Political involvement, and purging in particular, made it harder to recruit, train, and retain new officers. The shortage of skilled specialists of every kind had reached crisis proportions by 1940. As the army expanded, reaching a total strength of over 5 million by the summer of 1941, its need for officers grew desperate. On its own estimate, the officer corps was short by at least 36,000 on the eve of the German invasion, and when the wartime mobilization began, this figure leapt to 55,000.65 Translated into real lives, this meant that men and women had to fight under the leadership of youths who had no battlefield experience. But even in the 1930s, before the army had to fight, cadets were being forced out of staff colleges before they had finished their training. In 1938, Defence Commissar Voroshilov ordered 10,000 of them to take their commissions in advance of graduation.66 These were young men whose relations with their seniors – fathers and teachers – had been confined to following, not leading. When they had to deal with a regiment of thirty-year-olds, they risked becoming objects not of reverence but of contempt.
Men in the ranks were quick to spot incompetence. While the culture of purging and denunciation did a lot to damage officers’ prestige, their own ineptitude was fatal. The Soviet army was supposed to be comradely and open. It did not use the barking non-commissioned officers so central to the British and American systems. Instead, junior officers, backed up (or undermined) by political representatives, were charged with drill and training. The results could have been predicted. ‘If they send me to the front,’ remarked a young recruit as he contemplated mobilization for Finland, ‘I’ll sneak off into the bushes. I won’t fight, but I will shoot people like our unit commander Gordienko.’67 Among the most common breaches of discipline in the army before 1941 was rudeness or insubordination by men in respect of junior officers.68
Politics affected everything an officer might do. The politruks and commissars shadowed regular officers, insisting that their own concerns – class-consciousness, the inculcation of communist values – be given priority over military issues. Resistance, or even discourtesy, might cost an officer his job. The arrangement was absurd. In 1939, even Mekhlis was inspired to denounce it.69 New regulations were introduced the following year, in the wake of the Finnish disaster, to enhance purely military authority and entice officers to stay. The condition of their quarters was one of the issues that was detailed for reform. Status, the thinking went, needed the emphasis of privilege. ‘The company commander,’ as reformers put it, ‘should be given the tallest horse.’70 It was a step – and one of many – that would help young officers to do their jobs. But no one suggested the most radical change, which would have been to start afresh without the tangling web of politics. Each time the issue of parallel authority was raised, the answer was a compromise, a shift of emphasis that left the party’s influence intact.
Nothing stretched the creative powers of a politruk more than the job of explaining the news. Looking at Soviet foreign policy in the last few months of peace, you can feel almost sorry for them. Most troops were not sophisticated men, and many could not read a paper for themselves, but even a semi-literate drunk would have noticed a curious change of policy in 1939. On 23 August, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Red Army men had been forced to sit through sermons on the threat of fascism for a decade; now, suddenly, they were told that the Germans had become their allies. On Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in December 1939, the telegrams of congratulation included one from Adolf Hitler. The Führer included his best wishes ‘for the happy future of the friendly people of the Soviet Union’.71
Neither civilians nor troops knew what to think about this news. When their turn came to explain it, political staff were forced to draw upon the revolutionary rhetoric of historic progress. It was always possible to talk of international proletarian solidarity, and the German working class held a special place in Soviet imaginations, not least because its industry was so admired. But the idea of a treaty with Hitler could only be a shock. Cadets in one staff college thought the story was a spoof.72 When someone asked him if the next war would be an imperialist one, a politruk elsewhere simply gave up. ‘There’s no point,’ he answered, ‘in counting imperialist wars… When the war’s over, a [party] congress will convene, and they’ll tell us what type of war it was.’73 Left to themselves, the soldiers started cracking jokes based on the rhyme between German foreign minister Ribbentrop’s surname and the Russian word for arse.74
The Red Army was also about to engage in some unusual operations. A secret clause in the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 provided for the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and also for the future division of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The ink was hardly dry before the Germans invaded Poland from the west, and just over two weeks later, on 17 September, the first Soviet troops crossed into the country’s eastern provinces. Germany’s act of aggression prompted Britain and France to declare war on 3 September, but Poland was doomed. Warsaw fell to the Germans on 28 September, by which time the two armies, German and Soviet, had overrun the rest of the country from opposite directions. The Red Army drew up along its new boundary, confronting its ally for a prolonged interlude of uneasy co-operation. Its soldiers became an occupation force, assuming the part of liberators while daily confronting the hatred of the population among which they were stationed. The experience would be repeated the following June, when the Soviets continued their advance northwards to the Baltic, adding several million more unwilling citizens to Stalin’s western empire.
In 1939, Stalin’s priority was to establish a secure new border before the Wehrmacht managed to alter the map a second time. Red Army troops along the new front line engaged in a token show of comradeship with equally sceptical German counterparts. Prisoners were exchanged. Behind the new border, soldiers were detailed to go from house to house in search of hidden weapons. ‘Diversionary bands’ of Polish nationalists, the remains of the Polish army, were rounded up, as were any outspoken or respected members of local communities.75 Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, including reservists who had been called up only weeks before, were interned in prison camps. On Stalin’s orders, more than 20,000 of these would be murdered between March and May 1940. The execution of 4,000 Polish officers in the forests near Katyn, to the west of Smolensk, was carried out by secret police, as were the parallel shootings near Kharkov and Tver. The murders were also covert, though local people heard volleys of gunfire for hours, night after night. But while they were kept ignorant of specific events, regular soldiers knew that the state they represented, and whose policy they were enforcing every day, was not offering deliverance to fraternal peoples.