Patriotic War, 1941-1945
JOHN BARBER AND MARK HARRISON
Standing squarely in the middle of the Soviet Union's timeline is the Great Patriotic War, the Russian name for the eastern front of the Second World War. In recent years historians have tended to give this war less importance than it deserves. One reason may be that we are particularly interested in Stalin and Stalinism. This has led us to pay more attention to the changes following the death of one man, Stalin, in March 1953, than to those that flowed from an event involving the deaths of 25 million. The war was more than just an interlude between the 'pre-war' and 'post-war' periods.1 It changed the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals. For the survivors, it also changed the world in which they lived.
This chapter asks: Why did the Soviet Union find itself at war with Germany in 1941? What, briefly, happened in the war? Why did the Soviet war effort not collapse within a few weeks as many observers reasonably expected, most importantly those in Berlin? How was the Red Army rebuilt out of the ashes of early defeats? What were the consequences of defeat and victory for the Soviet state, society and economy? All this does not convey much of the personal experience of war, for which the reader must turn to narrative history and memoir.2
The road to war
Why, on Sunday, 22 June 1941, did the Soviet Union find itself suddenly at war (see Plate 14)? The reasons are to be found in gambles and miscalculations by
The authors thank R.W Davies, Simon Ertz and Jon Petrie for valuable comments and advice.
1 Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
2 Forty years on there is still no more evocative workin the English language than Alexander Werth's RussiaatWar, 1941-1945 (London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1964).
| Map 8.1. The USSR and Europe at the end of the Second World War |
all the Great Powers over the preceding forty years. During the nineteenth century international trade, lending and migration developed without much restriction. Great empires arose but did not much impede the movement of goods or people. By the twentieth century, however, several newly industrialising countries were turning to economic stabilisation by controlling and diverting trade to secure economic self-sufficiency within colonial boundaries. German leaders wanted to insulate Germany from the world by creating a closed trading bloc based on a new empire. To get an empire they launched a naval arms race that ended in Germany's military and diplomatic encirclement by Britain, France and Russia. To break out of containment they attacked France and Russia and this led to the First World War; the war brought death and destruction on a previously unimagined scale and defeat and revolution for Russia, their allies and themselves.
The First World War further undermined the international economic order. World markets were weakened by Britain's post-war economic difficulties and by Allied policies that isolated and punished Germany for the aggression of 1914 and Russia for treachery in 1917. France and America competed with Britain for gold. The slump of 1929 sent deflationary shock waves rippling around the world. In the 1930s the Great Powers struggled for national shares in a shrunken world market. The international economy disintegrated into a few relatively closed trading blocs.
The British, French and Dutch reorganised their trade on protected colonial lines, but Germany and Italy did not have colonies to exploit. Hitler led Germany back to the dream of an empire in Central and Eastern Europe; this threatened war with other interested regional powers. Germany's attacks on Czechoslovakia, Poland (which drew in France and Britain) and the Soviet Union aimed to create 'living space' for ethnic Germans through genocide and resettlement. Italy and the states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire formed more exclusive trading links. Mussolini wanted the Mediterranean and a share of Africa for Italy, and eventually joined the war on France and Britain to get them. The Americans and Japanese competed in East Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese campaign in the Far East was both a grab at the British, French and Dutch colonies and a counter-measure against American commercial warfare. All these actions were gambles and most turned out disastrously for everyone including the gamblers themselves.
In the inter-war years the Soviet Union, largely shut out of Western markets, but blessed by a large population and an immense territory, developed within closed frontiers. The Soviet strategy of building 'socialism in a single country' showed both similarities and differences in comparison with national economic developments in Germany, Italy and Japan. Among the differences were its inclusive if paternalistic multinational ethic of the Soviet family of nations with the Russians as 'elder brother', and the modernising goals that Stalin imposed by decree upon the Soviet economic space. Unlike the Nazis, the Communists did not preach racial hatred and extermination, although they did preach class hatred.
There were also some similarities. One was the control of foreign trade; the Bolsheviks were happy to trade with Western Europe and the United States, but only if the trade was under their direct control and did not pose a competitive threat to Soviet industry. After 1931, conditions at home and abroad became so unfavourable that controlled trade gave way to almost no trade at all; apart from a handful of 'strategic' commodities the Soviet economy became virtually closed. Another parallel lay in the fact that during the 1930s the Soviet Union pursued economic security within the closed space of a 'single country' that was actually organised on colonial lines inherited from the old Russian Empire; this is something that Germany, Italy and Japan still had to achieve through empire-building and war.
The Soviet Union was an active partner in the process that led to the opening of the 'eastern front' on 22 June 1941. Soviet war preparations began in the 1920s, long before Hitler's accession to power, at a time when France and Poland were seen as more likely antagonists.
The decisions to rearm the country and to industrialise it went hand in hand.[22] The context for these decisions was the Soviet leadership's perception of internal and external threats and their knowledge of history. They feared internal threats because they saw the economy and their own regime as fragile: implementing the early plans for ambitious public-sector investment led to growing consumer shortages and urban discontent. As a result they feared each minor disturbance of the international order all the more. The 'war scare' of 1927 reminded them that the government of an economically and militarily backward country could be undermined by events abroad at any moment: external difficulties would immediately accentuate internal tensions with the peasantry who supplied food and military recruits and with the urban workers who would have to tighten their belts. They could not forget the
22
N. S. Simonov, '"Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets": The 1927 'War Alarm" and its Consequences',