The tales of cities lost and farmland left to burn or rot arrived in the capital almost by the day. To the north, embattled Leningrad was holding, though the country’s leaders knew that its survival was as fragile as a hair. But to the south, the news was bleak. By late July, Stalin himself could stand no more. Interrupting a report that his chief of staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, was delivering, he ordered the general to draft a new command to the troops, a piece of paper that would come to symbolize that summer’s crucial turning point.7 The object was to change the mental habits of a generation. In fact, defeat itself was starting to break the old patterns, and there would be more changes in the coming months. Order no. 227 came at the army’s lowest point, but war itself would be the crucible in which a new mentality was forged.
Order no. 227 was issued on 28 July. At Stalin’s insistence, it was never printed for general distribution. Instead, its contents were conveyed by word of mouth to every man and woman in the army. ‘Your reports must be pithy, brief, clear and concrete,’ the politruks were told. ‘There must not be a single person in the armed forces who is not familiar with Comrade Stalin’s order.’8 In ragged lines, huddled against the sun and wind, the soldiers listened to a roll-call of disgrace. ‘The enemy,’ they heard, ‘has already taken Voroshilovgrad, Starobel’sk, Rossosh’, Kupyansk, Valuiki, Novocherkassk, Rostov-on-Don and half of Voronezh. A section of the troops on the Southern Front, giving in to panic, abandoned Rostov and Novocherkassk without offering any serious defence and without waiting for Moscow’s orders. They covered their colours in shame.’ The troops then heard their leaders spelling out what every soldier knew, which was that the civilian population, their own people, had lost almost all faith in them. The time had come to stand their ground whatever proved to be the cost. As Stalin’s order put it, ‘Every officer, every soldier and political worker must understand that our resources are not limitless. The territory of the Soviet state is not just desert, it is people – workers, peasants, intellectuals, our fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, and children.’ Even Stalin conceded that at least 70 million of these were now behind the German lines.9
Stalin’s remedy was embodied in a new slogan. ‘Not a step back!’ was to become the army’s watchword. Every man was told to fight until his final drop of blood. ‘Are there any extenuating causes for withdrawing from a firing position?’ soldiers would ask their politruks. In future, the reply that handbooks prescribed would be ‘The only extenuating cause is death.’10 ‘Panic-mongers and cowards,’ Stalin decreed, ‘must be destroyed on the spot.’ An officer who permitted his men to retreat without explicit orders was now to be arrested on a capital charge. And all personnel were confronted with a new sanction. The guardhouse was too comfortable to be used for criminals. In future, laggards, cowards, defeatists and other miscreants would be consigned to penal battalions. There they would have an opportunity ‘to atone for their crimes against the motherland with their own blood’. In other words, they would be assigned the most hazardous tasks, including suicidal assaults and missions deep behind the German lines. For this last chance they were supposed to feel gratitude. Death (or, the regulations stated, certain kinds of life-threatening injury) was a means for outcasts to redeem their names, saving their families and restoring their honour before the Soviet people. Meanwhile, to help the others concentrate, the new rules called for units of regular troops to be stationed behind the front line. These ‘blocking units’ were to supplement existing zagradotryady, the NKVD troops whose task had always been to guard the rear. Their orders were to kill anyone who lagged behind or attempted to run away.11
Order no. 227 was not made public until 1988, when it was printed as part of the policy of glasnost, or openness. More than forty years after the end of the war, the measure sounded cruel to people reared on the romantic epic of Soviet victory. A generation that had grown up through decades of peace baulked at the old state’s lack of pity. But in 1942, most soldiers would have recognized a restatement of current rules. Deserters and cowards had always been in line for a bullet, with or without the benefit of a tribunal. Since 1941, their families had also been caught up in their record of shame. Like a slap in the face, the new order was intended to remind the men, to call them to account. And their response was frequently relief. ‘It was a necessary and important step,’ Lev Lvovich told me. ‘We all knew where we stood after we had heard it. And we all – it’s true – felt better. Yes, we felt better.’ ‘We have read Stalin’s order no. 227,’ Moskvin wrote in his diary on 22 August. ‘He openly recognizes the catastrophic situation in the south. My head is full of one idea: who is guilty over this? Yesterday they told us about the fall of Maikop, today Krasnodar. The political information lads keep asking if there isn’t some treachery at work in all this. I think so too. But at least Stalin is on our side!… So, not a step back! It’s timely and it’s just.’12
To the south, where the retreat Moskvin abhorred was taking place, news of the order chilled the blood of depressed, tired men. ‘As the divisional commander read it,’ a military correspondent wrote, ‘the people stood rigid. It made our skin crawl.’13 It was one thing to insist on sacrifice but quite another to be making it. But even then, all that the men were hearing was a repetition of familiar rules. Few soldiers, by this stage in the war, would not have seen or heard about at least one summary execution, the laggard or deserter drawn aside and shot without reflection or remorse. The numbers are hard to establish, since tribunals were seldom involved, but it is estimated that about 158,000 men were formally sentenced to be executed during the war.14 However, the figure makes no allowance for the thousands whose lives ended in roadside dust, the stressed and shattered conscripts shot as ‘betrayers of the motherland’, nor for the thousands more shot for retreating – or even for seeming to retreat – as battle loomed. At Stalingrad, as many as 13,500 men are thought to have been shot in the space of a few weeks.15
‘We shot the men who tried to mutilate themselves,’ a military lawyer said. ‘They weren’t worth anything, and if we sent them to prison we were only giving them what they wanted.’16 It was helpful to have a better use for able-bodied men; that much was a real outcome of Stalin’s order. Copied from German units that the Soviets observed in 1941, the first penal battalions were ready well in time for Stalingrad. Though most assignments in this war were dangerous, those in the shtraf units were wretched, one step removed from the dog’s death that awaited deserters and common crooks. ‘We thought it would be better than a prison camp,’ Ivan Gorin, who survived a penal battalion, explained. ‘We didn’t realize at the time that it was just a death sentence.’17 Penal battalions, in which at least 422,700 men eventually served, were forlorn, deadly, soul destroying.18 But there could not have been a soldier anywhere who doubted that in this army, in any role, his life was cheap.
Though Stalin’s order formalized existing regulations, the process of its implementation exposed a real problem of mentalities. Indeed, its reception in many quarters was symptomatic of the very problem that it was supposed to remedy. People brought up in a culture of denunciations and show trials were used to blaming others when disaster struck. It was natural for Soviet troops to hear Stalin’s words as yet another move against identifiable – and other – anti-Soviet or unmanly minorities. The new slogan was treated, initially at least, like any other sinister attack on enemies within. Political officers read the order to their men, but acted, as some inspectors observed, as if it ‘related solely to soldiers at the front… Carelessness and complacency are the rule… and officers and political workers… take a liberal attitude to breaches of discipline such as drunkenness, desertion and self-mutilation.’ The warm summer nights seemed to encourage laxity. In August, the month after Stalin’s order, the number of breaches of discipline continued to increase.19