Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  The Soviet Union suffered roughly 25 million war deaths compared with 350,000 war deaths in Britain and 300,000 in the United States; many war deaths were not recorded at the time and must be estimated statistically after the event. Combat losses account for all U.S. and most British casualties; the German bombing of British cities made up the rest. The sources of Soviet mortality were more varied. Red Army records suggest 6.4 million known military deaths from battlefield causes and half a million more from disease and accidents. In addition, 4.6 million soldiers were captured, missing, or killed or presumed missing in units that failed to report. Of these approximately 2.8 million were later repatriated or reenlisted, suggesting 1.8 million deaths in captivity and a net total of 8.7 million Red Army deaths. But the number of Soviet prisoners and deaths in captivity may be understated by more than a million. German records show a total of 5.8 million prisoners, of whom 3.3 million had died by May 1944; most of these were starved, worked, or shot to death. Considering the second half of 1941 alone, Soviet records show 2.3 million soldiers missing or captured, while in the same period the Germans counted 3.3 million prisoners, of whom 2 million had died by February 1942.

  Subtracting up to 10 million Red Army war deaths from a 25-million total suggests at least 15

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  WORLD WAR II

  million civilian deaths. Thus many more Soviet civilians died than soldiers, and this is another contrast with the British and American experience. Soviet sources have estimated 11.5 million civilian war deaths under German rule, 7.4 million in the occupied territories by killing, hunger, and disease, and another 2.2 million in Germany where they were deported as forced laborers. This leaves room for millions of civilian war deaths on territory under Soviet control, primarily from malnutrition and overwork; of these, one million may have died in Leningrad alone.

  In wartime specifically Soviet mechanisms of premature death continued to operate. For example, Soviet citizens continued to die from the conditions in labor camps; these became particularly lethal in 1942 and 1943 when a 20 percent annual death rate killed half a million inmates in two years. In 1943 and 1944 a new cause of death arose: The deportation and internal exile under harsh conditions of ethnic groups such as the Chechens who, Stalin believed, had collaborated as a community with the former German occupiers.

  The war also imposed severe material losses on the Soviet economy. The destruction included 6 million buildings that previously housed 25 million people, 31,850 industrial establishments, and 167,000 schools, colleges, hospitals, and public libraries. Officially these losses were estimated at one-third of the Soviet Union’s prewar wealth; being that only one in eight people died, it follows that wealth was destroyed at a higher rate than people. Thus, those who survived were also impoverished.

  CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR

  The war had a greater effect on the external position of the Soviet Union than on its internal organization and structure. The Soviet Union became a dominant regional power and quickly thereafter an atomic superpower. The wartime alliance soon fell apart, but the Soviet Union soon replaced it with a network of compliant neighboring states in central and eastern Europe and remodeled them in its own image. This set the stage for the Cold War. In the process the popular sympathy in the west for the Soviet Union’s wartime struggle quickly dissipated.

  Within the country, the victory of the wartime alliance gave rise to widespread hopes for political relaxation and an opening outward but these hopes

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  were soon dashed. Living conditions remained extremely tough. Millions were homeless; it was just as hard to restore peacetime production as it had been to convert to a war footing; and the pressure to restore food supplies on top of a bad harvest led to one million or more famine deaths in Ukraine and Moldavia in 1946. In addition, Stalin used the victory not to concede reforms but to strengthen his personal dictatorship, promote nationalism, and mount new purges although with less publicity than before the war. After an initial phase of demobilization, the nuclear arms race and the outbreak of a new conventional war in Korea resulted in resumed growth of military expenditures and revived emphasis on the readiness for war. Not until the death of Stalin did the first signs of real relaxation appear.

  After the famine of 1946 the Soviet economy restored prewar levels of production of most commodities with surprising speed. It took much longer, possibly several decades, to return to the path that the economy might have followed without a war. It also took decades for the Soviet population to return to demographic balance; in 1959 women born between 1904 and 1924 outnumbered men of the same generation by three to two, despite the fact that women also fought and starved.

  One of the most persistent legacies of the war resulted from the wartime evacuation of industry. After the war, despite some reverse evacuation, the war economy of the interior was kept in existence. Weapons factories in the remote interior, adapted to the new technologies of nuclear weapons and aerospace, were developed into closed, self-sufficient company towns forming giant, vertically integrated systems; they were literally taken off the map so that their very existence became a well kept secret. Thus, secretiveness and militarization were taken hand in hand to new levels.

  It is easier to describe the Soviet Union after the war than to say what would have happened if the war had gone the other way. World War II was a defining event in world history that engulfed the lives of nearly two billion people, but the eastern front affected the outcome of the war to a much greater extent than is commonly remembered in western culture and historical writing. See also: COLD WAR; LEND LEASE; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; WAR ECONOMY; WORLD WAR I; YALTA CONFERENCE

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  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark. (1991). The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London: Longman. Erickson, John. (1962). The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918-1941. London: Mac-millan. Erickson, John. (1975). Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 1: The Road to Stalingrad. London: Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson. Erickson, John. (1983). Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 2: The Road to Berlin. London: Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson. Erickson, John. (1997). “Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941-1945: The System and the Soldier.” In Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945, eds. Paul Addison and Angus Calder. London: Pimlico. Erickson, John, and Dilks, David. (1994). Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Glantz, David M. (1991). From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942-August 1943. London: Cass. Glantz, David M., and House, Jonathan. (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Gorodetsky, Gabriel. (1999). Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Harrison, Mark. (1996). Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Mark, ed. (1998). The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haslam, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39. London: Macmillan. Haslam, Jonathan. (1992). The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933-41: Moscow, Tokyo, and the Prelude to the Pacific War. London: Macmillan. Kershaw, Ian, and Lewin, Moshe, eds. (1997). Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moskoff, William. (1990). The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Overy, Richard. (1997). Russia’s War. London: Allen Lane. Reese, Roger R. (2000). The Soviet Military Experience. London: Routledge. Roberts, Geoffrey. (1995). The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations

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  and the Road to War, 1933-1941. Ba
singstoke, UK: Macmillan. Roberts, Geoffrey. (2000). Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History. London: Longman. Salisbury, Harrison. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. London: Pan. Suvorov, Viktor [Vladimir Rezun]. (1990). Ice-Breaker: Who Started the Second World War? London: Hamish Hamilton. Urlanis, B. Ts. (1971). Wars and Population. Moscow: Progress. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. London: Weidenfeld amp; Nicholson. Weeks, Albert L. (2002). Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman amp; Lit-tlefield. Wegner, Bernd, ed. (1997). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939-1941. Providence, RI: Berghahn. Weinberg, Gerhard L. (1995). A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Werth, Alexander. (1964). Russia at War, 1941-1945. London: Barrie amp; Rockliff.

  MARK HARRISON

  WRANGEL, PETER NIKOLAYEVICH

  (1878-1928), general and commander-in-chief of the anti-Bolshevik forces in South Russia and leader of the White emigrant movement.

  One of the most talented, determined, and charismatic of the anti-Bolshevik generals (and one of the few who was authentically-and unashamedly- aristocratic), Peter Wrangel was born in St. Petersburg into a Baltic family of Swedish origin. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1901, but then joined a cavalry regiment as a private before volunteering for service at the front during the Russo-Japanese War, where he served with a unit of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks. In 1910 he graduated from the General Staff Academy and in World War I commanded a cavalry corps. He took no significant part in the events of 1917, but after the October Revolution he went to Crimea, where he was arrested by local Bolsheviks and narrowly escaped execution. He joined General Mikhail Alexeyev’s anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army in August 1918 and rose under General Denikin to command the Caucasian Army (largely made up of

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  Kuban Cossacks) of the Armed Forces of South Russia. In that role he led a successful offensive against the Red Army on the Volga, capturing Tsaritsyn in July 1919. However, the haughty Wrangel never liked the plebian Denikin and, after a fierce quarrel with him over strategy during the Whites’ Moscow offensive of the autumn of 1919, he was accused of conspiracy, dismissed, and exiled to Constantinople. Following the collapse of Denikin’s efforts, Wrangel was recalled and found enough support among other senior generals to be chosen, in March 1920, to succeed Denikin as commander-in-chief of the White forces in South Russia, which were now largely confined to Crimea.

  As a political leader, he was intolerant of opposition, distrusted all liberals, and remained a convinced monarchist, but he nevertheless promulgated a radical land reform in a belated attempt to win the support of the population (and the western Allies, who were by then despairing of the Whites). As commander, he was a strict disciplinarian, and he successfully reorganized the army (renaming it the Russian Army). However, a quarrel over command undermined a projected alliance with Pilsud-ski’s Poland. Although Wrangel’s forces managed during the summer of 1920 to pour out of Crimea into Northern Tauria, once the Bolsheviks had made peace with Poland in October, the Red Army was able to concentrate its vastly superior forces on the south and to drive the Russian Army back into Crimea. In November 1920 Wrangel organized a very remarkable and orderly evacuation of over 150,000 of his men and their dependents to Turkey, which was then under Allied control. They were poorly treated by the British administration of the Constantinople district and were subsequently scattered around Europe but remained unified through their shared experiences, their resentment of the Allies, and their veterans’ organization, the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), forged by Wrangel in 1924. Through ROVS Wrangel hoped to offer financial and social support to his men and to keep the ?migr? soldiers battle-ready and pure of political affiliation, while striving to unite monarchists and republicans under the banner of non-predetermination (i.e., by not prejudging issues regarding the future, post-Bolshevik, government of Russia). However, in November 1924, he announced his recognition of the claim to the Russian throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich. Wrangel died in Brussels in 1928, just as he and his associates were planning the creation of terrorist organizations to

  An experienced veteran of the Russian Imperial Army, Baron Peter Wrangel commanded the White forces during the civil war. © CORBIS be sent into the USSR. His children believed he had been poisoned by the Soviet secret police. He is buried in the Russian Cathedral in Belgrade. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kenez, Peter. (1971, 1977). Civil War in South Russia., 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, Paul. (2002). The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920-1941. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wrangel, Alexis. (1987). General Wrangel: Russia’s White Crusader. London: Leo Cooper. Wrangel, Baron Peter N. (1929). The Memoirs of General Wrangel, the Last Commander-in-Chief of the Russian National Army, tr. S. Goulston. London: Williams amp; Norgate.

  JONATHAN D. SMELE

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  YABLOKO

  Yabloko was one of the leading liberal opposition parties in the newly democratic Russia of the 1990s. Yabloko’s founder and leader was Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal economist who had stayed aloof from the new democratic political movements being formed between 1989 and 1991. A strong critic of Boris Yeltsin’s privatization program, Yavlinsky condemned both the anti-Yeltsin rebellion by the Congress of People’s Deputies in September 1993 and Yeltsin’s use of force to suppress it in October.

  In the wake of the October crisis, Yavlinsky teamed up with Yuri Boldyrev, an anticorruption campaigner, and Vladimir Lukin, ambassador to Washington until September, to form a bloc to run in the December 1993 State Duma election. Taking their three initials (Y, B, L), they named their alliance Yabloko (which means “apple”). Three small parties also joined Yabloko: the Republican Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Russian Christian-Democratic Union.

  The three founders of Yabloko were allies of convenience: They had a liberal orientation but were not part of Yeltsin’s team. Lukin wanted a foreign policy that was less pro-Western than that pursued by Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, an aspiration that contradicted Yavlinsky’s pro-Western orientation. Boldyrev subsequently quit Yabloko in 1995.

  Yabloko’s candidates were mostly young professionals and intellectuals. In the December 1993 election they won 7.9 percent of the vote and twenty seats in the national party-list race, and seven single-mandate districts. They were the sixth-largest party in the 450-seat Duma. Yabloko took up a position of principled opposition to the Yeltsin government. It opposed the new December 1993 constitution, refused to sign Yeltsin’s Civil Accord in May 1994, and repeatedly voted against government-proposed legislation.

  Yavlinsky ran Yabloko as a tight ship. Deputies who did not vote the Yabloko line were expelled from the party. In January 1995 Yabloko formally converted itself from an electoral bloc into a party. It claimed branches in more than 60 regions of Russia, although its most visible strength was in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and, curiously, the Far East. Yabloko projected an image that was partly liberal and partly social democratic, but nearly always critical of the government. They competed

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  for the liberal electorate with the pro-government reform party (at first Russia’s Choice, then Union of Right Forces). Party identification among Yabloko voters was rather weak, and surveys indicate that they were scattered across the entire political spectrum.

  In the December 1995 Duma election Yabloko maintained its position, finishing fourth with 6.9 percent of the vote, thirty-one seats on the party list, and fourteen seats in single-mandate races. Yabloko established a visible presence in the parliament through articulate young leaders such as Alexei Arbatov, deputy chair of the defense committee. In November 1997 Yabloko’s Mikh
ail Zadornov, the head of the Duma’s budget committee, joined the government as finance minister. In May 1999 Yabloko voted for impeaching Yeltsin because of his actions in the first Chechen war. In August 1999 former prime minister and anticorruption campaign Sergei Stepashin chose to join Yabloko rather than the rival Right Cause. But in the December 1999 Duma elections Yabloko’s support slipped to 5.9 percent (yielding sixteen seats, plus four in the single mandates). It was probably hurt by Yavlinsky’s criticism of the government’s new war in Chechnya.

  Yabloko mainly existed as a vehicle for its leader, Yavlinsky. The rise of Vladimir Putin sunk Yavlinsky’s presidential chances, leaving Yabloko as a visible but relatively powerless voice of opposition. See also: CONSTITUTION OF 1993; YAVLINSKY, GRIGORY ALEXEYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Yabloko website, English version. (1999). «http://www .yabloko.ru/Engl/».

  PETER RUTLAND

  YAGODA, GENRIKH GRIGOREVICH

  (1891-1938), state security official, general commissar of state security (1935).

  Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda was a native of Rybinsk, the son of an artisan and the second cousin of the revolutionary leader Yakov Sverdlov, to whose niece he was married. He finished eight classes of gymnasium in Nizhni Novgorod before joining an anarchist-communist group (1907), and

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  later the Social Democratic Party (December 1907). In 1912 he was arrested and exiled to Simbirsk. After returning from exile, he joined the army as a soldier and corporal in the Fifth Corps (1914-1917) and was wounded in action. In 1917, Yagoda worked with the journal, Soldatskaya Pravda, before taking part in the October Revolution in Pet-rograd. He entered the Cheka (military intelligence service) in November 1919 and was attached to the Special (00) Branch (watchdog of the military), and by July 1920 was a member of the Cheka Collegium. He worked his way up in the Cheka-GPU-OGPU (Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politich-eskoye Upravlenie, forerunner of the KGB), heading the Special Branch and later the Secret Political Department (watchdog of the intellectual life). In July 1927 he was the First Deputy Chairman of OGPU, but was later replaced by Ivan Akulov and demoted to deputy chairman. During the last two years, serving under the sickly Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, Yagoda actually ran the punitive organs. Taking an active part in working against Josef Stalin’s enemies, he was rewarded by being elected as candidate member of the Central Committee (1930) and later as a full member (1934). After Menzhinsky’s death in May 1934, the OGPU was re-formed as NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) on July 10, 1934, and Yagoda became its first commissar, the only Jew to hold this position. In 1935, when the rank of marshall of the Soviet Union was introduced in the Red Army, Yagoda received the equivalent rank of commissar general of state security, held by only two others (his successors Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria).