With Germany now defeated, Stalin honoured his pledge to the British and American allies to enter the war against Japan. Over the next three months tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers entrained for the Far East. On 9 August (the very day that the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki) Stalin’s forces erupted into Manchuria and rapidly pulverized the Japanese Kwantung army. Within days Tokyo had decided to treat with its enemies. On 2 September 1945 Soviet representatives were present to witness the Japanese surrender on the deck of the American battleship Missouri.
How the Soviets Won the War
To understand how the Soviet Union managed to prevail in its war with Nazi Germany it is no less important to consider the reasons for German failure as the reasons for Soviet success. In key respects, the Germans undermined their own war effort.
In the first place, German strategy for the invasion of the Soviet Union was based on entirely erroneous intelligence. For example, prior to the war the Germans had calculated that the Red Army had only 200 divisions; by early August 1941 they had identified 360. The German intelligence services also under-counted the Soviet tank park (by at least 50 per cent) and grossly underestimated the scale, and productivity of the Soviet war economy. Nazi racist ideology also contributed to this depreciation of the enemy. Regarding the Russian as an Untermensch, Hitler was supremely confident that the Germans could conquer the Soviet Union to the Urals in three months, for the entire rotten structure of the Soviet state would surely collapse ‘as soon as we kick the door in’. The battle of Moscow, however, soon demonstrated that the war was not going to be brief. And Hitler had given no thought to a protracted war in the east, specifically to its economic and logistical dimensions.
Ideology also dictated German aims in Russia, and this had major implications for the conduct of the war. With one lightning summer campaign, Hitler aimed to reverse thousands of years of Eastern European history: to overthrow the Soviet government, eradicate communism, and annex Soviet territory as far east as the Urals. This newly acquired Lebensraum could then be used to support a population of some 100 million additional Germans or Germanized Scandinavians. In the course of this process, ‘racially undesirable populations’, especially Jews and Gypsies, were to be systematically exterminated. The fate of the Slavs, and the Russians in particular, was not merely slavery but tribalism: denied any future possibility of a state of their own, they were to be confined to squalid villages and maintained in filth and ignorance.
But the Nazis’ genocidal policies in the occupation zone ultimately detracted from the prosecution of the war, diverting thousands of troops, as well as hundreds of locomotives and wagons, from military operations. The Nazis’ bestial treatment of the Slavs was also ultimately self-defeating, since it alienated them by the millions. Hence the German side failed to capitalize on the anti-communist sentiments of the peasants; not until the very end of the war (and even then with reluctance) did the Nazis authorize the raising of entire Russian military units to fight Stalin. Confiscations of food, fuel, tools, and clothing as well as rape, torture, and shootings undercut German efforts to extract economic benefits from occupied territories. After the harvest of 1942, for instance, the Germans permitted peasants to retain only enough grain for two-thirds of a pound of bread a day. These starvation rations depopulated the countryside and engendered flight or sullen non-co-operation among the survivors. The deportation of almost five million people for work in Germany further exacerbated the labour shortage in the occupied zone. Agricultural output fell by 50 per cent in the areas under Hitler’s controclass="underline" although his armies in the east could be fed locally, very little in the way of a surplus remained for shipment back to the Reich.
The Nazi leadership was slow to grasp that the economy of its eastern conquests had to be rebuilt and managed, not merely plundered. By the time it finally did, the expropriations and atrocities had hardened resistance to German rule and fuelled the growth of the partisan movement, which may have enrolled as many as 200,000 people by 1943.
None the less the Germans were defeated not only by themselves but by their Soviet enemies. Paradoxically the USSR won the war both because of and despite the Stalinist system.
Although the blunders of the Soviet leadership had enabled a surprise attack and a summer of catastrophic defeat, certain characteristics of the regime helped the country weather those initial shocks. Stalin himself observed in November that ‘any other country that had lost as much as we have would have collapsed’, and there was some truth in his remarks. The upheavals and turbulence of the 1930s had taught the mass of Soviet citizens a healthy respect for the power of the state and had inspired belief in its solidity and permanence. This psychic capital, combined with an immediate tightening of the monopoly on information (all radios in the country were confiscated at the end of June) enabled the regime to insulate the population from knowledge of the military débâcle and to combat rumour and panic.
Second, the extreme centralization of the Soviet dictatorship, so cumbrous in the opening phase of the war, eventually proved to be an asset; this authoritarianism permitted the state to mobilize the people and the resources necessary to prosecute total war. Mobilization entailed conscripting millions as soldiers, and millions more as labourers. On the very first day of the war Moscow called up almost all classes of reservists born after 1905. At the same time, it issued a new labour law that compelled vast numbers of Soviet civilians, both men and women, to take up war-related work. Industrial absenteeism was soon declared a felony; railways, waterways, and even many factories were placed under martial law. The State Defence Committee (GKO), created in June 1941 to unify the direction of the war effort, accelerated the evacuation of industrial enterprises from the western borderlands to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. By November of that year the regime had dismantled and shipped 1,523 plants east; roughly 1,200 of them were up and operating by mid-1942.
The management of the Soviet war economy was no easy task, especially in view of the army’s ravenous appetite for fresh manpower. The Soviet Union would eventually draft 16 per cent of its population into the armed forces during the war, thus permitting the Red Army at its height to maintain 11.2 million people under arms. Such unprecedented military conscription stripped the factories and farms of able-bodied men, thereby creating a labour shortage of staggering proportions. The release of prisoners from GULAG (the net outflow was 1.1 million people during the war) provided scant relief. Women, children, and the elderly had to substitute for the absent soldiers. By the end of the summer of 1941 women comprised 70 per cent of the industrial labour force in Moscow.
Matters were still worse in the countryside, as agriculture was feminized, demechanized, and deprived of draft animals. The proportion of women in the rural labour force increased from 40 per cent on the eve of the war to 70 per cent in 1943 and 82 per cent in 1944. The Red Army also requisitioned machines and horses in vast numbers—some 400,000 by the end of 1942, and almost half the horses from the collective farms by the end of the war. Peasant women experimented with harnessing cows to till the fields; others pulled the ploughs themselves. All of this had dire implications for food production, as agricultural yields in the uninvaded zone plummeted in 1943 to less than 50 per cent of the pre-war level. And this paltry stock of food had to sustain a population swollen by twenty-five million refugees.