Russia at war
Page 26
Rumanians had lost 110,000 men at Odessa; but this is by no means a fantastic figure, since, according to the Rumanians, their army lost, between the outbreak of the war and October 10, 1941, as many as 70,000 dead and 100,000 wounded.
[Telpukhovsky, op. cit., German edition, p. 58.]
Odessa and all the country between the Dniester and the Western Bug, were to be
incorporated in Rumania under the name of Transniestria. There was, as we shall see, going to be a marked difference between the Rumanian and the German occupation
régime.
Whether 175,000 prisoners were taken east of Kiev, or 400,000 or 600,000—all this
Russian and German quibbling over figures is one thing; another is what all this
represented in human terms.
A heavy silence hung over the whole question all through the war and, indeed, for many years after. Certainly, Molotov issued, from time to time, long Notes on the ill-treatment of Russian war-prisoners, or on atrocities committed by the Germans in the occupied
areas of the Soviet Union. But these were clumsy documents, in which horrors were piled upon horrors to such an extent that those who read them, not only in the West, but even in Russia in 1941-3, only half-believed them—if that. Except for some atrocities the
Germans had committed in the relatively small areas around Moscow that were liberated by the Russians in the winter of 1941-2, there was still very little first-hand information on the German occupation, or even on the German treatment of war-prisoners. Only after Stalingrad, when the Russians began to liberate enormous areas, did the truth begin to emerge. And even then, not the whole truth. The full enormity of it did not begin to be measured until the liberation of Poland with its super-death-camps and the occupation of Germany when stock could at last be taken of what had happened to the Russians
deported to Germany as slave labour, or captured as war prisoners, particularly in 1941-2.
For long after the war, very little was said about those who were taken prisoner in those early war days; a stigma was still attached to those unfortunate people.
The human tragedy of the Russian prisoners was not to be openly discussed in Russia
until long after the war. By far the most graphic account of what it was like to have been trapped in the Kiev Encirclement was not to be written until twenty years after, and published in the form of a short story in Novyi Mir of January 1963. But though presented as fiction, it is the tale of one of its survivors, and has the ring of absolute authenticity.
In the thirty pages of Through the Night, Leonid Volynsky succeeds in telling the story of German captivity with the same concentrated intensity that Solzhenitsyn had given to his account of the Stalin labour camps.
The story begins on September 17, 1941 in a Ukrainian village, just as the German ring is about to close round the Russians.
Many years afterwards, I read a book by von Tippelskirch, a German general, who
wrote that the encirclement of our troops east of Kiev had tied down large German forces, and so ruined Hitler's game, since it delayed his offensive against Moscow.
No doubt that's just how things happened... But we knew nothing about that. To
hundreds of thousands of men trying during those nights to break out of the
German ring... groping their way through forests and marshes, and under a
hailstorm of German bombs and shells ... all this was nothing but a vast and
inexplicable tragedy.
On that night of the 17th, the narrator was wandering along a road; two or three thousand motor vehicles were burning; it was important not to let the Germans have them. That night, too, he saw a group of ten senior officers also walking towards Lokhvitsa (where there was believed to be a gap in the ring)—he recognised among them the Commander
of the Front, General Kirponos.
Not until several years later did I learn that he shot himself that night—or it may have been the following night, having refused to fly off in a plane that had been sent for him with great difficulty... His remains have since been reburied in Kiev. With him also died a member of his war council, Burmistrenko, who had been the Second
Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP before the war.
[It is curious to note that, according to the official History Kirponos was "killed"; there is no mention of his suicide.]
On the following morning, the narrator and three other soldiers, seeing German tanks approaching, hid in an overgrown ravine. But the Germans noticed them, and proceeded to machine-gun the bottom of the ravine. One man was killed, but the three others
surrendered. (The thought of suicide crossed the narrator's mind, but no more.) A German soldier, a decent and pleasant fellow at first sight, slapped their faces, and ordered them to empty their pockets. Closely followed by a tank, they had to run to a village called Kovali. By the end of the day, 10,000 prisoners were assembled there.
On the following morning, the "Commissars, Communists and Jews" were summoned to come forward, after the arrival of some fifteen SS-men in black uniforms and with skulls on their caps. Some three hundred came forward, were stripped to the waist and lined up in the yard. Then the interpreter, a young man, speaking with a strong Galician accent, shouted that some must still be hiding; and anyone who denounced a Communist,
Commissar or Jew could take his clothes and other belongings. "And, among ten
thousand men, you will always find a dozen or two such people; it may not be a high
percentage, but there it is. Such people do exist, and always will." So, in the end, four hundred were shot, being taken away ten at a time, and ordered to dig their graves.
They all died silently, except one, who uttered heart-rending screams, as he crawled at the SS-men's feet: "Don't kill me! My mother is a Ukrainian." One of the SS-men kicked him in the face, and knocked his teeth out, and he was hauled off to the
execution ground, his bare feet dragging through the dust.
The surviving war prisoners were marched first to one camp, and then to another, and the soldiers—"decent-looking, ordinary chaps, perhaps German working-men"—
automatically shot any stragglers, or anyone falling down by the road-side. The rest of the story is one of such constant starvation, cold and humiliation that the prisoners rapidly lost all human semblance and human dignity. The narrator and two other men succeeded in escaping—but they were the lucky exceptions.
Chapter IX THE EVACUATION OF INDUSTRY
The evacuation of industry threatened by the German invasion had been one of the Soviet Government's major concerns almost since the moment the war had begun. During the
very first days of the war two important industrial centres were lost: Riga and Minsk; but there was nothing of outstanding industrial importance in Lithuania, the rest of Latvia, Belorussia, or the Western Ukraine. The great industrial areas of the European part of the Soviet Union threatened by the invasion, or, at any rate, by destruction from the air, were the whole of Central and Eastern Ukraine—including the Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk,
Krivoi Rog, Mariupol and Nikopol areas, and the Donbas—and secondly, the industrial
areas of Moscow and Leningrad.
Whether or not the Soviet Government believed, in the early weeks of the war, that the Germans would reach Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkov, or the Donbas, it very rightly
decided, there and then, to take no chances, and laid down as a firm principle the
evacuation of all essential industries, and particularly the war industries, to the east. It knew from the start that this was a matter of life and death if the Germans were going to overrun large areas of European Russia.
This transplantation of industry in the second half of 1941 and the beginning of 1942 and its "rehousing" in the east, must rank among the most stupendous organisational and human achievements of the Soviet Union during the war.
A steep increase in war production and the reorganisation of the ent
ire war industry on a new basis depended on the rapid transfer of heavy industry from the western and central areas of European Russia and the Ukraine to the distant rear, where it would not only be out of the German army's reach, but would also be beyond the range of German aircraft.
As early as July 4, the State Defence Committee ordered the Chairman of the Gosplan, Voznesensky, to draw up a detailed plan for setting up in the east what was, in effect, "a second line of industrial defence". The aim was to organise a "coherent productive combination between the industries already existing in the east and those to be
transplanted there".
The evacuation of industry to the Urals, the Volga country, Western Siberia and Central Asia, started at a very early stage of the war, not only from industrial centres immediately threatened by the Germans, but from other centres as well. Thus, as early as July 2, it was decided to move the armoured-plate mill from Mariupol in the Southern Ukraine, to
Magnitogorsk, though Mariupol was still hundreds of miles away from the front. On the following day, the State Defence Committee, after approving the plans for the output of guns and small arms during the next few months, decided to transfer to the east twenty-six armament plants from Leningrad, Moscow and Tula. During the same week it was
decided to send east part of the equipment, workers and technical staff from the diesel department of the Kirov Plant in Leningrad and the Tractor Plant in Kharkov. Another large plant for manufacturing tank engines was to be transferred from Kharkov to
Cheliabinsk in the Urals.
At the same time, the conversion of certain industries was decided upon: thus, the Gorki automobile plant was to concentrate on the output of tank engines. These two decisions laid the foundations for a vast Volga-Urals combine for the mass-production of tanks.
Similar steps were taken in respect of the aircraft industry.
With the German threat to the Eastern Ukraine growing, it was decided to evacuate
without delay such vast enterprises as the Zaporozhie steel mills (Zaporozhstal). On August 7 orders were given to evacuate the enormous tube-rolling mill at
Dniepropetrovsk. The first trains evacuating this plant left on August 9, and the ninth group of trains loaded with the plant's equipment, arrived at Pervouralsk in the Urals on September 6. By December 24 it was in production again.
Many other large plants were also evacuated during August. The dismantling and loading of the equipment went on non-stop for twenty-four hours a day, often under enemy
bombing. The size of the operation may be judged from the fact that in the case of
Zaporozhstal alone, it required 8,000 railway trucks to evacuate the entire plant and its stocks. Most of the equipment, weighing some 50,000 tons, was put to work in the
Magnitogorsk engineering combine.
On September 21, L. P. Korniets, of the Ukrainian Government, who supervised the
evacuation, was able to report to the Government that "At Zaporozhie all plants have been evacuated. The evacuation took place in an organised manner, and with proper
camouflage." He added that the raw materials were now being evacuated. In addition to the local workers, many hundreds of miners had been brought to Zaporozhie to help with the dismantling of the steel-mill equipment.
Rather less successful was the evacuation of some of the plants of the Donbas, which was overrun by the Germans more quickly than had been expected, and here the scorched-earth policy was extensively applied. Similarly, the Dnieper Dam was at least partly demolished by the retreating Russians. All the same, it had been possible to rescue a great deal: altogether, 283 major industrial enterprises had been evacuated from the Ukraine between June and October, besides 136 smaller factories.
More difficult, in the chaotic conditions of the first weeks of the invasion, had been the evacuation of the industrial plants of Belo-russia, all the more so as the railways were under constant air bombardment; even so, some 100 enterprises (though not comparable in importance to those of the Ukraine) were evacuated, chiefly from the eastern parts of Beloirussia (Gomel and Vitebsk).
The evacuation of Leningrad plants, and their workers, began in July after the Germans had reached the Luga river; but only ninety-two enterprises specialising in war
production, and some workshops of the Kirov and Izhora plants were evacuated in time; the rest were trapped in Leningrad after the Germans had cut all the railway lines.
The large-scale industrial evacuation of Moscow was not started until October 10, with the Germans only a few miles away. But by the end of November 498 enterprises had
been moved to the east, together with about 210,000 workers. No fewer than 71,000
railway wagons were required for this evacuation. During those grim winter months
measures were also taken to evacuate from "threatened areas" like Kursk, Voronezh and the North-Caucasian provinces, as much as possible of the available food reserves, as well as the equipment of many light-industry factories.
This fantastic migration of industries and men to the east was not completed without considerable difficulties: there were gigantic bottlenecks at certain major railway
junctions such as Cheliabinsk, and the evacuees suffered some terrible hardships on the way to the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan in the late autumn and at the height of winter.
Altogether, between July and November 1941 no fewer than 1,523 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 large war plants had been moved to the east—226 to the Volga area, 667
to the Urals, 244 to Western Siberia, 78 to Eastern Siberia, 308 to Kazakhstan and
Central Asia. The "evacuation cargoes" amounted to a total of one and a half million railway wagon-loads.
This transplantation of industry to the east at the height of the German invasion in 1941
is, of course, an altogether unique achievement. But it would, at the same time be naive to assume that everything of any industrial importance was either evacuated in time, or destroyed on the strength of Stalin's "scorched-earth" instructions of July 3.
After the war, the Soviet Government officially claimed that, apart from destroying six million houses, leaving twenty-five million people homeless, slaughtering or carrying off seven million horses, seventeen million head of cattle, twenty million pigs, etc., the Germans and their allies had also "destroyed 31,850 industrial enterprises, employing some four million persons before the war, and had destroyed or carried away 239,000
electro-motors and 175,000 machine-tools".
[Molotov's speech on Reparations on August 26, 1946, at the Paris Peace Conference for the Satellite countries, quoted in Vneshnyaya Politika Sovietskogo Soyuza, 1946 (Soviet Foreign Policy 1946) (Moscow, 1947), pp. 296-7.]
Even allowing for the fact that, with an eye on reparations Molotov quoted some greatly inflated figures for the industrial equipment destroyed or looted by the Germans and their allies, his statement is, in fact, still an admission that a very important quantity of such equipment was left behind.
Everything tends to show that a very important part in this evacuation of industry and its
"resettlement" in the east was played by Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Kaganovich, but one would look in vain for any of these names in present-day accounts of this gigantic achievement which was ultimately to enable Russia to carry on the war. Instead, the
names that are now given pride of place are Mikoyan and Kosygin, who remain among
Mr Khrushchev's closest associates, and Voznesensky, who was shot, apparently in the course of the lurid "Leningrad Affair" in 1949.
Especially when the Battle of Moscow was at its height, and after the Russian counter-offensive had begun, the Russian working-class worked with redoubled energy in
resettling the evacuated war plants. Here was the combination of a great feat of
organisation with an almost unparallelled example of mass devotion, for the men and
women engaged in re-starting the evacuated armaments industry had to work
at the
height of winter, with worse than inadequate food and housing.
In October, many government departments, such as the People's Commissariats of
Aircraft Production, Tank Production, Armaments, Iron and Steel, and Munitions were
evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev. Voznesensky, the head of Gosplan, was
instructed to send a weekly report to Moscow on the progress of the armaments
industries. Similarly, a part of the apparat of the Central Committee of the CPSU had been evacuated to Kuibyshev and "was authorised to send recommendations and
instructions to the regional party committees of the Volga, Urals, Siberian and Central-Asian provinces concerning the organisation of industries evacuated to these areas, and also concerning agricultural State purchases". Special "evacuation bases" were established in industrial centres such as Gorki, Kuibyshev, Cheliabinsk, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Magnitogorsk, Tashkent, etc.
Many evacuated factories were merged with local enterprises; thus, a large tank plant from the Ukraine was integrated with a number of local plants, to form a large combine which came to be known as the "Stalin Urals Tank Works", while the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, having merged with the evacuated Kharkov Diesel Works and parts of the Leningrad Kirov Plant came to be popularly known as "Tankograd".
Some of the "industrial giants" could not be transplanted as single units, and had to be decentralised: thus part of the Moscow Bali-Bearing Plant being re-settled in Saratov, another in Kuibyshev, and still another in Tomsk. All this created a variety of new
organisational problems.
During the war, I had the opportunity of talking to many workers, both men and women, who had been evacuated to the Urals or Siberia during the grim autumn or early winter months of 1941. The story of how whole industries and millions of people had been
moved to the east, of how industries were set up in a minimum of time, in appallingly difficult conditions, and of how these industries managed to increase production to an enormous extent during 1942, was, above all, a story of incredible human endurance. In most places, living conditions were fearful, in many places food was very short, too.