Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  continued to figure in subsequent communiqués right up to January.

  The Russian troops at Mozdok belonged to the so-called Northern Group of General

  Tyulenev's "Transcaucasian Front". The troops that had retreated from north to south belonged to two "Fronts", the "Southern Front" under the luckless Marshal Budienny, and the "North-Caucasian Front" under General Malinovsky. Malinov-sky was to play a very active part in the subsequent Caucasus fighting, but Budienny appears again to have soon faded out of the picture, since the troops of the "Southern Front" were merged on August 11 with Malinovsky's armies or with the "Black Sea Group" under General Petrov (of Sebastopol fame) which formed part of the "Transcaucasian Front". This "Black Sea Group" held the coast and the adjoining mountains between Novorossisk and Sochi.

  Not only did the Russians have considerable reserves in the Caucasus, which stopped the Germans at the most crucial points-after everything, or nearly everything, that was

  strategically expendable had been expended—but, from September right on to the end of the campaign, they succeeded in bringing very substantial reinforcements to the

  Caucasus, despite enormous transport difficulties. Men and a great deal of heavy

  equipment (guns, tanks, et cetera) came across the Caspian from Krasnovodsk to Baku, and thence by train or road; the Russian troops in the west were supplied, broadly, the same way. Mortars, small arms, ammunition and much else came from more or less

  improvised factories and workshops in Transcaucasia. Transcaucasia also provided the Russian armies of the Caucasus front with much of their food. Both men and supplies

  were also brought by sea from Batumi to Tuapse.

  No doubt the German advance had been spectacular throughout August, and in

  September the Germans scored a further success in the north-west by capturing the whole Taman Peninsula, as well as the naval base of Novorossisk. Not that they could use the port effectively, since the opposite side of the bay was still held by the Russians, who kept it under shell-fire. But the Germans' desperate attempts to break through to Tuapse, farther south, which was the real key to the Black Sea coast all the way to the Turkish border, failed completely. This failure is attributed by General Tyulenev to several factors; the extreme toughness of the Russian troops and sailors, the natural obstacles on the way to Tuapse (mountains and forests), but above all, perhaps, the stupendous amount of plain spade-work done by both soldiers and civilians in building gun emplacements, digging anti-trench ditches, and in some cases, felling century-old trees over threatened roads. This work was done not only on the road to Tuapse, but along mountain passes, on the road to Baku, and all along the Georgian and Ossetin Military Highways crossing the main mountain range.

  Within a few weeks the entire Caucasian theatre of war became a network of defences.

  People worked till they nearly collapsed, with bloody rags round their blistered hands.

  Sometimes they had little or nothing to eat for days, but they still went on with the work even at night, and despite enemy air-raids... By the beginning of autumn about 100,000

  defence works were built, including 70,000 pillboxes and other firing-points. Over 500

  miles of anti-tank ditches were dug, 200 miles of anti-infantry obstacles were built, as well as 1,000 miles of trenches. 9,150,000 working days were expended on this work.

  [ Tyulenev, op. cit., p. 188.]

  Tyulenev pays a special tribute to General Babin, head of the engineering troops of the Transcaucasian Front who succeeded in "sealing up the Caucasus against the enemy's infantry and tanks". He succeeded in this despite the extremely difficult conditions arising from the shortage of implements and explosives.

  [When in 1946 I travelled along the Georgian Military Highway, in an army truck from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi, I was indeed amazed at the number of pillboxes that had been dug into the mountainside, back in 1942.]

  Thus the Germans failed to break through both to Grozny in the east and to Tuapse in the west. In the "middle", they tried to cross the Caucasus range along three famous mountain passes, but although, from the top of these 9,000-foot high mountains they

  could see the Black Sea in the distance, they were held up there, too. Tyulenev describes some particularly ferocious fighting high up in the mountains throughout September, and the enormous difficulties of bringing up supplies to the troops there with little U2 planes or with mules and donkeys. A still more difficult problem was evacuating the wounded.

  The blizzards that began to sweep the mountains at the beginning of October forced the Germans to abandon their attempt to break through to the Black Sea across the high

  mountain passes.

  At the beginning of November the Germans made one final bid to break through to both Grozny and Tbilisi by another route, and to outflank the Russian forces at Mozdok from the south. On November 2 they captured Nalchik, the capital of Kabarda, and pushed on to Vladikavkaz (Orjonikidze), the capital of Northern Ossetia at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway, and also on the way to Grozny from the south-west. But the Russians had time to regroup, and only a few miles to the west of Vladikavkaz they

  delivered a smashing blow at the advancing German armoured columns, and finally

  hurled them back to Nalchik. Three well-manned defence lines had been built outside

  Vladikavkaz, and Russian tanks and artillery, operating from here, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Germans. The Russians put the German losses during the five days' fighting at 140 tanks, 2,500 motor vehicles and much other equipment, and the German casualties at 5,000 dead.

  In any case, the Germans undertook no further offensives after that and went over to the defensive at both Mozdok and Nalchik. They were hoping to resume their conquest of the Caucasus with renewed strength in the spring—if all went well at Stalingrad.

  As we have seen, it did not. By the beginning of January, the troops of the "Stalingrad Front", shortly to be renamed "Southern Front" and to be placed under the command of Malinovsky, instead of Yeremenko, were advancing beyond Kotelnikovo towards Salsk

  and Tikhoretsk, with the ultimate object of capturing Rostov and of closing the "Rostov Gap" to the German forces in the Caucasus. General Petrov's task was to strike east from the Black Sea coast towards Krasnodar and Tikhoretsk, and join up there with the troops of the "Southern Front", thus not only closing the Rostov Gap but also cutting off the German forces in the Caucasus from the Taman Peninsula, their escape route to the

  Crimea. For a large number of reasons this Russian plan failed. The Germans, rapidly transferred strong armoured forces from the Caucasus to the Zimovniki-Salsk-Tikhoretsk area to slow down the Russian advance on both Rostov and Tikhoretsk. After their heavy fighting since the beginning of Manstein's Kotelnikovo offensive, the Russian troops of the "Southern Front" were short of tanks and other equipment, and the new tanks they were asking for were slow in arriving.

  With the Stalingrad railway junction still inside the "Stalingrad Bag", there was no railway link with central Russia, and the road communications were slow and very long (about 220 miles from the nearest railhead). As for General Petrov's "Black Sea Group", it was also faced with supply difficulties; the gales on the Black Sea had rendered its chief supply lines precarious and, moreover, heavy rains and floods seriously slowed down its progress towards Krasnodar. This was not liberated by the Russians until

  February 12, i.e. over a month after the offensive had begun.

  There is much disagreement between German and Russian commentators on the German

  withdrawal from the Caucasus; according to the Germans, it was a "planned" withdrawal; according to the Russians it was a "disorderly retreat". In particular, the Russians make much of the complete demoralisation among the Rumanian and Slovak troops which took

  part in the German conquest of the Caucasus, and point to the large quantities of

  equipment the Germans abandoned in a hurry at certain railway junctions like

/>   Mineralnyie Vody, where the Russians captured 1,500 wagon loads of equipment. But

  there is, in fact, little to show that, in their pursuit of the retreating Germans, the Russian troops of the "Northern Group" of the "Transcaucasian Front" (among them those who had fought for months at Mozdok) succeeded in either capturing or destroying many.

  Most of the German troops in the Caucasus got away, either through the Rostov Gap, or to the Taman Peninsula. According to German commentators, it was Hitler's pet idea to hold this peninsula with the strongest possible forces as a springboard for a future reconquest of the Caucasus. This is today considered as a cardinal mistake on Hitler's part; instead of staying idle in the Taman Peninsula, these 400,000 troops could have made all the difference to the German's chances in the subsequent fighting on the Don and the Eastern Ukraine.

  [ Cf. Pmlippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 203.]

  The German withdrawal from the Caucasus was rapid, but still not rapid enough to

  prevent the application of "scorched earth" methods on a very considerable scale. In their retreat, the Germans destroyed or half-destroyed a very large number of towns and

  villages. Earlier on during their occupation of the Kuban they had confiscated or

  "bought" from the population large quantities of food and livestock.

  In invading the Caucasus, the Germans had laid great store on the "disaffection" towards Moscow on the part of the various Caucasian nationalities, and indeed the Russians

  themselves were far from certain about the loyalty of these people, and some even had doubts about the Cossacks of the Kuban—that "Vendée" of the Russian Civil War where, moreover, the Soviets had had some particularly serious trouble at the time of the

  Collectivisation drive.

  I remember a significant conversation on the subject with Konstantin Oumansky on July 24, i.e. on one of the blackest days of the Black Summer of 1942.

  I must say I am a little worried about the Caucasus. Even when a Russian or an

  Ukrainian is not particularly pro-Soviet, he still remains patriotic; he will fight for a United Russia, or the Soviet Union, or whatever you like to call it. But the Tartars in the Crimea are, to a large extent, disloyal. They were economically privileged by the wealthy tourist traffic before the Revolution, and now they have not been so well-off. But they never liked us. It is well-known that during the Crimean War they

  gladly "collaborated", as we'd now say, with the English and the French. And, above all, there are religious factors which the Germans have not failed to exploit.

  Nor do I trust the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. Like the Crimean Tartars,

  they are Moslems, and they still remember the Russian conquest of the Caucasus

  which ended not so very long ago—in 1863. The only fully pro-Soviet and pro-

  Russian nation in the Caucasus are—for obvious historical reasons—the

  Armenians. The Georgians are not so hot.

  "What, even with Stalin a Georgian?"

  Yes, because a lot of Georgians—well, you know yourself what kind of people they

  are. Southerners, like Italians, a lazy, wine-drinking, pleasure-loving bunch. No doubt we have several excellent Georgian generals in the Red Army, and some fine

  Georgian soldiers, but they are not altogether typical of the Georgians as a whole...

  "And the Cossacks?"

  They have their grievances against us. But they are Russian, so they'll be all right.

  Maybe a few will rat on us, but certainly not many.

  The Soviet authorities were, indeed, rather worried about the Caucasus and, particularly, about the Moslem nationalities there. This uneasiness extended, to some extent, also to certain Moslem nations of Central Asia, particularly the Uzbeks, though not to the

  Kazakhs who had much weaker historical and religious traditions of their own than the Uzbeks, and had proved the most "assimilable" of the Central Asian peoples, and had provided some of the toughest soldiers to the Red Army. Altogether, the Kazakh's

  military record throughout the war was to prove outstandingly good, and in Stalingrad itself some of the finest soldiers were Central Asians—Bashkirs, Kirghizes and, above all, Kazakhs. The Tartars— i.e. the Volga Tartars, not the Crimean Tartars—also had an excellent record.

  [During the first year of the war, military decorations were distributed much less lavishly than later. Up to October 5, 1942, 185,000 persons had been decorated. By nationalities, the list was headed by Russians (128,000), followed by Ukrainians (33,000),

  Belorussians (5,400), Jews (5,100), Tartars (2,900), Mordvinians (1,100), Kazakhs

  (1,000), Georgians and Armenians (900 each), Latvians, Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Karelians

  (400 each), Ossetins, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashs (300 each). There followed a dust of

  various small or tiny nationalities of Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, besides 14

  Gypsies, 7 Assyrians, 230 Poles, 98 Greeks, 37 Bulgars, 10 Czechs and 9 Spaniards.

  (Table from E. Yaroslavsky's Twenty-five Years of the Soviet Régime, Moscow, 1942.)]

  Since the rapid loss, during the first weeks of the invasion in 1941, of non-Russian areas like the Baltic Republics, the war had been fought on Russian and Ukrainian territory whose populations could (except in the Western Ukraine) be considered wholly, or

  almost wholly, loyal. But with the Germans breaking into the Caucasus and approaching the borders of Asia, the Soviet authorities were faced with a number of new problems.

  Their experience of the Crimean Tartars had been an unhappy one, and the question arose how the Caucasus would behave. There also seemed, at this stage, some need to preach loyalty to the Uzbeks, among whom Moslem traditions were still strong. The propaganda among the Uzbeks took on some extravagant forms; thus, on October 31, 1942, the whole second page of Pravda was printed in Uzbek, with a Russian translation opposite. This missive "From the Uzbek People to the Uzbek Soldiers" and signed by leading personalities in Uzbekistan "on behalf of over two million Uzbeks", was an extraordinary piece of florid oriental prose:

  Beloved sons of the people, children of our heart!... Remember, your ancestors

  preferred to gnaw through the chains with their teeth, rather than live as slaves...

  Remember, Hitler is not only the sworn enemy of all the European nations and,

  above all, the Slav nations, but he is also the sworn enemy of the peoples of the east.

  Behold the fate of the Moslem peoples of the Crimea and the Caucasus; their

  peaceful villages are being burned and looted by the Germans. Quickly destroy the enemy, or these beasts will slay your grey-haired grandfathers, and your fathers and mothers, and violate your wives and brides, and crush your innocent babes

  underfoot, and destroy your canals, and turn flourishing Uzbekistan into a sun-

  scorched desert...

  It went on and on for four columns, recalling all the national heroes of the Uzbek people who had valiantly fought against the Mongol conquerors, and the great writers and poets of the Uzbek people, who had lived in the ancient cities of Samarkand and Ferghana and Bokhara, all of which Hitler now intended to destroy. But the main point of this

  "missive" was that Hitler was the deadly enemy of the Moslem peoples as could be seen from the atrocities he was committing against the Moslems in the Crimea and the

  Caucasus.

  Had some German propaganda, one could only wonder, reached Uzbekistan to show that

  the Germans were favouring the Moslems in both the Crimea and the Caucasus?

  Needless to say, this kind of Soviet propaganda among the peoples of the Caucasus had started even earlier, immediately after the German invasion of the Kuban. All over the Caucasus "anti-Fascist" meetings were being organised. Great publicity was given to the enthusiasm with which all the Caucasian peoples had supported these meetings;

  particular prominence was given in the Soviet press to a vast "anti-Fascist" rally at Vladikavkaz
at the end of July. There was a curiously appealing, not to say cringing, note in the flattery that was now addressed to the peoples of the Caucasus. Thus, on

  September 1, Pravda published this appeal in enormous letters:

  Mountain peoples of the Northern Caucasus, Cossacks of the quiet Don, swift

  Kuban and stormy Terek; peoples of Kalmukia and Stavropol! Rise for the life-and-

  death struggle against the German invaders! May the plains of the Northern

  Caucasus and the Caucasus foothills become the grave of the Hitlerite robbers!

  On September 3, in an article entitled "The Peoples of the Caucasus and the Stalin Constitution", Pravda wrote:

  In the old days, that jewel among the nations—the Caucasus—shone but dimly.

  Now it glitters in the constellation of Soviet cultures.

  On September 6, in connection with another "anti-Fascist" rally, this time in Transcaucasia, it wrote:

  Peoples of Transcaucasia! To the Germans you are merely "natives". The German monster wants to cut the Caucasus armies from the rest of the Red Army, and to cut off the Caucasian nations from the rest of the Soviet family of nations.

  There was a clear suggestion in all this that the Soviet authorities were nervous about German policy in the Caucasus, not only vis-à-vis the Moslems, but also the Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis— and even the Cossacks.

  This anxiety, as it turned out, was largely unjustified, all the more so as the Germans stayed only a short time in both the Kuban and the Northern Caucasus, and their policy was, to say the least, a confused and contradictory one. Nevertheless the anxiety was not entirely groundless.

  We need not deal here with the various grandiose German "schemes" for the Caucasus, whether Rosenberg's or the others, all of which were to remain mere paper theories. All the same, some rather incoherent attempts were made to exploit the Cossacks' "anti-revolutionary past". Savagely anti-Bolshevik Cossack generals of the Civil War days like General Krasnov and General Shkuro were brought to the Kuban, and were expected to