Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Hitler’s ideology, along with his geopolitical plans, dictated that most of those killed by the Nazis were targeted in the name of stamping out “Jewish Bolshevism.” When they launched their full-scale genocide in 1941–42, it was enough merely to have been born a Jew, in accordance with Nazi definitions of Jewishness, for someone to be sentenced to die in the most wretched way possible. The Nazis were also merciless with Red Army prisoners, allowing millions to die in captivity. No one will ever know how many Red Army soldiers were shot out of hand rather than made captive.

  The Nazis were stopped and Berlin was in flames, but at the price of a reinvigorated Soviet Union. Like Lenin before him, Stalin wanted to capitalize on the situation brought on by war. In April 1945 he was candid with a visiting delegation led by Marshal Tito, the head of the Communist resistance in Yugoslavia: “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

  He was already thinking ahead: “We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.” That presumably meant an attempt to conquer the rest of Europe. Stalin admitted he had taken half and coveted the rest. These aims foreshadowed the Cold War that was to last almost a half century.17

  Milovan Djilas, who accompanied Tito on a visit with Stalin and saw him alone as well, noted how the “cult of personality” grew exponentially and turned him into a deity. Djilas identified the mercilessly buoyant Stalin and the mood of the time at war’s end:

  His country was in ruins, hungry, exhausted. But his armies and marshals, heavy with fat and medals and drunk with vodka and victory, had already trampled half of Europe under foot, and he was convinced they would trample over the other half in the next round. He knew he was one of the cruelest, most despotic personalities in human history. But this did not worry him one bit, for he was convinced that he was executing the judgment of history. His conscience was troubled by nothing, despite the millions who had been destroyed in his name and by his order, despite the thousands of his closest collaborators whom he had murdered as traitors because they doubted that he was leading the country and people into happiness, equality, and liberty….

  Now he was the victor in the greatest war of his nation and in history. His power, absolute over a sixth of the globe, was spreading farther without surcease. This convinced him that his society contained no contradictions and that it exhibited superiority to other societies in every way.18

  Stalin was infuriated to learn on May 7 that the Germans had just agreed to unconditional surrender, not in Berlin in the conspicuous presence of the Soviets, but rather in the small French city of Rheims. He called Zhukov and ordered him to Berlin for the ceremony the next day to represent the Supreme Command of the Soviet forces, along with the appointed leaders of the Supreme Command of the Allied forces. The documents were finally signed early in the morning on May 9, 1945. It would be that day the USSR celebrated, not May 8—considered V-E day in much of the rest of the world.19

  Stalin’s announcement of victory from Moscow was not the kind that touched the hearts of the people, though they were relieved and enraptured to hear it. Many hoped they would be rewarded with greater freedoms, but Stalin made no such promises. Instead, he spoke about how the independence of the country had been secured.20

  The agony persisted for millions, particularly the Soviet POWs and those men, women, and children who had been picked up and deported (often against their will) to work as slaves in the Third Reich. Between nine and ten million endured that fate at the hands of the Nazis, and barely half of them were alive at the end of the war. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Americans and British agreed to repatriate “liberated prisoners of war and civilians.” In making this decision, the Western Allies were concerned about the safe return of their own nationals found in camps by the Red Army, but their agreement had fateful consequences for Soviet citizens then in the West.

  From Stalin’s point of view all who survived Nazi captivity were under suspicion. Special NKVD filtration camps went over the cases of 1.8 million military personnel and the 3.6 million civilians who returned to the Soviet Union. The investigations took years. Some people were shot straightaway, while others were given long prison terms. One former POW recalled how they were gathered for meetings on their return where a political officer “told us that we had committed a grave offense before the motherland and our people, and proposed that we sign on voluntarily for five years’ construction work in the Urals as the only way to atone for our guilt.”21 Soviet citizens who had fought for Hitler and ended up in the distant United States had to be returned. They took all kinds of desperate measures to resist, but it was to no avail.

  All returnees were given a “temporary certificate,” which was a black mark on their record they could never erase. Soviet leaders harboured doubts and suspicions about their own partisans who had fought courageously behind the German lines on Stalin’s explicit instructions. Questions were even raised about members of the Red Army who had seen what life was like abroad. Konstantin Simonov wrote how “the contrast between living standards in Europe and among us, which millions of fighting people encountered, was a moral and psychological blow that was not so easy for our people to bear despite the fact they were the victors in the war.”22 Had the soldiers seen too much? Could they ever be trusted again?

  On June 24 an emotional victory parade took place in Moscow. Stalin decided he was physically unable to mount horseback for the salute and so delegated the task to Marshal Zhukov. On the appointed day at 10: 00 a.m. the war hero rode into Red Square on a white horse, where he met Marshal Rokossovsky and they reviewed the troops. After Zhukov’s brief speech, the music picked up, and then, to the accompaniment of a long drumroll, two hundred veterans carrying the banners of two hundred defeated German armies stepped forward and flung these tokens of victory in the dust before Lenin’s mausoleum. Looking at the news-reels, one gets an idea of the surging emotions, the grief, the elation, and the hopes for the future. The ceremony should have been enough to satisfy Stalin’s pride as he stood atop Lenin’s tomb, for he was held in such esteem at that moment that he might have been assured a place in the hearts of the people forever. It was not to be.

  On the eve of the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, Stalin let himself be made a generalissimo to be set above mere marshals. Within a year, Zhukov’s power was whittled down, and he was sent off to Odessa and obscurity. Stalin felt threatened by the war hero and by the adulation heaped on the armed forces. In 1947, Victory Day was turned into a regular working day (to be reinstated later); veterans’ associations were barred (until 1956); and the generals were strongly discouraged from writing their memoirs.

  These decisions might have been related to Stalin’s concerns about sharing the limelight, but the causes of the neglect of the war wounded need a different explanation. Many such people were reduced to begging in the streets until a campaign in 1947, reminiscent of the 1930s, sent them off to “special colonies.” One writer concludes that “having won a great war, the nomenklatura ruling class was digging in and constructing new pyramids of patron-client dependency. The habit of classifying, labeling, commanding, threatening, punishing, and granting or withholding benefits helped them to consolidate their dominance.”23 A sign that “normalcy” was going to return was that women, who had played an important role in the war and not merely on the home front but in uniform, were not permitted to march in the victory parade.

  Although tired and aging, Stalin reasserted his power inside the ruling elite and stripped colleagues of any independence they might have acquired during the war. In effect he restored the “leadership system that he had created in the wake of the Great Terror.”24 He would brook no rivals, and, like Lenin before him, he tried to stave off any thoughts of a successor—hence the need to demote Zhukov, who was sometimes mentioned as a possible heir. He had other candidates hum
iliated and sometimes pushed aside.

  The mills of the Gulag kept on grinding. The number of prisoners in labor camps and colonies rose almost continuously from 1941 until Stalin’s death in 1953, when there were 2.4 million people in the system.25

  At the same time Stalin was zealous enough to impose Soviet-style Communism in every country of Europe liberated by the Red Army. If Soviet military and economic power in 1945 was about what it had been in 1939, the great difference was that for the first time in Russian history, there were no major enemies on the borders. Stalin had made his intentions perfectly clear to Churchill and Roosevelt, and he set up regimes like his own when the Red Army toppled collaborationist governments or crushed resistance movements as it marched west. The one exception was Yugoslavia, where Tito and his Party not only liberated their country mostly by themselves but wanted to impose their own brand of Communism. They were expelled from the new Communist International in 1948. There were civil wars involving Communists and their opponents in other parts of Europe, most notably in Greece and Ukraine, which represented further ripple effects of the war.

  Spreading Communism to the West had been an integral part of the Bolsheviks’ ideology, and Stalin intended to make good on it. A ring of suitably “cleansed” states was established around the western Soviet border. They endured, complete with secret police and terror, for almost a half century. Communism undoubtedly held back the development of these nations for two full generations. They are still trying to recover.

  At Yalta, FDR and Churchill were willing to accept that the Germans living in the east would be pushed out as Stalin desired. Churchill admitted that people in England were shocked at the idea that so many would be moved against their will.26 It turned out that something on the order of nine million Germans were hounded out of the USSR, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in the east. FDR did not live to see victory and what happened, for he passed away on April 12. President Harry Truman was instinctively distrustful of Stalin, and when he met him at the Potsdam Conference (July 17 to August 2, 1945) expressed concerns about “population transfers.” Stalin disingenuously said he could do nothing about them and that anyway the Germans had already left.

  Truman wanted the USSR to enter the war against Japan, and he told Stalin offhandedly at the end of another contentious session at Potsdam that he “had a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” He recalled that all Stalin said was that “he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’” At the time many in the room focused on Stalin’s expression to see if they could read his mind. He was inscrutable, but he was every bit as informed about the atomic bomb as Truman, thanks to Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy at Los Alamos. Stalin’s view of the sudden announcement, echoed by Zhukov, who was there, though not an official member of the delegation, was that the U.S. president was trying to intimidate the USSR and assert himself “from a position of strength.” The ideological clash between the two new superpowers was on, and it would rage across the globe for the next half century, a creature born during the age of catastrophe.27

  Truman confided to his diary that he was troubled about the discovery of “the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.” He wondered whether it might be “the fire of destruction” mentioned in the Bible. He told himself it would be used only against the Japanese military and not against civilians, but he knew better. His consolation was that “it is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb.”28

  As the meetings went ahead at Potsdam, what happened on the ground was another atrocious chapter in the history of ethnic cleansing. This time mainly the Germans would suffer. They were pillaged, plundered, and the women raped, and ethnic Germans were terrorized into leaving for the West. Tens of thousands were butchered in the former Sudetenland along the western Czech border. In Poland it was worse, and a recent account concludes that as many as a half million were killed in the “cleansing” there.29

  One of the saddest developments in the immediate postwar period was the rise of yet another series of anti-Semitic attacks. In Poland, 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population had been murdered during the Holocaust. The survivors who returned to their homes after the war found not sympathy but hostility. Some Poles had gained materially at the expense of the Jews, and they feared claims by survivors. The new authorities in Poland, taking their anti-Semitic cues from Stalin, were intent on breaking the Nazi myths about the links between the Jews and Communism.30

  Stalin’s turn to anti-Semitism was out of character with his early life and career and a complete contradiction of what Marxists had said about the Jewish question for almost a century. Jews had always been welcomed into the Bolshevik Party, and, as we have seen, many leaders of the Soviet regime were from Jewish backgrounds, even if they themselves rejected all religion. Stalin’s attitude grew hostile to the Jews during the war in lockstep with the growth of his new Russian nationalism, which became more pronounced after the end of hostilities. Although he was the first to recognize Israel in 1948, he did so because he thought it could be turned into a Soviet outpost. When that failed and the new country looked instead to America, the ideological enemy, he became a staunch anti-Zionist.

  Recently revealed documents show that just before his death, Stalin seemed to be preparing a major action against the Jews in the Soviet Union. This development began in 1948, when one of his colleagues in the Politburo, Andrei Zhdanov, suffered a heart attack and other problems in June and was hospitalized. In July Zhdanov had what was likely another heart attack, and Stalin had his own physician investigate. The patient held on, but, perhaps because he had been misdiagnosed, suffered another attack and died on August 31. A year later Georgi Dimitrov, an old colleague, a former head of the Communist International, and then premier of Bulgaria, died suddenly as well. He was being treated by the same doctor.

  Thus began the dyelo vrachey (case of the doctors). What we had here was not a Jewish “doctors’ plot” against the Soviet Union, as was propagated by the regime, but the leader’s attempt to root out the Jews in the medical profession. In addition, thousands lost their jobs in the government, poets were put on trial, and it is not hard to conclude that Stalin intended to cut a wide swath through the Jewish population in the country.31

  On January 13, 1953, Pravda published an account of the “vast Jewish conspiracy,” after which rumors abounded that on a particular day soon, all would be “voluntarily” deported. Eleanor Roosevelt appealed to President Eisenhower to do something to help the Jews in the USSR, and that was enough for Stalin the same day to break off all relations with Israel.

  The net was thrown wider still when German, Austrian, and other foreign “criminals” were arrested in Soviet zones in the West and returned to the USSR for trial and punishment. Instructions were issued for the creation of four new concentration camps in the east where prisoners would be separated from the rest of the Gulag. Rumor had it that these camps were for Jews, and construction began only three weeks before Stalin died. Then the matter was shelved, and we are left to speculate what might have happened, had he lived longer.32

  The age of social catastrophe contained forces of such destructive power that even Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, could not bring the era to a close. The shock waves and eruptions, almost like gigantic earthquakes, could be felt as far away as South and Central America and eventually all over Asia, particularly in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Centuries of Asian civilization were threatened or rooted out, and new Communist regimes were formed at the cost of immeasurable suffering. As in many parts of Eastern Europe, the scars left on the land and on the people can be seen to this day.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS IN NOTES

  AHR American Historical Review

  BAB Bundesarchiv Berlin

  DGFP Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, Series D (Washington, D.C.)

  DRZW Das Deutsche Re
ich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1979 ff.)

  EAS Europe-Asia Studies

  Hitler Aufzeichnungen Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen,1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel, with Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart, 1980), collected writings

  Hitler: Reden, Schriften Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 1925–1933 (Munich, 1992ff.); collected speeches, writings, and directives

  Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus (Leonberg, 1973); collected speeches and proclamations

  HP Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, in Harvard’s Russian Research Center

  IMT Trials of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal (German ed.)

  KP Komsomol’skaya pravda; Communist Youth newspaper

  KTB Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt am Main, 1965ft); war diary, High Command of the German Armed Forces

  Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochineniia (Moscow, 1959ff.); the complete collected works in Russian

  McNeal, Stalin sochineniia Robert H. McNeal, ed., Stalin sochineniia (Stanford, 1967ft); these volumes continue the series of Stalin’s works (vols. 1–13) with 3 additional vols. They are in Russian and part of Stalin’s complete collected works