There never was a moment when the propaganda effort flagged. Red Army troops were presented, effectively, with two wars simultaneously. The first, the one that they alone could know, was the war of the battlefield, the screaming war of shells and smoke, the shameful one of terror and retreat. But the other war, whose shape was crafted by writers, was the one that propaganda created. Soldiers and civilians alike could learn about it in newspapers, the most popular of which, Red Star, was read aloud to small groups at the front. Serving troops also saw film shows that included newsreel, some of which, because it was carefully staged, could seem more vivid than their own fragmented memories of combat. Fighting might seem to take place outside real time, in terrifying moments that later defied recall, but Stalin’s official war unfolded with an epic certainty, in regular and well-planned episodes.
In all, over 1,000 writers and artists joined the campaign to report the front, 400 of whom would die in the fighting.84 Their work was controlled by yet another new body, the Sovinformburo. This monitored everything from Pravda to the news-sheets that soldiers were given at the front. Each captured or disabled German tank and plane was recorded, often with a photograph, but the blank space where Soviet losses should have been, padded with slogans and even short verse, was noticed by newspaper readers everywhere.85 The trouble was that no one could get to the censors’ offices to find out more. Security was so tight that even full-time members of the Sovinformburo’s staff sometimes discovered that their passes were not valid for its central building.86 Inside, trusted officials combed draft front-line reports for ideological mistakes, correcting even punctuation that might not conform to the official line. The famous correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg nearly resigned in protest at the pettifogging rules. When an editor changed the word ‘victories’, meaning real successes at the front, to ‘progress’ in an article he saw, the future voice of Stalin’s propaganda war declared that it was all a waste of time. ‘We spend so long on corrections,’ he complained, ‘that we lose the whole day, all our creative time.’87
One victory, or maybe piece of progress, that the Sovinformburo chalked up for Red Army troops that summer was the battle of Smolensk. The losses were devastating – 300,000 prisoners captured and 3,000 more tanks lost – but the Soviet papers remained silent about these. They focused on the fact that the Germans had been held up in their advance on Moscow.88 It was at this moment, too, that a desperate Red Army deployed its most impressive weapon for the first time. So secret that it had no real name until the troops gave it the feminine ‘Katyusha’, the BM-13-16 multiple rocket launcher and its descendants proved that Soviet designers could produce hardware to rival any in the world. ‘We first tried out this superb weapon at Rudnya, near Smolensk,’ remembered Marshal Yeremenko. ‘In the afternoon of 15 July the earth shook with the unusual explosion of jet mines. Like red-tailed comets, the mines were hurled into the air… The effect of the simultaneous explosion of dozens of these mines was terrific. The Germans fled in panic; and even our own troops… who for reasons of secrecy had not been warned that this new weapon would be used, rushed back from the front line.’89 Katyushas were quite inefficient for their range, consuming prodigious quantities of propellant to hurl rocket mines less than ten miles at this stage in the war, but the gratifying sight of German soldiers running from the field gave Stalin’s propagandists something they could really write about.
‘The retreat has caused blind panic,’ the head of the Belorussian Communist Party, Ponomarenko, wrote to Stalin on 3 September. To make things worse, ‘the soldiers are tired to death, even sleeping under artillery fire… At the first bombardment, the formations collapse, many just run away to the woods, the whole area of woodland in the front-line region is full of refugees like this. Many throw away their weapons and go home. They regard the possibility of being surrounded extremely anxiously.’90 This frank report would translate for secret police into a case of collective ‘betrayal of the motherland’, but moralistic talk was wasted on the leaderless and lost. Millions of men that summer were simply encircled, trapped. Others, with little training and scant knowledge of their companions, let alone the foibles of their equipment, were thrown into battle against an enemy that was still, until the first snow fell, as confident as it had been when it marched into Paris thirteen months before. The ones who simply made for home were the most natural of all. ‘In June 1941 our unit was surrounded by some German troops near the town of Belaya Tserkov,’ an ex-soldier explained. ‘The politruk mustered the remaining troops and ordered us to leave the encirclement in groups. I and two other soldiers from our unit… changed into civilian clothes and decided to go home where we used to live. We took this decision,’ he explained, ‘because, according to rumour, the German troops moving up towards us had advanced far away to the east.’91
The Germans themselves were unprepared for the number of prisoners they took. By the end of 1941, at a conservative estimate, they held between 2 and 3 million Red Army troops. No thought had been given to these men’s accommodation, for their lives, in Nazi thinking, had never been worth a plan. As the Wehrmacht swept eastward, many of its prisoners were herded into their own former barracks or prisons; others squatted in the open air, enclosed by nothing more protective than barbed wire. The shock that June was so severe that it took time for the tales of atrocity to circulate, the stories of Jews and communists singled out for torture and illegal execution, the tales of beatings, hunger, crude sadism and collective slow death. In the first few days of the war, Red Army soldiers simply gave up when they found themselves surrounded and outgunned.
On 22 June, the Supreme Soviet granted the army power to punish deserters. That day, provision was made for the establishment of three-man military tribunals. These would operate at the front and in all other areas affected by the war. Tribunals had the right to order death sentences if they chose, although a clause in their regulations asked them to inform Moscow by telegraph when they did. If they failed to receive a reply within seventy-two hours, the sentence could be carried out without appeal, and any other punishments they ordered, some of which amounted to death sentences by other means, could be imposed directly.92 These powers were comprehensive enough, but in practice commanders often acted on their own. On 14 July, Mekhlis received a note from his deputy on the South-Western Front that complained of the excessive use of the death penalty within an army desperately short of men. As always, lurid examples were attached. In one case, a lieutenant had shot two leaderless Red Army men and a woman who had come to his unit to beg for food.93