Workers' Paradise Lost

Chapter 8 / World War 11

              The myth that in World War II the people fought to defend the communist regime.

       From the first hour of the invasion the situation was catastrophic. Along a fifteen-hundred-mile front from the White to the Black Seas the Germans were pushing forward at blitz speed. Soviet armies were melting away, running off in chaotic spills of retreat eastward and surrender westward.

       The Germans could not build barbed-wire enclosures fast enough to contain the millions of prisoners and deserters—it was hard to tell them apart, because the defense was so half-hearted, the line between voluntary and involuntary submission so nebulous. The invaders took close to four million prisoners in the first four months—on a scale, that is, suggesting that the Red forces were not really fighting back. Before the Nazi tide of victory was stopped, it had engulfed a third of the Soviet population in a territory several times as large as France. Not since the Mongol invasion in 1236-1240 had Russian armies been so decisively defeated.

       The Kremlin had not been caught off guard. It had long been aware of the German plan to conquer Russia. A large-scale Red mobilization in Soviet frontier regions had been under way for many months under the guise of maneuvers.

       Nor were the Soviet forces inferior to Hitler's. In his postwar book, The Generals Talk, the British military expert, Lidell Hart, attested: "Hitler embarked on the invasion of Russia in the face of knowledge that his forces would be fewer than those opposing him at the outset, and were bound to be increasingly outnumbered if the campaign were to be prolonged." (125) The 121 divisions Germany could muster, he knew, would face 155 divisions in Western Russia. And the German military men did not underrate the fighting qualities of Russian soldiers.

       How, then, explain the great Soviet debacle? The answer is to be found in the reluctance of the population and its armies to defend an unpopular political and social system; in their burgeoning dream of freedom through defeat. Hitler, by quickly puncturing that dream, saved Stalin. Once the Russian peoples were convinced that the Germans had not come to liberate them from Bolshevism but to enslave them to Nazism, the fate of the invaders was fixed. Blindly, drunkenly, stupidly, the Hitlerites drove the Soviet masses to rally in despair around their hated masters.

       For nearly a quarter of a century the Soviet dictatorship had been rearing a new generation in its own grim image. It was a gigantic enterprise in "human engineering," as the communists called it, with a "new Soviet man" as its end-product. As a vital part of this job, the Russian past had been distorted and ridiculed, its religion especially condemned and persecuted. Then, on the morning of June 22, 1941, came the first great test of this portentous handiwork. The Nazis crashed into Russia. And at once the regime confessed that its engineering had been a grisly failure.

       In the hour of crisis, it could be expected, the Kremlin would summon the country to a crusade in defense of communist society, the collectivized farms, and socialized industry. It did nothing of the sort. That faceless, godless robot, the new Soviet man, might never have been. Instead, the dictators appealed to the insulted past. They barely mentioned the Soviet years. The very words "socialism" and "communism" were all but expunged from the propaganda lexicon. The memory of Russian heroes out of the past, great tsars and generals, was invoked, the names of Marx and Lenin were rarely alluded to.

       It was a humiliating retreat from the official ideology, a restoration of old-fashioned national patriotism. (126) It was to endure for years, until the time when victory seemed assured and reconciliation with the masses no longer urgent. With every month Moscow was to become more forthright in reviving old Russian values—old values in the Ukraine and other non-Russian areas as well—and brushing aside Soviet values. The nation was assured continually that it was fighting a Great Patriotic War, the Fatherland War, not a communist war. The people were frightened, bewildered, but also, as self-exiled Soviet nationals eventually could attest, curiously exhilarated and hopeful. Could it be that liberation from communism, like its imposition, was coming through war.

• Hitler's Biggest Blunder

       Not until July 3, 1941, twelve days after the start of the invasion, did Joseph Stalin, chief architect of the shattered Moscow-Berlin Pact, address the country. As most people understood, the delay meant that their hierarchs were assessing the state of mind of the populace. His radio address was like an echo from the far-off outlawed past. "A great danger hangs over our fatherland," Stalin said tremulously, in his thick Georgian accent. "Our war for the freedom of our fatherland will merge with the struggles of the peoples of Europe and America for their independence, for democratic freedoms . . . ." Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters! I address myself to you, my friends."

      Brothers and sisters—never before had a Soviet leader used that old-world form of address. Democratic freedoms —he was uttering in earnest words that until then had been heard only in derision. Stalin expressed gratitude to the U.S. government and Winston Churchill, the top villains in the preceding twenty-two months of alliance with Nazi Germany. Again, as in the glorious resistance to Napoleon in 1812, Stalin pleaded, the people must fight "a fatherland war of liberation."

      The note of deep patriotic tradition set the tone for all that followed. The Soviet slogans were swept out of sight. Traditional military formations, the elite Guards units, were restored, and shoulder boards, a very symbol of the ancien regime, blossomed on officers' uniforms. (127) The system of political commissars attached to, and thoroughly resented by, officers was suspended.

      Most indicative of all, as the war progressed religion was made not merely legal, but respectable; crusading against God was forbidden; church bells, silent nearly ten years, rang out again, even on the radio. Before long, the Communist International was formally dissolved—a move, it was generally interpreted, to placate the democratic allies, but also useful as an indication to the masses that messianic communism was a thing of the past. Under the impact of the invasion, in short, the Kremlin substantially disowned Bolshevism.

      It had to disown, too, nearly two years of zealous partnership with the Nazis. Even the thick-skinned Georgian, one supposes, was embarrassed by the need to turn yesterday's ally into today's fascist beast, and yesterday's capitalist imperialists into today's stalwart companions on the road to common freedom. Moscow, under the pact, had delivered to Germany millions of tons of foodstuffs, metals, oil, cotton, and other products essential to the war effort. More important, it had swung the support of the world-wide communist apparatus to Hitler's side. In the Balkans, the Communist Parties were under instructions to help the Germans take over their own countries.

      When the Russians finally began to stand up to the invaders, the West talked glibly of their "loyalty to the Soviets" and to Stalin personally. Inside the USSR that delusion was shared neither by the government nor the governed. Again and again Stalin explained to foreign guests like Harry Hopkins and Joseph E. Davis that his people were not fighting for communism but for their fatherland.

      Ever since the terrible blood-purges and the imbecile Moscow trials in 1936-1938, a shocked world had been told that the carnage was necessary to destroy the enemy within, in preparation for possible war. Yet the Kremlin now declared itself deeply alarmed by swarms of traitors, saboteurs, and other species of internal foes. (128) The "fifth columns," it warned, were everywhere. From the outset, the Soviets fought a war on two fronts: against the foreign enemy and against "dangerous elements" at home.

      Priority was given to the domestic menace. Long blacklists had been prepared in advance by the NKVD successor to the GPU). Hundreds of thousands were taken into custody at once. In every city, town, and neighborhood, special "military tribunals" were set up to identify and extirpate anyone suspected of, or denounced for, anti-regime sentiments. They had the power to sentence to death. At the same time, thousands in prisons and concentration camps—especially political and military personalities who might provide leadership in case of revolution— were summarily shot. As one wartime defector put it: "Our . . . rulers behaved like a frightened wolfpack."

      To protect the government against subversive broadcasts, all private radio receivers were simply confiscated. The Volga German Republic was abolished, on the theory that even after the lapse of centuries, its citizens might still be sympathetic to Germans; the entire population, about 400,000 men, women, and children, was exiled and dispersed. Later other "republics" and "autonomous regions," in particular Moslems in the Caucasus and Crimea, were awarded the same fate.

      To a government with multitudinous eyes and ears, it had been no secret that thousands had been praying for war as the best chance to throw off their shackles. The communists themselves had provided the precedents: during the First World War, they had urged not only Russians but all belligerent peoples to turn their national wars into civil wars. The lack of legitimacy, the Kremlin's dread of the people under war conditions, had in large measure motivated Stalin's alliance with Hitler. The reality surpassed his worst forebodings.

      The Red forces were fighting on their own soil against an unprovoked invader, normally a guarantee of keen battle morale. They were on flat terrain wide open to rapid retreat. Can there be any doubt that the millions taken by the Germans had not resisted resolutely? (129) Certainly Stalinhad no such doubts. That was why he issued his notorious edict, unprecedented in modern history, that all Soviet captives were to be considered deserters and their families stripped of support. That was why special divisions were deployed behind the fronts to block retreat, by force if necessary. But who was to block the blockers? Besides, millions were retreating forward, in waves of real desertion.

      A German journalist who has written extensively about the Eastern campaigns, Jurgen Thornwald, refers to "the real joy with which the population everywhere received the advancing German soldiers; the words of greeting, first church services in twenty years." In town and village alike the inhabitants turned out with bread and salt, the ancient Slavic ceremonial of welcome. Civilians by the tens of thousands flocked to volunteer for non-combatant services to the Germans. They enlisted willingly, in this honeymoon phase, for transport to Germany in labor contingents. In many cities the people made gay bonfires of books by Lenin, Stalin, Marx. Communist "activists" tried to run away, as much out of fear of their next-door neighbors as of the foreign forces.

      A top-secret report from occupied Russia to his political superior in Berlin, dated October 24, 1942, signed by Dr. Otto Braeutigam, a German specialist on Russian affairs long stationed in Moscow as a diplomat, is available in the Nuremberg trial records. It says in part:

      But Hitler's policy, instead, was arrogant and deeply insulting. He did not seek affection in Russia but blind obedience based on animal fears. All Slavs were openly treated as Untermenschen suited only for future colonial exploitation. Prisoners-of-war were massed in the open in sub-zero weather, neglected, underfed, and maltreated, so that hundreds of thousands perished miserably. Enough of them made their way back to Russia, however, to spread the news of Nazi racist contempt and inhumanity. Volunteer enlistment dried up, after which hundreds of thousands—ultimately millions—were forcibly deported from occupied Russia for labor in Germany.

      The famous General Koestring, when he fell into American hands in the last stage of the war, said bitterly: "We Germans, through ignorance, greed, and inefficiency, squandered our great capital in the struggle against Bolshevism." He identified that "capital" as the people's hatred of the Soviet regime and their yearning for justice.

      Hitler was committing his greatest and in the end fatal blunder. Quickly enough the real nature of the conqueror was, manifest: his racist insanities, his cruelty, his plans for permanent occupation and dismemberment of Russia. He accomplished what Stalin could not: the creation of a genuine fighting spirit in an old-style patriotic dedication. The Fuehrer, a Soviet escapee said later, "played his greatest trump, the people's trust, into Stalin's hands."

• Patriots in Enemy Uniforms

      In a fine recent novel, Parallax, by Vladimir Yurasov, a Russian emigre who had fought as an officer in the Red Army against the Germans, there is a memorable scene. An American official is interrogating the hero, a Soviet officer seeking asylum. (131)"Why did men like you—Red soldiers—put up such a heroic fight for the regime?" he asks. The Russian replies: "All I can say is that we fought for our homes and our homeland, and not for the Soviet regime."

      But a million Soviet soldiers and officers, possibly more, chose to fight for home and homeland in another way—by donning German uniforms in the hope of overthrowing the communist regime. Their intentions were patriotic, but the consequences for themselves were tragic.

      Defeatism is in the Russian revolutionary tradition. In the First World War, the Bolsheviks in particular cheered every defeat of their own country as another opportunity for rebellion. The Nazis had few illusions about the Soviet military volunteers: these were not their friends but merely the enemies of their common enemy.

      Soviet Russia was the only participant in the great war which supplied substantial fighting forces to the enemy. The largest and best known formation (except in the USSR, where it has been smeared out of recognition) was the Russian Army of Liberation (ROA by its Russian initials), better known as the Vlasov movement. General Andrei A. Vlasov, chief of the ROA, had been an authentic Soviet hero, decorated personally by Stalin for his successful defense of Moscow, and a member of the Central Committee of the ruling party. But when captured by the Germans, he readily agreed to organize, from among Soviet war prisoners, forces to fight communism, with a constitutional democracy as his professed goal.

      The Hitlerites reneged on all their promises to Vlasov and his staff. Not until the final months of war did they allow the ROA to engage the Red armies, which was the original purpose. The truth is that Berlin did not trust any patriotic Russians, even in German uniforms, fearing that they might one day interfere with Nazi plans for their country. Not until its final agony did Germany unleash its Russian contingents against the communists, but it was too late to affect the outcome. Until then they had been used, under protest, on other fronts. Toward the end of the war the Vlasov movement was credited with nearly a million men. Only a small fraction of them, however, was actually in ROA.(132) There were other groups, particularly national-independence formations of Ukrainians, Cossacks, Georgians, and Turkomans.

      After the German collapse, Vlasov and his main associates surrendered to the Allies—and were promptly turned over to Stalin for execution. Tens of thousands of their followers, similarly, were handed over to Moscow for imprisonment and mass extermination. It was not an episode in which the Western statesmen involved could take any pride, the only excuse being that they knew not what they were doing. Vlasovites were just a small part of the Soviet citizens driven with Allied bayonets and truncheons into east-bound transport trains for delivery to Kremlin vengeance.

      At the war's end an estimated six million Soviet men, women, and children—the imported slave laborers and liberated war prisoners—were stranded beyond their native frontiers, mostly in areas under Allied occupation. Several million of them refused to return to the USSR. They knew full well the hardships and humiliations that awaited them as unwanted displaced persons in alien lands, but anything seemed to them better than resuming life under communism.

      Never before in history had so many nationals of a victorious country, including uniformed men who had helped win the victory, repudiated the government and social system of their homeland. They represented a true cross-section of the Soviet population—peasants, workers, intellectuals—so that there is some justice in the claim that it amounted to a limited "plebiscite" on communism.

      To placate the Soviet dictator, the United States and its Allies, alas, used force to repatriate his runaway subjects. One of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, later U.S. Senator from Connecticut, said subsequently:

      While we were driving them into trucks and trains, a Soviet Repatriation Commission was engaged in a fantastic man-hunt wherever their terrified countrymen might be hiding. On November 6, 1946—ironically on the eve of another happy Soviet birthday—Andrei Vishinsky told a United Nations committee that his country, as of right, demanded the surrender of "more that 1,200,000 refugees and displaced persons." Evidently the Moscow Marxists were not giving up private property rights in human beings.

      In the end all but half a million, the so-called non-returners, were herded back to Russia. There they were treated as deserters. Even loyal demobilized Red troops who had fought outside the USSR were subjected to purges. Because they had had a glimpse of life without benefit of communism, they were considered unreliable and, at best, a source of infection. Relatively few were permitted to return to their families and previous homes; the rest were dispersed to other areas, where their influence on local opinion would be reduced.

      The alliance between regime and people for struggle against a foreign aggressor was never complete. As victory became more assured, the old civil conflict was resumed. By the time hostilities with Germany ended, hostilities between the Kremlin and the populace were again in full swing.

      Through the war years wishful hoping had foreseen great and happy changes in the Soviet system as the reward for heroism and sacrifice. Without making promises, the regime subtly encouraged the people to believe that the nightmare past was ended and an era of comparative freedom ahead. (134) The moratorium on communist slogans, the new rights of worship, the leaders' guarded allusions to democracy—all seemed a tacit agreement for a new start. The Kremlin's acceptance of the Atlantic Charter and Mr. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" seemed to the ordinary Soviet citizen at least an omen of reform in the right direction. The very experience of cooperation with Western democracies, he thought, would promote wholesome changes. He knew that the United States had contributed to the Soviet effort more than eleven billion dollars in military supplies and food, including entire American-made and equipped factories. At one point, though not without needling by the U.S. Ambassador, Stalin stated publicly what everyone knew privately: that Soviet Russia could not have won the war without American help.

      William Henry Chamberlin wrote during the war: "It seems almost incredible that the Soviet dictatorship, strong as it is, will not be influenced and modified in many ways by this tremendous ordeal of the Russian people. The dictatorship may well be loosened."

      But the incredible came to pass. The dictatorship was not loosened but grimly tightened. The old terror was back in full swing, along with the old slogans, compulsions, attacks on religion, and ferocious crack-downs on writers and the arts. Yesterday's gallant allies were once again "imperialist" enemies, with implications that Stalin single-handedly had won the war—even against Japan! Every department of Soviet life was purged and re-purged, and the camp population swelled.

      A revised history of Soviet Russia, prepared under Stalin's personal supervision, contained a passage about Russia's war with Napoleon:

       This is an almost perfect summation of what happened in World War II. Again the rulers, like the feudal lords in 1812, frightened by their own subjects, hastened to rob them of their victory. But in 1812 Russia did not forget the peace its people had lost. Thirteen years later came the Decembrist uprising, harbinger of the revolutionary surge that could no longer be repressed. We may be sure that in 1945, similarly, the lost peace was not forgotten by the victims. The story of the war has been told; its aftermath is very much an unfinished story.

      An able American journalist thoroughly familiar with Russia through long residence there, John Scott of Time-Life, wrote in October, 1959, that he had seen a process of political disillusionment during his visit to the USSR that year: "It has already brought the Soviet Union to a position where, in my opinion, in the event of a war or civil strife which forced a choice upon them, most Soviet citizens would reject the Soviet government and communism, unless a foreign invader unified them, as did Hitler, with the threat of an even more cruel dictatorship if he won."