Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  help in converting the Cossacks to "collaboration". Whereas Rosenberg had expressed the view that the Cossacks were essentially Russians, and should, therefore, be treated more harshly than the Ukrainians (whom, unlike Erich Koch, the Reichskommissar for the

  Ukraine, he chose not to regard as Untermenschen), the German Army adopted the policy that the Cossacks were potential 'friends", who should be exempted from the

  Untermensch status. Cossacks were, as far as possible, to be drafted into the German Army. As we have seen, for instance in Kotelnikovo, which was considered a Cossack or semi-Cossack town, the Germans refrained from committing any major atrocities, though they did, in fact, nothing to endear themselves to the population—which they treated with much disdain. As regards "reforms", like abolishing the kolkhozes, they did not go beyond vague promises.

  It was, roughly, the same in the Kuban country, except that here certain German officers established an experimental "Cossack District" with a population of about 160,000. All kinds of promises were made, including that of an early dissolution of the kolkhozes.

  Although Rosenberg's Ministry, as well as the SS objected to the experiment at first, the Army pursued it until the day in January 1943 when the Germans had to pull out of the Kuban.

  A local police force was recruited. By January 1943 the District's borders were to be expanded, and a Cossack Army commander was to be appointed... Far-reaching

  reforms were contemplated in agriculture, though, in practice, little was achieved.

  Other plans called for the recruitment of 25,000 Cossack volunteers to fight with the German Army, but again there was no time to implement them.

  [Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia (London, 1957), p. 300.]

  The purpose of this "realistic" Army policy, was, as Alexander Dallin says, to secure as much cannon-fodder for the German Army as possible. He also argues that the

  experiment was intended to show that once "the Soviet population was given a chance to work out its own problems... it was generally inclined to work more wholeheartedly with the Germans." He also notes that:

  When Kleist's army withdrew from the Kuban considerable numbers of Cossack

  refugees joined in the exodus, and by late 1943 more than 20,000 Cossacks—or

  rather men claiming to be Cossacks—were fighting in various German-sponsored

  formations.

  Even so, it is fairly clear from Mr Dallin's account that the great majority of the Cossack population on the Don, Kuban and Terek did not collaborate, and that many, indeed,

  offered passive and often active resistance to the Germans. Cossack partisan units were operating in many areas, and some took an active part in the liberation of Krasnodar in February. And even if the Germans succeeded in collecting 20,000 Cossacks—or pseudo-Cossacks—in a vast area of a few million people, the "achievement" can only be regarded as a relative failure. The very fact that many of these "Cossacks" only "claimed to be Cossacks" suggests that the number of real Cossacks of the Don, Kuban and Terek who joined the Germans was not large.

  Over 100,000 Cossacks had been in the Red Army since the beginning of the war and

  some, like the famous Dovator Corps, which had harassed the Germans for weeks in the Battle of Moscow, had acquired almost legendary fame. Many thousands—among them

  most of the Dovator Corps—had died fighting the Germans. No doubt many Cossacks

  had mental reservations about the Soviet régime, but in the patriotic atmosphere of 1942

  it would have been absurd of the Germans to expect much co-operation from the

  Cossacks, with their nationalist Russian traditions.

  To expect a sinister émigré adventurer like General Krasnov, head of the "Central Cossack Office" in Berlin to win over the Cossacks and—in the words of another

  Cossack adventurer in German pay, Vasili Glazkov—"to recognise the Führer Adolf Hitler as the supreme dictator of the Cossack Nation " was naive, to say the least.

  The few "Cossack" bands the Germans did scrape together for the German army were later to become notorious, especially in the Ukraine, for their acts of banditry. Which, in itself, was not, of course, entirely alien to certain Cossack traditions either.

  The German courting of the Moslems in the Caucasus was part of Hitler's lunatic

  schemes for bringing Turkey into the war and for advancing from the Caucasus into the Middle East; Moslem fighting units were to be formed in the Caucasus and these were to take part in bringing the whole Middle East into the German orbit. On the other hand, Hitler appears to have treated with great scepticism Rosenberg's ideas about a "Berlin-Tbilisi Axis". In December 1942 he said:

  I don't know about the Georgians. They do not belong to the Turkic peoples. I

  consider only the Moslems to be reliable... I consider the formation of these battalions of purely Caucasian peoples as very risky, but I see no danger in the establishment of purely Moslem units... In spite of the declarations of Rosenberg and the military, I don't trust the Armenians either.

  [Quoted by Dallin, op. cit., p. 251.]

  The question whether the Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis would have co-

  operated with the; Germans never came to the test; all we know is that several divisions composed of these nationalities were formed in the autumn of 1942 to fight on the

  Russian side, though there were, of course, a number of émigrés—mostly Georgians—

  who had come to the Caucasus with the German Army and were waiting for the entry of

  the German troops into Baku, Tbilisi and Erevan.

  But the Germans did make contact with some of the Moslem nationalities in the Northern Caucasus, as well as with the more-or-less Buddhist Kalmuks to the east of the Kuban.

  Their capital of Elista in the sparsely inhabited Kalmuk steppes was occupied by the Germans for about five months, and émigrés like the notorious Prince Tundutov were

  busy knocking together Kalmuk military units of sorts for the German Army. Towards

  the predominantly Moslem mountaineers of the Northern Caucasus—the Chechens,

  Ingushi, Karachai and Balkarians—the German Army adopted a "liberal" policy.

  Promises were made for the abolition of the kolkhozes; mosques and churches were to be reopened; requisitioned goods were to be paid for; and the confidence of the people was to be won by "model conduct", especially in respect of women. In the Karachai region a

  "Karachai National Committee" was set up. The same happened in the Kabardin-Balkar area, though the Moslem Balkars were more outspokenly pro-German than the mostly

  non-Moslem Kabardinians. Although the Germans did not penetrate far into the Chechen-Ingush ASSR (south of Grozny), these two peoples appear to have made no secret of their sympathy for the Germans. They were to suffer for it later, like the peoples who had actually collaborated.

  The high point of German-Karachai collaboration was the celebration of Bairam,

  the Moslem holiday, in Kislovodsk on October 11... High German officials were

  presented with precious gifts by the local committee. The Germans ... pledged the early dissolution of the collective farms and announced the formation of a Karachai volunteer squadron of horsemen to fight with the German Army.

  Similarly, on December 18:

  The Kurman ceremonies were held at Nalchik, the seat of the local administration of the Kabardino-Balkar area. Again gifts were exchanged, with the local officials

  giving the Germans magnificent steeds and receiving in return Korans and captured weapons. Bräutigam (of the Rosenberg Ministry) made a public address about the

  lasting bonds of German friendship with the peoples of the Caucasus.

  [ Dahin, op. cit., pp. 246-7.]

  Exactly a fortnight after this moving ceremony, the Germans abandoned Nalchik and

  were on the run.

  The Germans apparently amassed only a very small number of soldiers from amongst

  their Mosle
m friends in the Caucasus, and the most active collaborators naturally

  followed the German Army in its retreat to the north. The grandiose scheme for the

  conquest of the Middle East with the help of the Caucasus mountaineers was off.

  The Moslem nationalities whose representatives had fraternised with the Germans were to suffer for it. The "liquidation" of the Moslem areas was decreed by the Supreme Soviet on February 11, 1944. When I visited Kislovodsk, Nalchik, Vladikavkaz and other towns in the Northern Caucasus in 1946, people were still talking of the "liquidation" of the Chechens, Ingushi, Karachais and Balkars. In a few days the NKVD had herded everyone of these nationalities into railway carriages and packed them off "to the east". As a frightened and embittered Kabardinian told me at Nalchik: "It was a terrible business seeing them all—men, women and children— being sent off like this; but you can say it was a tremendously efficient piece of organisation—yes, terrifyingly efficient." "And what about the Kabardinians?" I asked. "Well," he said, "we got away with a few bumps and bruises. Some of our people also did a few foolish things. One Kabardinian prince, who lived high up in the mountains, could think of notliing better than to send a superb white charger to Hitler personally."

  In his "secret" report at the XXth Congress, Khrushchev was to refer to these mass deportations in the following terms:

  At the end of 1943 ... a decision was taken to deport all the Karachai... The same lot befell, in December 1943, the population of the Autonomous Kalmuk Republic. In

  March 1944 all the Chechen and Ingushi people were deported and their

  Autonomous Republic liquidated. In April 1944 all Balkars were deported to

  faraway places and the Kabardino-Balkar Republic was renamed Kabardinian

  Republic. The Ukrainians avoided this fate only because there were too many of

  them... Otherwise he (Stalin) would have deported them also.

  Not only no Marxist-Leninist, but also no man of common sense can grasp how one

  can make whole nations responsible, including women, children, old people,

  Communists and Komsomols, and expose them to misery and suffering for the

  hostile acts of individual persons or groups of persons.

  [ The Dethronement of Stalin (Manchester Guardian reprint, 1956), p. 23.]

  These five nationalities—or what was left of them—were, indeed, allowed to return to their homes after Stalin's death. Khrushchev's indignation would perhaps have been more convincing if he had extended it to the fate of two other nationalities, the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans; for these were not allowed to return to their homes, either then or later.

  [Perhaps there is something in the argument that the German boasts, in 1943, of having left a "fifth column" behind in the Caucasus in the shape of Germany's Moslem friends convinced the Kremlin that something drastic should be done about the "disloyal"

  nationalities. A particularly boastful article about Germany's "allies" in the Caucasus appeared in Goebbels's paper Das Reich of February 21, 1943 (cf. Dahin, op. cit., p.

  251.)]

  PART SIX 1943: Year of Hard Victories— the

  Polish Tangle

  Chapter I AFTER STALINGRAD.—THE BIRTH OF "STALIN'S

  MILITARY GENIUS"

  With the victory of Stalingrad the Soviet Union had won her Battle of Survival, and now the war entered an entirely new phase. Anxiety over the ultimate outcome of the war

  vanished almost completely; and there were even moments of excessive optimism and

  over-confidence, such as those after the Russian liberation of Kharkov in February. Less than a month later, Kharkov was again to be lost.

  This setback acted as a reminder that, despite Stalingrad, the Germans were still far from finished, and that there was perhaps some justification, after all, for Churchill's forecast, made at the time of the Stalingrad victory, that the war might last till 1945—a forecast which greatly annoyed the Russians at the time. Nevertheless, nobody in Russia doubted any longer that ultimate victory was now a foregone conclusion; the only question was:

  "How long will it take? " And this was inevitably linked with the other question of what Britain and the United States were going to do.

  There were moments of optimism, after Stalingrad, when soldiers would say that the Red Army could smash the Germans single-handed, and that Russia would therefore not need to "share the fruits of victory" with anybody. This line was to be discouraged by Stalin himself, who, on one occasion in 1943, bluntly declared that Russia could not win the war by herself.

  In 1943, the official Russian attitude to Britain and America was much better than it had been in 1942, when nervousness over the ultimate outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad tended to produce outbursts of bad temper like the whole Hess affair. In 1943, victory—

  though still distant—was already in sight, and it was important to start making plans with Britain and America for a peace settlement. Discussions which were, in the end, to lead to the Teheran Conference, had already begun. The Allied victories in North Africa were being given considerable publicity in the Soviet press. Although this was "not the Second Front yet", it was very far from negligible, especially as it was certainly drawing away from the Russian front at least part of the Luftwaffe, as was also the bombing of

  Germany. But there were still to be many ups and downs in the Russian appreciation of the Western war effort; the landing on "the island of Sicily" was deliberately to be played down, though, later in the year, maximum publicity was to be given to the fall of

  Mussolini.

  Another factor which greatly contributed to a more friendly attitude to the Allies was the very considerable increase, in the course of 1943, of lend-lease supplies. If there was still very little allied equipment in the Red Army at the time of Stalingrad, this was no longer true. Not only were there many Western bomber and fighter planes in the Russian air

  force, but everywhere in the Red Army there were now hundreds of Dodges and

  Studebakers and jeeps, and a considerable proportion of army rations was American food.

  It gave rise to some wisecracks: thus, spam was invariably referred to as "Second Front", and egg-powder used to be called "Roosevelt's eggs" (yaitsa being the Russian word both for "eggs" and "testicles"). But they were pleased to have it, all the same.

  After Stalingrad, too, Soviet foreign policy became much more active than it had been. In 1942, except for the "Second Front" and "Hess" campaigns, the Soviet Government had avoided any major unpleasantness with the world at large. There were occasional

  criticisms of Turkey and Sweden, but these never assumed the proportions of a

  "campaign"; the handling of Japan, then at war with Britain and the United States, was exceedingly tactful and cautious, as at least up to October the possibility of a Japanese stab-in-the-back could not be entirely ruled out. Much more remarkable was the great reticence, throughout 1942, in respect of the Polish Government in London, and almost no publicity was given to the departure from Russia of the Anders Army.

  [See Part VI, Chapter 6.]

  But, soon after Stalingrad, attitudes to foreign governments began to be more selective.

  Apart from Japan, to which the Russians remained formal but polite, a sharp line began to be drawn between good and bad governments. The Polish Government in London soon

  became the blackest sheep of all, and the campaign against it began in real earnest in February 1943, and soon led to the breaking off (or rather, "suspension") of diplomatic relations. This was followed by the formation of a Polish Army on Russian soil

  independent of the London Government. That this trouble with the Poles was going to

  create considerable complications with Britain and America could, of course, be

  foreseen; but the Russians tried—not unsuccessfully—to "localise" the quarrel, at least for a time. At Teheran, indeed, the Polish Problem was going to be as good as shelved.

  On the other h
and, the real friends of Russia were proclaimed to be the Czechs, the

  Yugoslavs and—the French. All three were represented by fighting units on the Russian Front, and the French Normandie Squadron was given particularly wide publicity. The

  Czech and Yugoslav token forces fitted well into the general pattern of the "All-Slav solidarity" propaganda; as for the French squadron, which fought gallantly throughout 1943, and was to suffer very heavy casualties, it symbolised, as it were, the solidarity between the Soviet Union and all the nations of occupied Europe—not only the Slav

  nations.

  After Stalingrad the Russian attitude to Germany's satellites also changed sharply. The rout of the Rumanians and Italians in the Don country between November and January,

  and the terrible losses inflicted on the Hungarians at Kastornoye a little later, had struck a fearful blow at Hitler's Grand Coalition. Although, in 1941, Lozovsky at his press

  conferences, as well as the Russian press, used to ridicule Hitler's attempts to "make these people fight for him", it was well known that, numerically, at any rate, they represented a considerable contribution to Germany's armed strength, and there were times when both the Hungarians and the Rumanians had fought very well indeed. At Odessa, at

  Sebastopol, and in the Caucasus, the Rumanian troops had been of considerable help to the Germans.

  Now, in a military sense, Hitler's Grand Coalition had as good as ceased to exist. There were still some hardened Hungarian troops, and the Finns; but the latter were a rather special case, since they were fighting their "own", "independent" war. In any case, as Mathias Rakosi, the Hungarian Communist leader, wrote in Pravda in February 1943, two-thirds of the Hungarian forces in the Soviet Union had been wiped out; there was a political crisis in Hungary; and the Government was already trying to "get out of the war". The Russians began to pay more and more attention to signs of rebellion against the Germans in the satellite countries.

  In short, after Stalingrad the stage was set for a big Russian international game.

  Significantly, it was in 1943, only a few months after Stalingrad, that the Comintern, dormant for at least two years, was called upon to dissolve itself. This was an essential preliminary to the international policies on which Stalin and Molotov were now