which the occupiers controlled most of the food, caused many women to sell their bodies to Germans, and many men to enlist as auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht – ‘Hiwis’, as they became known: 215,000 Soviet citizens died wearing German uniforms. But partisan operations achieved a strategic importance in Russia, harassing the German rear and disrupting lines of communication, unmatched anywhere else in the Nazi empire save Yugoslavia.
Moreover, for all the Wehrmacht’s dramatic successes and advances, the Red Army remained unbroken. If many of Stalin’s soldiers readily surrendered, others fought on, even in hopeless circumstances. They astonished the Germans by their week-long defence of the frontier fortress of Brest in June; a divisional report asserted that its attackers were obliged to overcome ‘a courageous garrison that cost us a lot of blood…The Russians fought with exceptional stubbornness…They displayed superb infantry training and a splendid will to resist.’ The Soviets had some good heavy tanks. As Hitler’s commanders smashed one Soviet army, they were bemused to find another taking its place. On 8 July German intelligence reported that, out of 164 Soviet formations identified at the front, eighty-nine had been destroyed. Yet by 11 August the mood of Halder in Berlin was much sobered: ‘It is increasingly clear that we underestimated the Russian colossus…We believed that the enemy had about 200 divisions. Now we are counting 360. These forces are not always well-armed and equipped and they are often poorly led. But they are there.’
Helmuth von Moltke, an anti-Nazi working in the German Abwehr, wrote to his wife, expressing regret that he had been foolish enough ‘in my heart of hearts’ to approve the invasion. Like many of his fellow aristocrats in France and Britain, his loathing for communism had exceeded his antipathy to Hitler: ‘I believed that Russia would collapse from within and that we could then create an order in that region which would present no danger to us. But nothing of this is to be noticed: far behind the front Russian soldiers are fighting on, and so are peasants and workers; it is exactly as in China. We have touched something terrible and it will cost many victims.’ He added a week later: ‘One thing seems certain to me in any case: between now and 1st April next year more people will perish miserably between the Urals and Portugal than ever before in the history of the world. And this seed will sprout. Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind, but after such a wind as this what will the whirlwind be like?’
Initial bewilderment among the Russian people following the invasion was rapidly supplanted by hatred for the invaders. A Soviet fighter landed back at its field with human flesh adhering to its radiator grille, after a German ammunition truck exploded beneath it. The squadron commander curiously picked off fragments, and summoned the unit doctor to examine them. He pronounced: ‘Aryan meat!’ A war correspondent wrote in his diary: ‘Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time – a time of iron – has come!’
Hitler repeatedly switched objectives: at his personal insistence, in July Army Group Centre, driving for Moscow, halted in the face of strong Russian resistance.
