mobilised, and had not been moved to the frontier. Important, too, was the fact that Fascist Germany unexpectedly and perfidiously violated the 1939 Non-Aggression
Pact between herself and the USSR, wholly indifferent to the consideration that she would be branded as the aggressor by the whole world.
Stalin then proceeded to justify the Soviet-German Pact.
One might well ask: How was it possible for the Soviet Government to sign a non-
aggression pact with such inhuman scoundrels as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Had not a
serious mistake been made? Of course not! A non-aggression pact is a peace pact
between two states, and that was the pact that Germany proposed to us in 1939. No peace-loving state could have rejected such a pact with another country, even if
scoundrels like Hitler and Ribbentrop stood at its head. All the more so, as this Pact did not in any way violate the territorial integrity, independence or honour of our country."
Stalin went on to say that the Pact had given the Soviet Union time to prepare against a German attack should Nazi Germany decide to embark on one.
This war has been inflicted on us, and our country has entered into a life-and-death struggle against its most wicked and perfidious enemy, German Fascism. Our
troops are fighting heroically against heavy odds, against an enemy heavily armed with tanks and aircraft... The main forces of the Red Army, armed with thousands
of tanks and planes, are now entering the battle... Together with the Red Army, the whole of our people are rising to defend their country.
The enemy is cruel and merciless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat and oil.
He wants to restore the power of the landowners, reestablish Tsarism, and destroy the national culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union... and turn them into the slaves of German princes and barons.
There should be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for deserters
and panic-mongers. Our people should be fearless in their struggle and should
selflessly fight our patriotic war of liberation against the Fascist enslavers...
After a reference to Lenin, Stalin said:
We must immediately put our whole production on a war footing, and place
everything at the service of the Front and the organisation of the enemy's rout... The Red Army and Navy and the whole Soviet people must fight for every inch of Soviet soil, fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages... We must organise every kind of help for the Red Army, make sure that its ranks are constantly
renewed, and that it is supplied with everything it needs. We must organise the
rapid transport of troops and equipment, and help to the wounded.
... All enterprises must intensify their work and produce more and more military
equipment of every kind... A merciless struggle must be undertaken against all
deserters and panic-mongers... We must destroy spies, diversionists and enemy
paratroopers... Military tribunals should immediately try anyone who, through
panic or cowardice, is interfering with our defence, regardless of position or rank...
And then came the famous "scorched-earth" instructions:
Whenever units of the Red Army are forced to retreat, all railway rolling stock must be driven away. The enemy must not be left a single engine, or a single railway
truck, and not a pound of bread nor a pint of oil. The kolkhozniki must drive away all their livestock, hand their grain reserves to the State organs for evacuation to the rear... All valuable property, whether grain, fuel or non-ferrous metals, which
cannot be evacuated, must be destroyed.
Then followed the "partisan war" instructions:
In the occupied territories partisan units must be formed... There must be
diversionist groups for fighting enemy units, for spreading the partisan war
everywhere, for blowing up and destroying roads and bridges and telephone and
telegraph wires; for setting fire to forests, enemy stores and road convoys. In the occupied areas intolerable conditions must be created for the enemy and his
accomplices, who must be persecuted and destroyed at every step...
This war, Stalin continued, was not an ordinary war between two armies; it was a war of the entire Soviet people against the German-Fascist troops. The purpose of this all-people war was not only to destroy the threat hanging over the Soviet Union, but also to help all the nations of Europe groaning under the German yoke. In this war the Soviet people
would have faithful allies in the peoples of Europe and America, including the German people enslaved by their ringleaders ... the Soviet people's struggle for the freedom of their country would be merged with the struggle of the peoples of Europe and America for their independence and their democratic freedoms:
In this connection the historic statement of Mr Churchill on Britain's help to the Soviet Union and the statement by the United States Government on its willingness to help our country can only meet with a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of our people, and are highly indicative.
And then came the conclusion:
Comrades, our forces are immeasurably large. The insolent enemy must soon
become aware of this. Together with the Red Army, many thousands of workers,
kolkhozniki and intellectuals are going to the war. Millions more will rise. The workers of Moscow and Leningrad have already begun to form an opolcheniye
(home guard) of many thousands in support of the Red Army. Such opolcheniye
forces must be constituted in every town threatened with invasion...
A State Defence Committee has been formed to deal with the rapid mobilisation of
all the country's resources; all the power and authority of the State are vested in it.
[The members of this Committee, presided over by Stalin, were Molotov (Deputy
Chairman), Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria, a fact not mentioned in the 1961 History, which merely states that Stalin was Chairman.]
This State Defence Committee has embarked upon its work, and it calls upon the
whole people to rally round the Party of Lenin and Stalin, and round the Soviet
Government for the selfless support of the Red Army and Navy, for the routing of
the enemy, for our victory...
All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward, to victory!
The effect of this speech, addressed to a nervous, and often frightened and bewildered people, was very important. Until then there had been something artificial in the
adulation of Stalin; his name was associated not only with the stupendous effort of the Five-Year Plans, but also with the ruthless methods employed in the collectivisation campaign and, worse still, with the terror of the Purges.
The Soviet people now felt that they had a leader to look to. In his relatively short broadcast Stalin not only created the hope, if not yet the certainty, of victory, but he laid down, in short significant sentences, the whole programme of wartime conduct for a
whole nation. He also appealed to the national pride, to the patriotic instincts of the Russian people. It was a great pull-yourselves-together speech, a blood-sweat-and-tears speech, with Churchill's post-Dunkirk speech as its only parallel.
An admirable description of the effect of Stalin's speech is to be found in Konstantin Simonov's famous novel, The Living and the Dead; here the speech was listened to in a field hospital:
Stalin spoke in a toneless, slow voice, with a strong Georgian accent. Once or twice, during his speech, you could hear a glass click as he drank water. His voice was low and soft, and might have seemed perfectly calm, but for his heavy, tired breathing, and that water he kept drinking during the speech...
There was a discrepancy between that even voice and the tragic situation of which he spoke; and in this discrepancy there was strength. People were not surprised.
It was what they were expecting from Stalin.
They loved him in different ways, wholeheartedly, or with reservations; admiring
him and yet fearing him; and some did not like him at all. But nobody doubted his courage and his iron will. And now was a time when these two qualities were needed more than anything else in the man who stood at the head of a country at war.
Stalin did not describe the situation as tragic; such a word would have been hard to imagine as coming from him; but the things of which he spoke— opolcheniye,
partisans, occupied territories, meant the end of illusions... The truth he told was a bitter truth, but at last it was uttered, and people felt that they stood more firmly on the ground...
And the very fact that Stalin should have talked about the unhappy beginning of a vast and terrible war without changing his vocabulary, and that he should have
spoken in his almost usual way about the great but not insuperable difficulties that would have to be overcome— this, too, suggested not weakness, but great strength.
"My friends", Sintsov repeated over and over again. And suddenly he realised that in all the great and even gigantic work that Stalin had been doing, there had been a lack of just these words: "Brothers and sisters! My friends!"—and, even more so, the feelings that stood behind these words. Was it only a tragedy like the war that could give birth to these words and these feelings? ... Above all, what was left in his heart after Stalin's speech was a tense expectation of a change for the better.
This passage is all the more remarkable as it was written in 1958, when the general
attitude to Stalin had already become extremely critical; but Simonov was clearly
unwilling to distort history on this cardinal point. Other works written in the late 1950's, without exception, admit the extreme importance of Stalin's broadcast of July 3—even though some do not even mention his name, but merely speak of a "government
communication".
Chapter IV SMOLENSK: THE FIRST CHECK TO THE
BLITZKRIEG
The State Defence Committee, the formation of which Stalin had announced in his July 3
speech, was charged not only with the military conduct of the war but also with "the rapid mobilisation of all the country's resources". Among the decisions it made in these crucial days were many of far-reaching importance. They concerned the whole field of economic wartime organisation, including industrial mobilisation and the evacuation of whole
industries to the east as well as reorganisation within the armed forces.
Militarily, the State Defence Committee decided to decentralise the command system to some extent by dividing the enormous front into three main sectors, each with a
Command of its own. Voroshilov was appointed to command the "North-Western
Direction", including the Baltic and Northern Fleets; Timoshenko was appointed to the
"Western Direction", and Budienny to the "South-Western Direction", including the Black Sea Fleet. As principal members of their War Councils (i.e. the senior Party leaders for the areas concerned) they were given Zhdanov, Bulganin and Khrushchev
respectively.
On July 16 the military commissars were re-introduced. L. Z. Mekhlis, head of the
Political Propaganda of the Red Army, had fanatically supported this measure.
[ Mekhlis had been notorious in the past as one of the "purgers" of the Army, and was held directly responsible for the liquidation of Blucher. He was something of a
"politisation" fanatic, and had been on particularly bad terms with Timoshenko. A protégé of Voroshilov, he was unpopular with the "younger" generals, and finally, in 1942, after the disastrous Kerch operation in the Crimea, he was demoted. He was
sharply disliked not only by men like Zhukov and Rokossovsky, who did not favour the re-introduction of the officer-and-commissar dual command in the Army in 1941, but
also, on more personal grounds, by some top-ranking members of the Politburo, such as Shcherbakov. The eventual abolition of dual command should not be confused with the
Political Departments in the Army, which continued as before. On Mekhlis, see John
Erickson, The Soviet High Command, London, 1962.]
One cannot help suspecting that the re-introduction of commissars was something of a panic measure due to the fear of a latent, if not open, conflict between the Army and the Party, and the doubt whether some of the officers (many of whom had highly unpleasant memories of the purges) would prove reliable. It is difficult to be sure how much hostility to the Party there was among the officers. In the higher ranks, many veterans of the Revolution such as Budienny and Voroshilov were probably more "Party" than "Army", and others, like Konev, were half-and-half. But several of the brilliant younger generals, such as Zhukov, Tolbukhin, Rokossovsky and Govorov, were probably more "Army"
than "Party". The last two, for instance, had themselves been purged in 1937 and, though now fully rehabilitated, must still have had a good many reservations about the Party, however strong their patriotism.
In fact the military commissars were to prove a cause of friction and were to be abolished again in the autumn of 1942.
Similarly, it was decided at the end of June to mobilise members of the Party and
Komsomol as "politboitsy", i.e. "political soldiers" to be incorporated in the Army. Each obkom or kraikom (i.e. provincial party committee) was to mobilise within three days between 500 and 5,000 Communists, and place them at the disposal of the Commissariat of Defence. In this way 95,000 politboitsy were mobilised, and of these 58,000 were sent into the Army in the field within the first three months of the war.
Another measure was the approval of the constitution of the opolcheniye, i.e. mainly workers' battalions, in cities like Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, Makeyevka,
Gorlovka and other industrial centres. These "home guard" units were to be used extensively— and often very wastefully—to fill in gaps at the front, notably in the
defence of Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa. The story of these poorly-trained and poorly-armed units is one of the most tragic in the whole war. Judging from the available figures, the eagerness to join the opolcheniye varied from place to place. It was highest in Leningrad, rather lower in Moscow, and much lower in Kiev.
Apart from the opolcheniye, a variety of other emergency formations were constituted in both towns and villages, such as anti-paratroop units, and orders were given for air-raid precautions:
All Soviet citizens between the ages of 16 and 60 (men) and 18 and 50 (women) must
compulsorily take part in civil-defence groups to be constituted by enterprises, offices and house committees. The training in anti-aircraft and anti-gas defence is to be carried out by the Osoaviakhim.
[The Osoaviakhim was the "Society for aiding defence and the aircraft and chemical industries"; it was a "voluntary society", set up long before the war, for giving some military experience to the population. Later, during the war, it was renamed DOSAAF
(Voluntary society for aiding the army, air force and navy).]
Another important set of instructions issued at the end of June concerned the organisation of partisan warfare in the enemy rear; but while the principle of the thing was important, large-scale partisan war behind the German lines did not develop until considerably later.
While the State Defence Committee were making these plans and also laying the
foundations for a thorough economic reorganisation of the country, the military situation continued to be disastrous. At the beginning of July there were large gaps in the front.
The "first echelon" of the Red Army had suffered such appalling losses in the first weeks of the invasion that it scarcely still counted as an effective force. The hopes of holding a new defence line (referred to by the Western press as the "Stalin Line") running from Narva on the Gulf of Finland, through Pskov, Polotsk, and then along the Dnieper to
Kherson on the Black Sea, had been smashed. And though there wer
e still reserves of
men, the Red Army was suffering severe shortages of weapons of all kinds.
In these circumstances the Soviet command had to decide on priorities, and it decided that the first priority was to make every effort to hold up the enemy in the "Smolensk-Moscow direction".
Seen in perspective, the battle of Smolensk was to mark the beginning of a new phase in the campaign and, indeed, to introduce a decidedly different pattern into the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In the Smolensk area, for the first time, Soviet resistance succeeded in bringing the German blitzkrieg advance to a halt, if only for a couple of months. Thus, at the very centre of gravity of the invaders' attack, on the direct road to Moscow, the freedom of manoeuvre of the German High Command was seriously
restricted and its all-important time schedule upset.
It was on July 16 that von Bock's advance guards reached the outskirts of Smolensk—and ran into resistance such as they had not met before. Hitherto they had encountered only limited nests of resistance and relatively small units making heroic and suicidal last-ditch stands. This time they were met with firm resistance on a coherent and relatively wide front.
The Russians were determined not to allow the enemy to advance much further. They
threw in reserves along a wide front from Velikie Luki to Mozyr, and their counter-
attacks were successful in checking the German advance. Though Smolensk itself fell, heavy fighting continued in the area, and for the rest of July and August the Germans failed to break through the Russian line, firmly stabilised about twenty to twenty-five miles east of Smolensk—the Yartsevo-Yelnya-Desna Line.
As usual, German and Russian histories disagree about which side had the numerical
advantage in men and material in the Smolensk battle. General Guderian, for example, has referred to "the Russians' great numerical superiority in tanks". In view of the heavy Russian losses earlier, this is extremely improbable, though it must be remembered that, after such a deep and rapid advance into enemy territory, many of the German tanks may not have been operational any more. Wear and tear would have taken their toll, and the supply lines were by now so extended (in a country with inadequate roads) that spares and fuel may well not have been arriving at the front quickly enough, or in the quantities needed.
Russia at war Page 21
