The Great Patriotic War and the death of Stalin

Soviet troops at Stalingrad. Bundesarchiv.

The challenge of the 1930s

In the early 1930s, Stalin had no constructive or consistent foreign policy: he simply wanted the USSR to survive. Yet increasingly the the Soviet Union perceived itself to be surrounded by hostile powers. In 1931 Japan established a puppet state in Manchuria. In 1933 the Hitler government banned the German Communist Party. 

In 1934, on the advice of Maxim Litvinov, his pragmatic Commissar for Foreign Affairs, the Soviet Union ended its isolation and joined the League of Nations. Fear of Nazi Germany and Stalin's past as a revolutionary led him to give aid to the the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War. The USSR sent instructors and military advisors, and Russian tanks and planes played a part in the Republican attack on Madrid in the winter of 1936-7. However, the Republican defeat in 1939 owed much to Stalin's obstructionist tactics towards other left-wing groups fighting in Spain. (This is described in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.)

The alliance with Germany

The USSR was excluded from the Munich Agreement of September 1938, and the capitulation of Britain and France to Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland led Stalin to doubt whether Britain and France would ever stand up to Germany. After the German invasion of Prague in March 1939, he came to the conclusion that war was inevitable. In May he dismissed Litvinov and replaced him with the hardline Vyacheslav Molotov, opening the door to a more flexible policy towards Germany. Soviet options were limited: either an agreement with Hitler or an agreement with the western allies, France and Britain. Yet Franco-British diplomacy was sluggish and it was not clear they were interested in a deal.

Molotov: a new foreign minister for a new policy.
Dutch National Archives, The Hague.
Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau.
Public domain.

On 23 August 1939 Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the infamous Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The secret protocol to the treaty proposed the partition of Poland, and Russia to include Finland, Latvia and Estonia in the Soviet sphere of influence. On 17 September Red Army troops crossed into Poland from the east and moved south to the frontier with Romania and Hungary. Poland was thus sealed off on all sides. 

On 28 September the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship redrew the demarcation lines, now putting eastern Poland and Lithuania into the Soviet sphere, while a slice of central Poland went to Germany. As a result, the Soviet Union gained more than 10 million people. 

Stalinism comes to eastern Europe

The NKVD accompanied the Soviet army, and thousands of Polish officers were rounded up and sent to labour camps. In the areas they invaded, the Soviets went through a show of democratic procedure, convoking assemblies to decide the future of these territories. Following rigged elections, provisional governments were set up and the inhabitants were subjected to the full force of the Stalinist terror. By the summer of 1941 between one and two million people had been deported.

In 1940 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became Soviet Republics.

Finland: the Winter War

Finland had been independent of Russia since 1917. When the Finns refused to allow Soviet bases in the country or to cede border territory, the Soviet Union attacked on 26 November with a force of 120,000 men, six hundred tanks and a thousand guns. The first phase of the war, from November 1939 to February 1940, was disastrous for the Soviet Union. The Red Army had not recovered from the purges, and it suffered terrible casualties with poorly led units floundering in snowdrifts, many freezing to death as Finnish ski troops destroyed their field kitchens and tents. 

However, on 11 February 1940, the Soviets, under Semyon Timoshenko, breached the Mannerheim Line. On 12 March, a peace agreement was signed. The Soviet border was pushed northward 93 miles, and the Karelian Isthmus became part of the USSR. For Stalin Finland would now serve as a subservient buffer-state. In 1940 Karelia became the Karelo-Finnish Republic, within the USSR. After the war, the Finnish population of the Isthmus was almost totally replaced by Russians. 

Though they had been defeated, the Finns had exposed the weakness of the Red Army and convinced Hitler that he had nothing to fear from it. The Russians learned critical lessons from the war and set about equipping the Red Army with winter clothing and snow camouflage, all of which would play a vital role in future campaigns. 

The Katyn massacre

The most notorious incident of this phase of the war is the Katyn Massacre in western Russia. On 5 March 1940 Stalin signed an order authorising the NKVD to shoot over 26,000 Allied prisoners of war. The great majority of these were Polish reserve officers. 

On 6 June they were driven in small groups to secret killing grounds in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, shot in the head and buried in mass graves. The number of victims is estimated to be 22,000. In April 1943, the Germans unearthed some 4,5000 bodies. Because this was a major embarrassment to the British government, every effort was made to suppress the facts. 

Mass grave at Katyn, unearthed in 1943.

Preparations for Barbarossa

In July 1940, when Germany and the Soviet Union were still nominal allies, Hitler told the chiefs of the armed forces that it was time to plan for the invasion of Russia: Operation Barbarossa. His aim was to capture the Caucasian oil fields and the grain of the Ukraine, but the overwhelming reason was Lebensraum – living space. The Germans would colonise Russian territory and the Russians would starve. 

On 6 June 1941, Hitler gave a written order, known as the ‘Commissar Order’ that demanded that any Soviet prisoner identified as a commissar should be shot immediately. This was a clear violation of international law and was to lead to thousands of executions.

Throughout May and early June, columns of German troops and vehicles passed through Poland. Stalin was warned by Semyon Timoshenko, the People’s Commissar for Defence, by Georgy Zhukov the Chief of the General Staff, and by Churchill, who had sent warning telegrams. However, believing that these troop movements were simply tactics to secure more concessions, Stalin continued to ignore the accurate reports of his agents.

Barbarossa

Just before dawn on 22 June more than three million German soldiers, with another half million troops from allied countries, crossed the Soviet border at numerous points. They were equipped with 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motor vehicles and 700,000 field guns and other artillery. Some 2,700 aircraft, more than half the entire strength of the German air force, had been assembled behind the lines. Within days the Soviet air force was destroyed. Stalin was completely wrong-footed. He had realised that war with Germany would come some day but he had miscalculated the timing. Nevertheless, he was the man in charge and on 10 July, at the instigation of Georgy Zhukov, the Chief of the General Staff, he allowed himself to by appointed Supreme Commander. This was to be his war.

Georgy Zhukov in 1944
From LIFE magazine.

At first the war went catastrophically badly. Minsk, the capital of Belarus fell on 29 June, and over 4000,000 Red Army troops were taken. Smolensk fell on 16 July. The USSR had lost half its industrial and agricultural capital. By 21 July the Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow. Not since 1812 had the city been in such danger.

The Soviet Union stands its ground

Stalin insisted that the Red Army should stand its ground even when the armies faced encirclement. His Order 270 of 16 August 1941 called for the execution of ‘malicious deserters’ and the arrests of their families. In the course of the war 168,000 Soviet citizens were sentenced to death for alleged cowardice or desertion. Around 300,000 soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders – roughly the entire death toll of British troops in the war. 

The Soviet Union now mobilised itself for total warfare. Huge parts of its industrial base, including 1,360 major plants, were transferred to safer parts of the country such as Magnitogorsk, Siberia, and central Asia. Every Soviet citizen over the age of fourteen was declared eligible for conscription into the industrial labour force. Minorities whose loyalty was deemed suspect, such as the 1.2 million ethnic Germans of the Volga region, were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. 

It was not all repression. The war was a great national endeavour. Stalin re-invented himself as the saviour of 'Mother Russia'. The Orthodox churches were re-opened. This was the 'Great Patriotic War'. And in spite of enormous sufferings, the Soviet Union survived.

Key moments in the war

The failed advance on Moscow: In August and September, Hitler was diverted from the push towards Moscow. Instead, the German army turned south and captured the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. In October two million German soldiers and 2,000 tanks resumed the attack on Moscow in a campaign named ‘Operation Typhoon’ but they had left it too late. The autumn rains had begun and by late October the German armies had been stuck in the mud for three weeks. By this time, the capital was well defended. 400,000 experienced troops, 1,000 tanks and 1,000 planes moved westward from Siberia. On 16 December, faced with the hardships of the Russian winter, the German army retreated before Zhukov. 

Stalingrad: In the spring and summer of 1942 the Germans intensified their attack on the south-western front, and by the end of July they had pushed the Soviets across the Don River. Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army was making a dash for Stalingrad, a city of great symbolic significance because of its name, but also a key location on the mid-Volga, with access to the Soviet Union's oil and grain supplies. 

In August Zhukov was  appointed Deputy Supreme Commander, and was put in charge of the defence of the city, and by the middle of the month the Russians and German were fighting each other amid the ruins. On 31 January 1942, the remains of Paulus’ Sixth Army surrendered after a struggle that had cost 155,000 Russian dead. Some 235,000 German and allied troops had been captured and over 200,000 killed. Those captured died in their thousands on their way to the prison camps. Fewer than 6,000 eventually found their way back to Germany. 

The siege of Leningrad: On 1 September 1941, the German encirclement of Leningrad was completed, and the siege began. Hitler’s policy was to starve its two million citizens. However, in January 1943 after months of terrible suffering, a corridor was opened along Lake Ladoga. The siege was finally lifted on 27 January 1944. At least a million died in the siege, though the true figure was never admitted. For a fictionalised account of this terrible time, see Helen Dunmore's The Siege.

The Battle of Kursk: In July and August 1943 German and Soviet forces confronted each other in a massive tank battle on the huge salient at Kursk (an area nearly half the size of England), 450 kilometres south of Moscow. In August the Germans withdrew and though they retreated in good order, they had sustained half a million casualties in fifty days of fighting.

In spite of the disasters of 1941, the Soviet Union had survived.

The Soviet advance and the end of the war

By the end of 1943, the Russians had recaptured Smolensk and Kiev. The Red Army then moved west, entering Warsaw, Krakow and Budapest early in 1945. On 12 January 1945 Zhukov launched his assault on Berlin. In accordance with the agreement between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in February the siege was left to the Soviet army, which lost more men in this one operation than the US army lost in the whole of the war. The suicide of Hitler on 30 April was followed by the fall of Berlin on 2 May and the unconditional surrender of all German forces on 7 May.

Stalin: the last years

In 1945, Stalin became ‘Generalissimo’, with the prestige of a world conqueror. Eastern Europe was under his control. In 1949 the Soviet Union successfully carried out a nuclear explosion. But with his arteries hardening and his mental faculties declining, he became more paranoid and unpredictable. He still believed that the problems of the USSR were best solved by the elimination of his enemies. In 1950 there were 2.6 million slaves in the Gulag – more than ever before. Millions of people, most notoriously, the the Crimean Tatars and the Don Cossacks, had been deported. 

The 1930s policy of the purging of political opponents was revived.  The war hero, Air Marshall Alexander Novikov, was purged purged because of his closeness to Zhukov, whom Stalin had come to envy. He was blamed for the shortcomings of the Soviet air force in what was known as the ‘Aviators’ Plot’, tortured and sentenced to fifteen years in a labour camp.

In 1947, Andrei Zhdanov, who had coordinated the defence of Leningrad, and was touted as a possible successor to Stalin, launched his cultural terror, the Zhdanovshchina, against the Leningrad intellectuals. Anna Akhmatova came under particular attack for writing the 'wrong' sort of poetry. Molotov's Jewish wife, Polina, was arrested in 1949 and only released on Stalin's death. In 1952-3, in what was known as the 'Doctors' Plot', a group of predominantly Jewish doctors were accused of assassinating Zhdanov (who had died in 1948) and plotting to assassinate other leaders. The accusations were dropped after Stalin's death, but by this time many had been tortured and executed.

The death of Stalin and its aftermath

Stalin died at Kuntsevo on 5 March 1953 three days after suffering a stroke. There was universal mourning – even in the camps! He was laid to rest in the Lenin Mausoleum. He was replaced by a collective. ln December, Lavrenty Beria, the mastermind of the terror, was executed. 

Nikita Khrushchev.
He denounced Stalin
having previously destroyed possible 
evidence of his own crimes.

On 24 February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, whose own hands were hardly clean, denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress. The delegates were stunned into silence. The so-called 'Secret Speech' was soon widely distributed, and the process of 'destalinisation' was begun. On 31 October 1961, Stalin's corpse was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum and placed in the Kremlin Wall. On 11 November, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. 

Conclusion

There is considerable controversy about the number of deaths caused by Stalin. The figures have to include the deaths from the famines, the forced removals of population, and the purges as well as those who died in the Gulag. Estimates range from a low (!) six million to 20 million. But, whatever the truth, Stalin ranks with Mao and Hitler among the great mass murderers of the twentieth century.

There is one place where his memory is still revered -his native Georgia. 

Statue of Stalin outside his birthplace
 museum, Gori, Georgia.