All infantry must learn to shoot. The Russian word for footsoldier translates as rifleman. The rifle in question, at this stage, was a magazine-fed, bolt-action model with a bayonet. Its design dated from the 1890s, but it was reliable and trusted by the men. The problem was that even when the factories in Tula and Izhevsk stepped up production after 1937, there were not enough guns available for every recruit to handle. Spare parts were another problem everywhere.52 The men who faced the Finns in 1939 had often trained for weeks with wooden replicas; enough, perhaps, to learn some drill, to try the handling when lying down or kneeling in a trench, but hopeless when it came to taking aim, to testing weight or balance in your hand. It was the same with tanks, where cardboard training replicas were sometimes used. And though Soviet factories had produced a sub-machine gun of world class, Vasily Degtyarev’s PPD, it took the Finnish war to persuade Stalin of its value in the field. Suspicion prevented wider deployment. Until the end of 1939, the smart new guns were reserved for military police and all the army’s stock was locked away in stores.53
Not surprisingly, reports from military camps painted a dismal picture of training and its effects. Large numbers of recruits, both officers and men, regularly failed to meet expected standards of rifle competence.54 Accidents, too, were alarmingly frequent. Even during daytime training there were instances of soldiers firing randomly when they were drunk. There was no reason, after all, to be on top form all the time, for this was an army where men who turned up for parade were often left to sit around and wait.55 As any faith in their officers that they still nurtured ebbed away, bright soldiers learned to put their time to better use. ‘You’ll never teach me anything,’ observed a Ukrainian conscript. ‘I slept at my post and I’ll go on sleeping.’56 In March 1939, an enterprising group of men sent a detachment out on horseback every morning to work in the local woodyard. The pay that each received was then divided up, although a part was reserved, tactfully enough, for the political officers.57
The raw recruits of 1938 and 1939 would also learn from older generations. In 1939, the reserves were called up as a preparation for campaigns in Poland, the Baltic and Finland. These mature men, sometimes in their late thirties or early forties, arrived already smouldering with wrath. They had been forced to leave their jobs and families behind to go back to an army most had worked hard to forget. Their resentment was seldom far below the surface. ‘It’s worse in the army than doing forced labour on the Baikal–Amur railway,’ one grumbled to his mates. Some harked back to the Red Army in its democratic years, the early 1920s, when they talked to officers through clouds of cheap tobacco smoke and treated orders as the signal for a general debate. The memory rankled like a broken promise. ‘Red Army discipline is worse than under the old tsarist regime,’ the veterans complained. The young heard all of this and learned. ‘We’ll only get leave when we’re dead.’58
Potential officers, the future élite of the Red Army, could hope for a better deal than this. A select group began their training while they were still at school. Others started as private soldiers and made their way up by impressing superiors with their political convictions and practical skill. As the army grew in the 1930s, the demand for new cadets increased as well. ‘No calling is higher than the calling of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army,’ ran the communist slogan. ‘No profession is more honoured than the profession of commander in this army.’59 In fact, it was only after 1934 that infantry platoon commanders began to make more money than blue-collar workers in Soviet factories.60 Only the élite could expect the trappings of power and wealth enjoyed by senior managers and politicians in the civilian world. But poor pay was no deterrent to enthusiasts. The army offered the romance of adventure, travel, and good comradeship. It did not matter if cadets came from poor peasant huts or city-centre apartments. As they pored over their lessons in languages, mathematics, field tactics and history, officer trainees were embarking on solid careers.
At least, that was the hope until a few years before 1939. True, the shortages and physical misery that beset their men could affect junior officers as well; it was hard enough to get things done in an army that went short of greatcoats, boots and guns. But those were irritations, and good communists ignored them unless they were working to relieve the hardships of their troops. Far more oppressive, from 1937, was the constant fear of political error. Stalin’s purge of the political and military élite, which began that spring and continued through the months to come, would change officer culture for the worse. One of the highest profile victims, after all, was Tukhachevsky, the Chief of the General Staff himself.61 The charges that he and his colleagues faced included treason, so a sentence of death was inescapable. Where formerly the victims of political repression had been civilians, this time a trial had sent a shudder through the military establishment.
Tukhachevsky’s arrest was the first act in a process of state-directed terror that would subordinate the army, and the defence sector in general, to new forms of political control. The upheaval would lead to changes in strategy, for Tukhachevsky’s plans for defence in depth were discredited by his personal downfall, leaving the General Staff to plan for an offensive war in 1941. At the time, however, the question of strategy in a hypothetical conflict seemed trivial beside the fear that blew like a whirlwind through the officer corps. In the three years from 1937 to 1939, a little over 35,000 army officers were removed from their jobs. By 1940, 48,773 people had been purged from the Red Army and Fleet. In the last three years of peace, 90 per cent of military district commanders lost their jobs to subordinates, a turnover of men that left recruitment, training, supply and the co-ordination of troop movements in turmoil on the very eve of war.62 Morale, too, lay in ruins as professional soldiers struggled to save their careers.
An officer who lost his job was not necessarily imprisoned, still less shot. Even those who were arrested by the NKVD – about a third of those discharged – were sometimes reinstated, and Reese has calculated that even in the hardest year no more than 7.7 per cent of the Red Army’s leadership was discharged for political reasons.63 By 1940, too, 11,000 men had returned to army posts. But the purge made every officer’s work more difficult. In the first place, it was clear that no one’s job – or life – was guaranteed. Among the military stars of the Great Patriotic War were several men, including Konstantin Rokossovsky, the victor of Kursk and Koenigsberg, who had done time in prison cells and camps. From 1937 on, there was no doubt that every aspect of the army’s work, including purely military matters like training and the deployment of hardware, could be a subject for party debate. On the eve of the German invasion, the party’s representatives dogged every step that officers would take. Meanwhile, the entire culture of leadership had been undermined. Instead of taking pride in responsibility, an officer was well advised to dodge the limelight and to pass the buck. Cadets learned very little about inspiring their men in field conditions. The party hacks, the politruks, were supposed to take care of that.
It was a classic recipe for stress. Young officers, their minds already racing with the party’s teachings on responsibility and sacred trust, were given tasks that they had not been trained to execute and then, as if in mockery of their efforts, they were obstructed all the way by pettifogging from the commissars. The pitfalls of bureaucracy were just as terrifying for these trainees as the threat of a visit from the secret police. In 1939, well after the worst years of the military purge, the suicide rate among cadets and junior officers was scandalous. ‘Fear of responsibility’ was one of the most frequent reasons distilled from their farewell notes. For those who were prone to despair, poor diet and miserable living conditions might well destroy the last reserves of their morale. One junior lieutenant had been living in an earth dugout for months by the time his nerve gave way. As a young communist, a komsomol, he could not condemn the political system. Instead, as he put it in his final note, ‘I am not able to go on living this hard life… I love my country and I would never betray it. I believe in an even better future, when a bright sun will shine on the whole world. But here there are enemies who sit and threaten every step an honest commander tries to take. I have decided to take my own life, even though I am but twenty-one years old.’64