Dictatorship was reimposed – slowly – using the bullet or the punishment battalion. In each region’s chaotic network of government offices, a new structure of party rule was hammered into place. Here, counter-intelligence worked beside Communist Party officials, since the party always assessed its members’ records for itself. Communist survivors who were deemed suspect or even negligent were purged. Some were drafted at once into the Red Army. The rest were transferred to the Gulag. Later in the war, they would be joined by the thousands of communist troops who had grown tired or critical as the Red Army crossed into the capitalist world.84
The group at the top of SMERSh’s wanted list, for now, was the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). This was a fascist-sponsored force composed mainly of ethnic Russians and identified with General Andrei Vlasov. The general, a former star in the Red Army, had turned traitor when he was captured on the Volkhov Front in July 1942. He came to symbolize the ragtag of desperate prisoners and disgruntled anti-communists who hoped to save themselves by working for the Germans. In 1943, partisans near Smolensk reported that leaflets bearing Vlasov’s portrait and that of his deputy, Malyshkin, had been dropped in the area, and there were rumours that Vlasov himself had visited Smolensk in July 1943.85 Moskvin encountered ‘Vlasovites’ when his group was surrounded and attacked in April 1943,86 but the term was a catch-all for the armed bands that the Germans liked to use when they destroyed partisan groups. By labelling local collaborators, including anyone who was fed up with partisan extortion, as ‘Vlasovites’, SMERSh fostered rumours of a larger and more sinister conspiracy. It was a technique that had always served the secret police well.
The real Vlasov army, forlorn and poorly equipped, was sent off to France and southern Europe in the late summer of 1943.87 Vlasov’s German paymasters no longer trusted his troops on Soviet soil. Even before that, the general had not been responsible for every leaflet that called on Soviet citizens to resist Stalin’s rule. With or without him, a string of shadowy ‘Liberation Armies’ had been at work in Ukraine and the western provinces of Russia throughout 1943. There were ‘Russian committees’ and ‘People’s Parties of Russia’ in many occupied cities, each working, under German supervision, to undermine Soviet habits of thought. They revived long-forgotten flags and colours, promised (tardily and desperately) to dissolve collective farms, and swore that communism would end. One even used the letters ‘SSSR’, the initials of the Soviet Union, for its own masthead. But in this case they stood for a different slogan: ‘Smert’ Stalina spaset Rossiyu’ – ‘Stalin’s death will save Russia.’88 The whole thing was convenient for SMERSh. Wherever there were real traitors, there could be convincing arrests.
Genuine Vlasovites, in fact, were thinner on the ground than collaborators and hiwis, and neither was as numerous as the rabble of small-time opportunists, local bosses, deserters and crooks. Ideology, as Stalin and Hitler defined it, was less of a priority for wartime populations than the fight for life. Given the choice, large numbers of people might have preferred to escape from dictatorship altogether, and this impulse found reflection in the appeal of nationalist bands. These had been active in some regions since the war began. Some were large and even, for a time, successful, imposing a kind of frontier law in the districts they controlled. In 1944, the most powerful guerrilla group in Ukraine was the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.89 This movement, thought to number 20,000 members by the end of the war, scored a notable coup in February 1944, when one of its detachments shot and fatally wounded the talented Soviet general Nikolai Vatutin.90 But the UPA’s support would be strongest in the western, recently annexed regions of Ukraine. The history of intermarriage on the Soviet side of the Dnepr, together with its tradition of loyalty to Moscow, ensured that nationalism in this region posed little threat.91 It was anarchy, not organized disloyalty, that disrupted the Red Army’s supply lines and support troops at this stage. Apart from arrests, the best remedy for that was forced conscription. People who served under the red flag, too, could not be recruited so easily by other gangs.
In October 1943, a former soldier called Andreev experienced this form of liberation at first hand. The letter that he wrote to his mother, five pages in length, has the quality of a last testament. It was also the first news he had sent home since he was taken prisoner in August 1941. Back then, Andreev’s unit had been surrounded by tanks, but in the general chaos of the time, he had escaped from the escorting German guards and hidden in a village called Annovka. There he married Oksana, the daughter of the woman who was hiding him. Their own daughter, Nina, was born in 1943. What prompted him to write and tell his mother all this news was the approach of the Red Army. ‘There was a huge battle here today,’ he explained, ‘and I, Oksana and Ninochka had to cower in a hut with all the old people. They say that a military commission is coming here, and that it will examine all the former prisoners of war. The fit ones will be taken for the front, which means that instead of going home I may end up in the front line.’92 Andreev passed the tests that SMERSh set up, but he was unfit, untrained and without equipment. He died a few weeks later on the banks of the Dnepr.
Detachments of partisans posed different problems. By this stage, many were working as adjuncts of the Red Army. It was they who disrupted German supply lines before the campaigns at Kursk, Orel and Kharkov. They also helped regular troops to capture the potential informers – ‘tongues’ – who might betray the enemy’s planned manoeuvres. Partisans could send reports from deep behind German lines, informing Moscow about training bases, repair shops and even German pigeon coops.93 Moskvin’s diary for 1943 reads like a list of military engagements, each with its own objective. ‘Every day we have carried out some kind of action against the enemy,’ he wrote in April. Their usual targets were the railways and roads. It was like army life again. The men were formed into battalions, each including about ten explosives groups. They were becoming expert in laying and in clearing mines. At the end of a ‘month of uninterrupted battle’, Moskvin felt ‘the same creative sense that I had when we destroyed the Vitebsk aerodrome in 1941, except that then our tragedy was about to begin’.94
The problem was that renewed battle meant increased numbers of casualties. ‘I am writing for posterity that partisans undergo inhuman suffering,’ Moskvin noted on 25 March.95 The losses could only be made up by recruiting new people. That spring and summer, and especially after Kursk, the task became easier as ‘1943 partisans’ – peasants who saw which way the war was going and resolved to save themselves – made their way to the dugouts and the camps. The Grishin regiment, which included Moskvin’s own battalion, increased in size from about 600 to over 2,000 members by the late summer of 1943.96 All these people had to be retrained. There was the usual rough military drill, including target practice using captured guns. Recruits also needed to learn ‘equanimity in the face of death’ and to combat ‘cowardice, panic and whining’.97 But there were other types of lesson to be learned as well. There was a cultural gulf between the older generation of partisans, many of whom had once belonged, before 1941, to the élite of working-class soldiers and officers, and these young village toughs.98 ‘We have to strengthen the discipline of the whole group,’ Moskvin wrote. ‘We have to improve their relations with the local population, not allowing cases of coarseness and shameful behaviour by Soviet citizens.’