Russia at war
Page 30
Russian tanks were superior to those of the Germans. It was essential not only to produce far more tanks, but also far more anti-tank planes, guns, rifles, mortars and grenades, and to devise and make every kind of antitank obstacle.
After demonstrating that, far from being either "nationalists" or "socialists", the Nazis were imperialists of the worst kind, determined, in the first place to annihilate or enslave the Slav peoples, and after quoting some particularly revealing German "Untermensch"
utterances, Stalin made his supremely significant appeal to the Russians' national pride—
And it is these people without honour or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the great
Russian nation—the nation of Plekhanov and Lenin, of Belinsky and
Chernyshevsky, of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Gorki and Chekhov, of Glinka and
Tchaikovsky, of Sechenov and Pavlov, of Suvorov and Kutuzov! The German
invaders want a war of extermination against the peoples of the Soviet Union. Very well then! If they want a war of extermination they shall have it! {Prolonged, stormy
applause.) Our task now... will be to destroy every German, to the very last man, who had come to occupy our country. No mercy for the German invaders! Death to
the German invaders!" {Stormy applause.)
There were not only moral reasons why these wild beasts would perish, Stalin went on.
The "New Order" in Europe was not something that the Germans could rely on. Secondly
—and here was still a faint echo of Stalin's previous distinction between the "Nazi clique"
and the "German people"—the German rear itself was unreliable. The German people were tired of the war of conquest, which had brought them millions of casualties, hunger, impoverishment and epidemics.
Only the Hitlerite halfwits have failed to understand that not only the European
rear, but the German rear is a volcano ready to blow up, and to bury the Hitlerite adventurers.
And thirdly, there was the coalition of the Big Three against the German-Fascist
imperialists. This was a war of engines, and Britain, the USA and the USSR could
produce three times as many engines as Germany.
He then referred to the recent Moscow Conference attended by Beaverbrook and
Harriman, to the decision to supply the USSR systematically with planes and tanks, to the earlier British decision to supply raw materials to Russia such as aluminium, tin, lead, nickel and rubber, and the latest American decision to grant the Soviet Union a one
billion-dollar loan.
All this shows that the coalition between the three countries is a very real thing
{stormy applause) which will go on growing in the common cause of liberation.
In concluding, Stalin said that the Soviet Union was waging a war of liberation, and that she had no territorial ambitions anywhere, in either Europe or Asia, including Iran. Nor did the Soviet Union intend to impose her will or her régime on the Slav or any other peoples waiting to be liberated from the Nazi yoke. There would be no Soviet
interference in the internal affairs of these peoples. But to achieve this, the peoples of the Soviet Union must do their utmost to help the Red Army with armaments, munitions and food. And he ended on the usual note:
Long live our Red Army and our Red Navy!
Long live our glorious country!
Our cause is just. Victory will be ours!
Much more dramatic and inspiring was the setting in which Stalin delivered his speech to the troops on the following morning. In the distance Russian and German guns were
booming, and Russian fighter planes were patrolling Moscow. And here, in the Red
Square, on that cold grey November morning, Stalin was addressing troops, many of
whom had come from the Front, or were on the way to the Front.
Comrades! We are celebrating the 24th Anniversary of the October Revolution in
very hard conditions... The enemy is at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad... Yet, despite temporary failures, our army and navy are heroically repelling the enemy
attacks along the whole front.
Russia, Stalin went on, had survived worse ordeals than this; he recalled 1918, the first anniversary of the Revolution and, stretching some historical points, he said:
Three-quarters of our country was then in the hands of foreign interventionists. ..
We had no allies, we had no Red Army—we were only beginning to create it—we
had no food, no armaments, no equipment. Fourteen states were attacking our
country then... And yet we organised the Red Army, and turned our country into a
military camp. Lenin's great spirit inspired us in our struggle against the
interventionists. .. Our position is far better than it was twenty-three years ago. We are richer in industry, food and raw materials than we were then. We now have
allies, and the support of all the occupied nations of Europe. We have a wonderful army and a wonderful navy... We have no serious shortage of food, armaments or
equipment... Lenin's spirit is inspiring us in our struggle as it did twenty-three years ago.
Can anyone doubt that we can and must defeat the German invaders? The enemy is
not as strong as some frightened little intellectuals imagine...
[In his memoirs, Ehrenburg, while welcoming the speech as a whole, described this phrase as particularly offensive and un-called for; in 1941 the intellectuals were no more, and no less worried than the rest of the Russian people. {Novyi Mir, January, 1963.)]
Germany is, in reality, facing a catastrophe.
After reiterating that Germany had lost four and a half million men in the last four months, he went on:
There is no doubt that Germany cannot stand this strain much longer. In a few
months, perhaps in half a year, maybe a year, Hitlerite Germany must burst under
the weight of her own crimes.
Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, officers and political workers, men and
women partisans! The whole world is looking upon you as the power capable of
destroying the German robber hordes! The enslaved peoples of Europe are looking
upon you as their liberators... Be worthy of this great mission! The war you are
waging is a war of liberation, a just war. May you be inspired in this war by the heroic figures of our great ancestors, Alexander Nevsky, Dimitri Donskoi, Minin
and Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Michael Kutuzov! May you be blest by great
Lenin's victorious banner! Death to the German invaders! Long live our glorious
country, its freedom and independence! Under the banner of Lenin—onward to
victory!
This invocation of the Great Ancestors—the great men of Russian civilisation—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, the great scientists and thinkers, and the great national heroes—
Alexander Nevsky who routed the Teutonic Knights in 1242, Dimitri Donskoi who
routed the Tartars in 1380 and Minin and Pozharsky who fought the Polish invaders in the seventeenth century, Suvorov and Kutuzov, who fought Napoleon—all this was
meant to appeal to the people's specifically Russian national pride. With the Baltic States gone, with the Ukraine gone, it was in old Russia, one might almost say in old Muscovy, that the remaining power of resistance against the Germans was chiefly concentrated.
In wartime Russia, where every official utterance, and especially any word from Stalin was awaited with a desperate kind of hope, these two speeches, especially the one
delivered in the dramatic setting of the Red Square, with the Germans still only a short distance outside Moscow, made a very deep impression on both the Army and the
workers. The glorification of Russia—and not only Lenin's Russia— had a tremendous
effect on the people in general, even tho
ugh it made perhaps a few Marxist-Leninist
purists squirm on the quiet. However, even these realised that it was this patriotic, nationalist propaganda which identified the Soviet Régime and Stalin with Russia, Holy Russia, that was the most likely to create the right kind of uplift.
In any case, it was not something entirely new. It was Stalin's nationalism which had, for years now, triumphed over Trotsky's internationalism; for years Stalin had already been built up in popular imagination as a state builder in the lineage of Alexander Nevsky (e.g.
in the Eisenstein-Prokofiev film), of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great (e.g. in Alexei Tolstoy's novel).
Thus, in November 1941, all these reminders of the Tartar Invasion, of the Troubled
Times, with their Polish invasion, and of 1812 did not fall on deaf ears. The Russian people felt the deep insult of the German invasion—it was something more deeply insulting than anything they had known before. In his 6th of November speech Stalin had not missed the chance of pointing out the difference between Napoleon and Hitler;
Napoleon had come to a sorry end, but at least he had not brought to the invaded
countries any Untermensch philosophy.
We shall deal more fully in a later chapter with the mood in Russia in 1941-2; here it is enough to say that in his two November speeches, Stalin had not only cleverly adapted himself to this mood, but he did everything to strengthen and encourage it.
It was, indeed, appropriate that such a mood should be encouraged, with the ancient
Russian cities of Pskov, Novgorod and Tver (Kalinin) occupied by the Germans, with
Leningrad virtually surrounded, and the Germans still battering against hastily
improvised new Russian lines thirty or forty miles outside Moscow...
As a very orthodox Communist jokingly remarked to me some months later: "At that time it was absolutely essential to proclaim a 'nationalist NEP'."
[The New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced in 1921 had temporarily allowed some
capitalist trading.]
The importance of the two Stalin speeches is not underrated even in the "Khrushchevite"
History:
Stalin's two speeches had an enormous effect on the population in the occupied
areas... Soviet airmen dropped behind the enemy lines newspapers with accounts of the November 6 meeting and of the Red Square Parade. These papers passed from
hand to hand and were then kept as treasures. With tears of joy people learned that the Nazi stories about the fall of Moscow were nothing but stupid lies, and that
Moscow was standing firmly like a rock. In hearing the voice of their beloved Party
[euphemism for Stalin] they believed more firmly than ever in the might of the
Soviet State, in the invincible will of the Soviet people to win, in the inevitable doom of the Nazi invaders...
October and November 1941 were the grimmest months in the whole of the Soviet-
German war, only to be equalled by October 1942, when the fate of Stalingrad hung in the balance.
By the end of September 1941, the greater part of the Ukraine had been lost, and the Germans were crashing ahead towards Kharkov, the Donbas and the Crimea. After the
débâcle in the Battle of Kiev, in which the Russians—even according to their own admission— had lost in prisoners alone something in the neighbourhood of 175,000 men, the Germans, in the south, had a great superiority not only in men but in planes, tanks and guns.
[ Men, two to one; guns, three to one; planes, two to one. (IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 218.)]
Neither the Stavka's order to organise a "stubborn defence" on the Perekop Isthmus in the Crimea, nor its order to build solid defences west of Kharkov or the Donbas could be carried out in time. The mobilization of many thousands of Donbas miners into the local opolcheniye and the efforts made by 150,000 miners to build new defence lines were of no avail. By September 29, the Germans broke into the Donbas which was then
producing sixty per cent of the Soviet Union's coal, seventy-five per cent of its coking coal, thirty per cent of its pig-iron and twenty per cent of its steel. By October 17, Rundstedt's armies had overran the whole Donbas and, after forcing the Mius river,
entered Taganrog on the Sea of Azov; meantime, further north, Paulus's 6th Army was
advancing on Kharkov, which was captured on October 24; the Russians had, during the previous days, been evacuating what industrial equipment they could. It was also then, with the Germans already at Taganrog, that Rostselmash, the vast agricultural-machinery plant at Rostov began to be evacuated to the east; this work continued almost till the last minute, often under German bombing.
On November 19, the Germans captured Rostov, after two days' bitter street fighting. But the High Command considered Rostov so important that even at the height of the Battle of Moscow, Timo-shenko was given some reinforcements and ten days later, Rostov—
"the gate to the Caucasus"—was recaptured by the Russians. It was the first major Russian victory, though the Germans were pushed only some thirty to forty miles to the west, where they entrenched themselves along the Mius river. This victory was,
according to the Russians (with some confirmation from the Germans) not only militarily but also politically important as it affected Turkey's policy towards Russia.
[The Russian attacks on Rostov in the south and Tikhvin in the north also helped to
reduce the pressure on Moscow. Rostov was abandoned without Hitler's orders: hence the temporary disgrace of Rundstedt.]
In the meantime Manstein's 11th Army, supported by a Rumanian Army Corps, had
broken into the Crimea, where the Russian forces retreated in disorder to Sebastopol. By mid-November the whole of the Crimea was in German (or Rumanian) hands, with the
exception of Sebastopol, where three solid defence lines, ten miles in depth, had been organised. All enemy attempts to storm the naval base failed and under the command of Vice-Admiral Oktiabrsky and General Petrov the beleaguered fortress held out until July 1942. In underground workshops, more or less immune to the continuous bombing and
shelling, Sebastopol made many of its own arms and ammunition. In November and
December alone, it made 400 minethrowers, 20,000 hand-grenades, and 32,000 anti-
personnel mines, repaired numerous guns, machine-guns, and even tanks. At that time
52,000 men were defending Sebastopol, and for eight months they succeeded in tying up large German and Rumanian forces which, in the Russian view, would otherwise have
been used to invade the Caucasus across the Kerch Straits.
Though thrown back from Rostov and held at Sebastopol, the Germans could still claim to have caused not only grievous military, but also immense economic damage to the
Russians in the south.
The Russians' plight in the north was even more tragic. Except for a slender life-line across Lake Ladoga, the blockade of Leningrad had been complete by September 8, with the German capture of Schlüsselburg; on November 9, even the Ladoga gap was made
almost unusable after the Germans had captured Tikhvin on the main railway line to the south-east of the lake. Leningrad seemed finally condemned to starvation, and it was not till December 9 that Tikhvin was recaptured, and the future began to look a little less desperate. It is rather remarkable that, at the very height of the Battle of Moscow, the High Command should have been able to spare enough troops to recapture both Rostov
and Tikhvin—even though these had obviously been looked upon as merely minimal
objectives, which could not be followed up by either a recapture of the Donbas, or a major breach in the Leningrad blockade. For, at the time, Russia was not only short of trained soldiers, but also desperately short of arms. And, above all, it was clear that the Germans' Number-One target was still the capture of Moscow, despite the failure of their all-out October offensive.
Everything, by the beginning of November, tended to show that the Germ
ans were
preparing for another all-out attack, and were concentrating heavy forces not only west, but also north-west and south-west of Moscow. The failure of the first offensive had given the Soviet High Command just enough time to assemble large strategic reserves
behind Moscow, and to strengthen their front line in all sectors.
The fact that Moscow was not captured in October had had an enormously salutary effect on the soldiers' morale. Some significance is today attached to the eagerness with which soldiers and officers were joining the Party and the Komsomol; within a month (October to November) the number of Party members in the three army groups outside Moscow
rose from 33,000 to 51,000, and of Komsomol members from 59,000 to 78,000; it was at this stage in particular that the policy was adopted of admitting to the Party, with the minimum of formalities, almost any soldier who had distinguished himself in battle; the identification of Party and Country was at its height. Or rather, the Party adapted itself, as best it could, to the nationalist spirit of resistance.
After the failure of the first German onslaught on Moscow civilian morale improved also.
The evacuation of Moscow had continued right through October and the first half of
November; about half the population had gone, as well as a large part of the industry: thus, out of 75,000 metal-cutting lathes, only 21,000 remained in Moscow, whose
industries were now concentrating chiefly on the manufacture of small arms,
ammunition, and the repair of tanks and motor vehicles. The Moscow sky was dotted
with barrage balloons, and there were anti-tank obstacles in most of the main streets, and a great many anti-aircraft batteries. These were far more numerous than before, and
firewatching rules had become even stricter; thousands of Muscovites were engaged in fire-watching. The atmosphere was austere, military and heroic—very different from
what it had been at the time of the panic exodus.
Although there was the general conviction that Moscow would not now be lost, the
seriousness of the coming second offensive was not underrated. As was to be expected the Germans achieved considerable superiority in a number of places. Their first big blows fell on November 16 in the Kalinin-Volokolamsk sector of the front where they