The first partisans could scarcely be regarded as volunteers. As German forces swept with breathtaking speed through the villages and towns of the western Soviet Union, large numbers of soldiers and Communist Party officials found themselves left behind German lines. Stragglers from the disorganized, retreating army escaped into woods or marshland. Party members or Jews, fearful of what the Germans would do to them, followed them into the inaccessible terrain. They did not constitute a serious fighting force. They were poorly armed and supplied, usually relying on what could be captured from ambushed Germans. They were in the main desperately short of food; much ‘partisan activity’ in the early months consisted of little more than the seizure of food from peasants, who had little desire to give it up. This did not endear the partisans to the local population. During the later part of 1941 some 30,000 Party members and young Communists from the Komsomol were infiltrated from the east through the German lines or were parachuted to where partisan groups were thought to operate. The local population in the Ukraine had little love for their former Communist masters either, and many of them were betrayed to the German authorities. Efforts by the newcomers to bring some kind of discipline to the Red Army stragglers and the ragbag of civilian recruits produced fresh tensions. Many partisan units simply sought to survive rather than fight.45
Whatever the limitations of the early partisan movement the German authorities reacted savagely to the threat of popular revolutionary warfare. The army regarded civilian resisters and francs-tireurs as nothing more than terrorists to whom the laws of war applied not at all. Partisans and their accomplices – a category that was suitably elastic – deserved only immediate death. Savage reprisals were approved at the highest level. On July 23 Hitler directed that his forces ‘spread the kind of terror’ which would ‘make the population lose all interest in insubordination’.46 Throughout the summer, army and SS commanders vied with each other in approving the most barbarous solutions to the partisan threat. On September 16 Hitler's chief of staff finally announced the notorious hostage order: between fifty and one hundred should be executed for every German death. There was no place for leniency; the stick, not the carrot, was what the Russian understood. Human life in the Soviet state, he continued, counted for nothing. Hence, punishments of ‘unusual severity’ would be necessary in order to deter terrorism.47 The stage was set for a war in which neither side would show any mercy, in which terror was met with indescribable terror, in which all conventional morality was banished. Partisans expected the harshest treatment; they were thus under no obligation to treat the enemy any differently.
The German anti-partisan offensive, which came under the general control of the same Bach-Zalewski who operated the liquidation squads, had in 1941 two strikingly contrary effects. On a military level the operations were reasonably successful. More than two-thirds of the occupied area had no partisan activity of any significance, and in the more favourable topography of the north-west, dense forests and inhospitable swamp, thousands of partisans were rounded up and shot or publicly hanged, with placards placed round their necks, as an example to the rest. Thousands more were murdered in reprisal for partisan attacks. In most cases villages held only women, children, the sick and the old when the Germans arrived; the able-bodied had fled or been evacuated when the Red Army retreated. The soldiers, often aided by local militia or helpful Cossacks, murdered a village's entire population in cold blood on the flimsiest pretext: ski tracks in the snow betrayed one hamlet; in another a lone sniper. The 707th Infantry Division in Belorussia in one month shot 10,431 ‘partisans’ in reprisal for the loss of two of their own number.48 Atrocity on this scale swiftly turned the local population against the Germans, whose campaign of enforced obedience was generally feared and resented more than were the partisans, whose activity had prompted the atrocities in the first place. By 1942 the Germans had done more to promote the partisan war than had any number of uplifting tracts from Moscow.
In the spring of 1942 Stalin at last gave formal structure to the partisan war. On May 30 a Central Staff for Partisan Warfare was established in Moscow under the Belorussian Party Secretary, Panteleymon Ponomarenko, who became chief of staff of all Soviet partisans. The guerrillas, whose life and fortunes were difficult to predict or control, found themselves the victims of a rigid centralization. The partisan groups were organized under regional and frontline staffs; local Red Army officers or Party officials became commanders; each partisan unit had an NKVD cell attached to it to keep the group in line. Something like military discipline was now imposed, although many bands displayed an anarchic refusal to conform. Elements deemed by the Party or the NKVD to be a danger to morale or simply too lazy or fearful to act energetically against the enemy were shot out of hand. Partisan groups were encouraged to see themselves as terrorist Stakhanovites. The Yalta Brigade was given specific work norms to fulfil: ‘Each partisan must exterminate at least five fascists or traitors; [and] he must take part in at least three actions a month.’ In Moscow 50,000 copies of a partisan guide were published, explaining in detail the behaviour of a Communist freedom fighter, from blowing up railway lines to surviving on bark and moss in subzero temperatures.49
The attempt to impose order on a fragmented and shadowy force had mixed results. Recruitment did increase, and because of the behaviour of the German authorities many of the new recruits were motivated by a genuine patriotism or by a deep and fiery hatred forged by what they had witnessed. But many of the newcomers were pushed into the partisan war because they had nowhere else to go. Jews fleeing from their exterminators provided one source. In Poland and Belorussia they fled from the ghettoes and small towns into the thick Belorussian forests. In the woods around the town of Nowogrodek the Bielski brothers assembled a large group of Jewish escapees, armed young men, women, children and older men. They were not partisans in the Soviet sense, since their main aim was to survive the German onslaught on the local Jewish population. Nonetheless, they named the group after Zhukov, already a legendary character. The group lived on what they could beg or confiscate from local peasants, and were constantly on the move to avoid German anti-partisan sweeps, eking out a precarious existence side by side with groups of Russian soldiers or Polish resistance bands hiding in the woods, neither of which were particularly sympathetic to Jews. The different armed bands stole from each other or murdered rival members. Occasionally group members were betrayed by local peasants, who were paid fifty marks by the German authorities for each treachery. Spies or traitors were routinely executed. The young leader of the Zhukov group, Tuvya Bielski, succeeded in his aim of saving lives. Of the 1,200 in his group, only an estimated fifty died during the war. Bielski himself became a taxi driver in Palestine after 1945 before moving to the United States, where he died in 1987, age eighty-one.50
The partisan bands – or otriad – drew heavily on young men and women who fled from the threat of forced labour or escaped from captivity. Hundreds of Soviet prisoners of war escaped from the network of camps set up far behind the German front, with conditions so poor that two million prisoners died in the first six months of the war. Knowledge quickly spread of the fate that awaited prisoners. Rather than surrender, surrounded Red Army troops tried to hide in the hope of making later contact with local partisans. By the end of the year there were an estimated 300,000 partisans, but their willingness or ability to fight effectively varied greatly. They remained short of equipment; only one-tenth of the units had regular radio contact with the Soviet side of the front; and partisans depended critically on the shelter of forests, mountains or marshland. In the vast steppe areas of central and southern Ukraine there was almost nowhere to hide. The few partisan brigades sent into the region to drum up support were hunted down and annihilated.51
In August 1942 Stalin summoned partisan commanders to Moscow. He lectured them on the duties of the profession: energetic aggression, constant action, a vigilant anti-fascism.52 It was easy to romanticize the life of the partisan, and Soviet propagan
da did just that. Even Hollywood joined in. The North Star , screened in 1943, was pure invention, full of heroic stereotypes that would hardly have been out of place in Pravda. The real partisans faced a grim existence. They lived in constant dread of discovery; spies and informers could be bought by the German authorities for very little. They fought with poor weapons against an enemy who mobilized Panzer divisions and bomber fleets in the great anti-partisan sweeps, Operation Munich and Operation Cottbus. They had little access to medical supplies, and hundreds of wounded partisans died in caves and forests, lacking even basics like bandages. In parts of Belorussia or around Smolensk or Briansk, the partisans came to control large areas, where they re-established a primitive form of Communist authority, but they
Caption
Map 4 Main Partisan Areas in the German-Occupied Soviet Union, Summer 1943
were loath to risk their local power by attacking the enemy. Instead they turned their guns on local traitors, leaders who had been forced to collaborate with the Germans, peasants who had too readily handed over food to the enemy or worked for German favours.
In some areas partisan rule was welcomed, and partisans were fed and sheltered. But until the victory of Stalingrad, when there appeared a greater likelihood of Soviet victory, relations between partisans and their hosts were strained. The diary of a young partisan stationed near Smolensk early in 1942 betrays the roots of that tension: ‘Drove to Nekasterek to fetch bread – without success. We shot a traitor. In the evening I went to do the same to his wife. We are sorry that she leaves three children behind. But war is war!!!’ Five days earlier, he had shot down three Germans in cold blood in an ambush: ‘captured a cigarette lighter, a gold ring, a fountain pen, two pipes, tobacco, a comb.’ A week later, ‘a rich loot captured’.53 Partisans sometimes walked a thin line between military hero and gangster. Partisan actions invariably were followed by reprisals. If some were driven to join the partisans by the sight of German atrocities, others resented the risks that the partisan presence imposed on them. Increasingly the partisans began to conscript local men and women into their bands by force. Peasants had little choice. If they resisted they were shot by their own side; if they joined the partisans they were likely to suffer the same fate at the hands of the Germans. They had no military training. Partisan units with large numbers of forced conscripts – and by 1943 they constituted from 40 to 60 per cent of most brigades – took exceptionally high casualties and were conspicuously more inept than units with a cadre of experienced guerrillas.54 They stare out of hundreds of photographs, gaunt, sullen men, poorly dressed and scarcely armed, fighting for a system that a decade before had forced them into collective farms with the same grim resolution with which it now propelled them into involuntary terrorism.
Nowhere was the tension between Soviet partisans and the local population as marked or as dangerous as it was throughout the Ukraine. There were partisans in the region, but most of them were nationalist guerrillas, fighting both the Germans and the Soviets for the right to an independent Ukraine. The battle lines of the area were pure anarchy. There were nationalists under the hetman Bulba-Boravets who fought on the side of the Germans in 1941, against them in 1941, under the designation Ukrainian Insurgent Army, then in 1943 amalgamated with the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization led by Stepan Bandera, whose estimated 300,000 supporters fought both Germans and Russians. The notorious ‘Bandera boys’ punished Ukrainians who helped either side.55 This nationalist militia was, by 1943, strong enough to turn back attempts by the Soviet partisans to penetrate the Ukraine and inflict damage on German communications. Soviet partisans found almost no support among the Ukrainian villagers, whose memories were long enough to recall the famine and the terror. In 1943 the German authorities calculated that 60 per cent of the area of north-western Ukraine was under the control of nationalist partisans. The Ukrainian nationalist force was too large for the Germans to defeat, but they held on to the main lines of communication, after abandoning the forests and mountains. In November 1943 Bandera was confident enough to stage a Conference of the Enslaved Nations of Eastern Europe and Asia, which brought together Tatars, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs and Cossacks to draw up a common programme for the struggle against Germany and the Soviet Union. The struggle continued well after the end of the war against the Communist successors to the retreating German army.56
By 1943 the partisan movement in the rest of the occupied area had come of age. The growing confidence of the Red Army and the greater availability of military supplies boosted the partisan organization. The units came to resemble the regular army. Tanks, heavy artillery, even aircraft were made available. A total of 22,000 trained military experts were sent into the partisan regions, three-quarters of them demolition experts, 8 per cent of them radio operators. In the spring of 1943 Stalin ordered the Rail Campaign, a co-ordinated attempt to disrupt communications in the German rear. Thousands of explosions forced desperate measures from the German authorities, but the rail network was kept going despite the constant threat of disruption.
The life of Germans caught in the vast expanses of the Russian front was bleak. The roads were no longer safe. Vehicles were forced to move in convoys, with heavy machine-guns mounted on trucks. All main routes were patrolled regularly. Nevertheless the partisans took a steady toll. Lines of vehicles were blocked by simple barricades thrown across the roads at blind corners. Trees were chopped down and laid behind the last truck, while a hail of bullets was pumped into the hapless convoy. Partisans were credited with the destruction of 65,000 vehicles and 12,000 bridges. In one such ambush the SA leader Viktor Lutze was killed. In Minsk the commissar of Belorussia, Wilhelm Kube, a man whose savage reputation made him a prime target, was blown up by a timebomb laid under his bed by a partisan maid. Neither German soldiers, nor the thousands of Soviet citizens who worked for the new masters, were safe. An insidious demoralization was evident among the occupation troops. Repression was tempered in some areas by attempts to buy local peace from the partisans or to negotiate a truce, but for many isolated, frightened, perhaps guilty German soldiers vicious reprisal remained the refrain. Hundreds of ruined villages and a death toll that passed an estimated one million bore terrible testimony to the price paid for Hitler's ‘kind of terror’.57
In 1944 the partisan war was wound up. As the Red Army swept through the last areas of occupation, partisan units, with their colourful names, ‘Death to the Fascist’ or ‘The People's Avengers’, were absorbed into the regular army. One-fifth were rejected as unfit. Others were carefully scrutinized by the NKVD units which followed in the wake of the conquering armies. Membership in the partisans did not bring immunity from the security habits of the regime. All Ukrainian partisans, even Communists, were distrusted as a matter of course. The arrival of the Red Army opened up old wounds and exposed new ones. The tortured history of collaboration, betrayal and resistance left hundreds of thousands dead beside the millions slaughtered by the invader in the name of racial war. The urge for revenge is easy to understand. The journalist Alexander Werth found himself talking in 1944 to a middle-aged Russian partisan who had been appointed mayor of the Ukrainian town of Uman. Short, with pale skin and dark hair brushed back, Mayor Zakharov explained to his guest the rigours of partisan life. He had been able to recruit only a small group, which had hidden in the Vinnitsa forest. Poorly armed, they took consistently high casualties. He had been wounded in July 1941, and captured by the Germans; escaping, he ended up with partisans outside Uman. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, who savagely tortured and beat him and broke his back. He disappeared back into the forest, where the partisans knew him only as ‘Uncle Mitya’; here he masterminded attacks on railway lines, while his force was harassed by Cossacks in German pay. ‘It was a harsh and grim life,’ he told Werth. ‘They were merciless and so were we. And we shall be merciless with the traitors now.’58
Across a vast no-man's-land from the Baltic states in the north to the shores of the Blac
k Sea in the south was played out a human tragedy that still defies imagination. The population of Baits, Belorussians, Ukrainians and Jews was caught up in a drama not of their making. Why did some choose to collaborate and some to resist? There is no simple answer. Most of those caught in the middle had little choice but were forced to one side or the other by fear, opportunism or accident. Millions had no choice at all, victims of an ideology of discrimination and destruction. Some collaborators actively chose the German side because of their hatred of Communism. A large part of the German-conquered area had been ruled by the Soviet Union for only a matter of months. There was no fund here of Russian patriotism or socialist commitment. No doubt the German invaders could have made more of such anti-Soviet sentiments than they did, but millions of nationalists continued to fight against the Soviet side even when the true nature of German imperialism became clear.
Resistance is no easier to understand. It carried exceptional risks; partisans were the kamikazes of the Soviet war effort. Some who joined did so from fear of what would happen to them when, or if, the Soviet system returned. Others joined from honest conviction. Mayor Zakharov expressed his own choice in simple terms: ‘working for the good of his country’.59 It is easy to be sceptical about the political idealism of those who fought for a system which imposed such heavy burdens on its own people, but it should not be dismissed out of hand. An uncomplicated patriotism is evident in the behaviour and language of many partisans, which we have no reason to disregard. The German invaders were easy to hate. Stalin encouraged the partisans to see the war in ideological terms; resistance was an expression of commitment to the Soviet cause and the forces of socialist progress. This perception transformed the campaign of resistance into a revolutionary war, a conflict with deep echoes of the civil war, whose confused battle-lines the partisan struggle closely resembled, a war more in tune with the theory of proletarian struggle that permeated military thinking in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. The partisan movement was also important to the Soviet leadership because it kept the occupied area in touch with Moscow, and maintained a residual Communist apparatus. Despite the three years of German occupation, the Party and the Soviet state held on to the bare threads of a system that might otherwise have collapsed entirely.
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