The leader’s words made even less impact in villages where people still distrusted Soviet power. In Kursk province, for instance, there were peasants who resented the order to dig tank traps and defence trenches. ‘Shoot me if you like,’ an angry woman told local police, ‘but I’m not digging any trenches. The only people who need trenches are the communists and Jews. Let them dig them for themselves. Your power is coming to an end and we’re not going to work for you.’54 ‘A war has started and people are going to get killed,’ a man told fellow villagers at their meeting. ‘I personally am not opposed to Soviet power, but I hate communists.’55 ‘Your war isn’t anything to do with me,’ another told the party men. ‘Let the communists fight.’56 Collectivization was one focus for this opposition to Soviet power, political repression another. ‘It’s a good thing Hitler has invaded the Soviet Union,’ a dinner lady whose husband was in prison commented that July. ‘They’ll have to let the prisoners out.’57 Such views were amplified, in different ways, among members of the non-Russian ethnic groups.
The greatest test of Stalin’s speech, however, was the reaction in the Red Army itself. Official histories and memoirs published under Soviet power agree that many saw it as the first true ray of hope. ‘It is hard to describe the enormous enthusiasm and patriotic uplift’ with which the speech was met, recalled front-line General I. I. Fedyuninsky. ‘We suddenly seemed to feel much stronger. Where circumstances permitted, short meetings would be held by the army units.’58 These meetings, sometimes the first that politruks had dared to call, provided an opportunity to discuss the gravity of the attack at last. Instead of lies and silences, the men now learned what kind of effort each of them would have to make if the invaders were to be driven from Soviet soil. War that had been unreal until that point, like a play that had suddenly deviated from its script, now became serious, the fear as well as sacrifice more valid. In his war novel The Living and the Dead, Konstantin Simonov recalled the men’s response. ‘Stalin did not describe the situation as tragic,’ he has a wounded soldier muse. ‘The truth he told was a bitter truth, but at last it was uttered, and people felt that they stood more firmly on the ground.’ The speech, wrote Simonov, left its audience with ‘a tense expectation of change for the better’.59
Accounts like this, from Soviet times, reflect the sense of awe that the catastrophe inspired. Stalin, like Churchill in Britain at the same time, understood and responded to the emotional intensity of the moment. But the leader’s strong words did not impress everyone. The ‘bitter truth’ that Stalin told was far from accurate. It was true, as he said, that thousands of troops were ‘fighting heroically’, but it was also true that tens of thousands more were missing or captured, striking out towards their homes or waiting in depots for transport to take them anywhere at all. Nor could the leader’s speech help people stranded in the mosquito-haunted marsh. Among these was a politruk called Nikolai Moskvin.
Moskvin’s war had begun with the same fine words and lofty hopes as any loyal citizen’s, words written in the collective national trance. ‘I profoundly believe in the rightness of our cause,’ he wrote in his diary on 22 June. ‘I love my motherland, I will defend it to the last ounce of my strength, and I will not begrudge my life for my people.’ That night he kissed his family goodbye as they joined the long convoy of evacuees. He did not think they would be separated long. Two days later, he was with his regiment and preparing to defend Belorussia. But disturbing rumours of loss – 850 planes and 900 tanks – soon began filtering east, and the shrewd politruk already guessed that these estimates might prove to be low. ‘Who tells the truth in wartime?’ he wondered. Moskvin began to weigh the odds. ‘We’ll win for sure,’ he still believed. ‘But the cost will be colossal.’ Ten days later, on 4 July, the truth had dawned. ‘Our situation is very bad,’ he wrote in despair. ‘How could it have turned out that we, preparing to fight on enemy soil, absolutely failed to consider that we might have to mount some kind of defence? Something was up with the doctrine of our armed forces.’60
Moskvin’s main job was to maintain morale. After a short delay, he received a transcript of Stalin’s speech with instructions to read it to the men. But by this stage his regiment had little time for meetings. ‘No time to write,’ the politruk noted on 15 July. ‘It is possible that we are not completely defeated yet, but the situation is extremely difficult… The enemy’s aviation is destroying absolutely everything. The roads are littered with the bodies of our soldiers and the civilian population. Towns and villages are burning. The Germans are everywhere – in front, behind, and on our flank.’ A couple of new recruits from western Ukraine were calling on the men to surrender their arms. Their situation seemed hopeless enough. By 23 July, the regiment had been encircled. ‘What am I to say to the boys?’ Moskvin asked in a scribbled note. ‘We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us?… It seems that I didn’t do a good job of convincing them,’ he added the next day. The previous evening, after his pep talk to the men, thirteen of them had slipped away into the forest.61
The Red Army collapsed in the first weeks of the war. This is no criticism of its individual troops; it is a statement about bureaucratic rule, coercion, lies, fear and mismanagement. The problems were not new, nor were they unfamiliar. Transport, for instance, which was identified by nearly every frontline officer as the reason why retreat turned into rout that June, was like a running sore for units based along the Soviet border. ‘It is absolutely unknown to us where and when we will receive the motorized transport we need for newly mobilized units,’ the commander of an infantry division in the 4th Army had written on 12 March 1941. That same month, another report found no unit with more than four fifths of the required transport strength. Even then, spare parts, fuel and tyres remained impossible to guarantee.62 Four months later, when the crippled armies of the western region needed transport to bring fresh reserves up to the front, they found themselves short by at least one third of the required strength.63
Gabriel Temkin, a Jewish refugee from Hitler who would later fight in the Red Army, witnessed the impact of the transport shortage from his lodging near Bialystok. The soldiers he saw on their way to the front that first week made a depressing spectacle: ‘Some in trucks, many on foot, their outdated rifles hanging loosely over their shoulders. Their uniforms worn out, covered with dust, not a smile on their mostly despondent, emaciated faces with sunken cheeks. Equally miserable,’ he added, ‘were the small trucks pulling the vehicles with ammunition, food and personal belongings.’64 The men’s morale was desperately low. It was a matter of poor leadership, inadequate training and lack of faith in their own cause, but the long marches and even longer bivouacs, sometimes in the open air, made the whole nightmare worse. ‘Sometimes,’ Fedyuninsky wrote of the retreating armies, ‘bottlenecks were formed by troops, artillery, motor vehicles and field kitchens, and then the Nazi planes had the time of their life… Often our troops could not dig in, simply because they did not have the simplest implements. Occasionally trenches had to be dug with helmets, since there were no spades…’65