38. Ibid., pp. 266–7; Erickson, Road to Berlin, p. 265.
39. M. Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front (Westport, Connecticut, 1977), P. 158.
40. P. Winterton, Report on Russia (London, 1945), p. 23 [an ‘Old Believer’ is a member of a Russian Orthodox sect loyal to the traditional church].
41. Ibid., pp. 24–7; W. A. Harriman and E. Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1945 (London, 1975), p. 314.
42. Main Front, p. 192.
43. S. M. Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff at War (Moscow, 1970), p. 44.
44. Details in J. Erickson, ‘Soviet Women at War’, in Garrard, World War 2, pp. 62–9.
45. Erickson, Road to Berlin, pp. 288–90; Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, pp. 204–5.
46. Ibid., pp. 205–6.
47. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 280–1.
48. Ibid., pp. 282–3.
49. P. Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer SS (London, 1990), pp. 523–7; further details can be found in J. Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of 1944 (Cambridge, 1974).
50. W. S. Churchill, The Second World War (6 vols., London, 1948–55), vi, pp. 124–5.
51. V. Berezhkov, History in the Making: Memoirs of World War II Diplomacy (Moscow, 1983), pp. 358–9.
52. G. Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York, 1990), pp. 114–17.
53. Berezhkov, History in the Making, pp. 357–8.
54. Werth, Russia at War, p. 877.
55. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 301–2.
56. For details see M. J. Conversino, Fighting with the Soviets: The Failure of Operation Frantic, 1944–1945 (Lawrence, Kansas, 1997), pp. 135–7.
57. Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, pp. 213–14; Erickson, Road to Berlin, pp. 384–7.
58. M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), p. 114.
59. Ibid., p. 115.
60. L. C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Partition of Europe from Munich to Yalta (London, 1993), pp. 200–203.
61. Berezhkov, History in the Making, pp. 370–72.
62. Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy, pp. 388–90.
63. Ibid., pp. 391–3.
64. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 273–4.
65. See W. Loth, The Division of the World 1941–1945 (London, 1988), pp. 69–72; Gardner, Spheres of Influence, pp. 226–36.
66. Berezhkov, History in the Making, p. 411.
67. Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy, p. 419.
68. Berezhkov, History in the Making, p. 405.
69. Werth, Russia at war, p. 980.
Chapter 9
Epigraph: I. Ehrenburg, Men – Years – Life: The War 1941–1945 (London, 1964), p. 191.
1. G. K. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections (2 vols., Moscow, 1985), ii, p. 346.
2. Ibid., p. 347.
3. The best account of this campaign is C. Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (London, 1993). Details also in R. J. Rummell, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (New Brunswick, 1990), pp. 160–61.
4. Ehrenburg, Men – Years – Life, pp. 116, 138, 163.
5. J. Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps (London, 1990), p. 19.
6. V. I. Chuikov, The End of the Third Reich (London, 1967), p. 41.
7. Bridgman, End of the Holocaust, pp. 19–20.
8. Ibid., pp. 25–7.
9. Ibid., pp. 23, 27. See too N. Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917 (2 vols., London, 1990), ii, pp. 424–5. When the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee leaders asked for details of Jewish deaths they were told that records on German crimes were not ‘organized according to the nationality of the victims’.
10. M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York, 1962), p. 111; see too N. Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War (London, 1981), p. 269.
11. A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (London, 1974), p. 21.
12. J. Erickson, ‘Soviet War Losses‘, in Erickson and D. Dilks, eds., Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 265.
13. Chuikov, End of the Reich, pp. 123–9.
14. Ibid., p. 136; Duffy, Red Storm, p. 246.
15. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 339–40.
16. Ibid., pp. 348–9; I. Konev, Year of Victory (Moscow, 1969), pp. 79–80; O. P. Chaney, Zhukov (2nd ed., Norman, Oklahoma, 1996), pp. 307–8, 310–11.
17. Konev, Year of Victory, p. 84.
18. Zhukov, Reminiscences, pp. 358–9.
19. Ibid., pp. 353–5.
20. Chaney, Zhukov, pp. 308–9.
21. V. Berezhkov, History in the Making: Memoirs of World War II Diplomacy (Moscow, 1983), pp. 421–4.
22. Chuikov, End of the Reich, pp. 144–6.
23. Ibid., p. 147; Zhukov, Reminiscences, pp. 364–6, who claimed that the searchlights and fog ‘troubled no one’. See too Chaney, Zhukov, pp. 313–15 and the detailed day-by-day reconstruction in T. Le Tissier, Zhukov at the Oder: The Decisive Battle for Berlin (London, 1996).
24. Chaney, Zhukov, p. 316; W. Spahr, Zhukov: The Rise and Fall of a Great Captain (Novato, California, 1993), pp. 173–5.
25. Spahr, Zhukov, p. 177; Chuikov, End of the Reich, pp. 169–70.
26. Konev, Year of Victory, p. 92.
27. Ibid., pp. 171–2.
28. J. Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Stalin's War with Germany (London, 1983), pp. 809–11.
29. J. Toland, Hitler (New York, 1976), pp. 865–7.
30. Details in F. Genoud, ed., The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents February–April 1945 (London, 1961).
31. Toland, Hitler, p. 867.
32. Ibid., p. 878.
33. W. Maser, Hitler's Letters and Notes (New York, 1974), pp. 357–61.
34. On the circumstances of Hitler's death there is still much disagreement. See H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (7th ed., London, 1995), Preface and Chapter 7; H. Thomas, Doppelgängers: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker (London, 1995).
35. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, p. 390.
36. Chuikov, End of the Reich, pp. 219–23.
37. Ibid., p. 258.
38. Details in Konev, Year of Victory, pp. 193–235; D. Glantz and J. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, Kansas, 1995), pp. 272–4.
39. D. M. McKale, Hitler: The Survival Myth (New York, 1981), pp. 31–3.
40. Ibid., pp. 182–5. Zhukov was not told of the discovery of Hitler's remains for twenty years (Spahr, Zhukov, p. 181).
41. McKale, Survival Myth, p. 187, based on the testimony of L. Bezymensky, The Death of Adolf Hitler (New York, 1968).
42. Details from Der Spiegel, ‘Hitlers Höllenfahrt’, no. 14, 1995, pp. 170–87, no. 15, 1995, pp. 172–86.
43. H. C. Butcher, Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher (London, 1946), pp. 691–3, entry for 7 May 1945; J. Deane, The Strange Alliance: the Story of American Efforts at Wartime Cooperation with Russia (London, 1947), pp. 164–8.
44. S. M. Shtemenko, The Last Six Months (New York, 1977), pp. 410–11; Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 396–7; Deane, Strange Alliance, pp. 172–3.
45. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 399–401; details also in Chaney, Zhukov, pp. 329–32; Deane, Strange Alliance, pp. 177–8.
46. R. Parker, Moscow Correspondent (London, 1949), pp. 11–14.
47. Ehrenburg, Men – Years–Life, p. 187.
48. Ibid., pp. 188–9.
49. P. Grigorenko, Memoirs (London, 1983), p. 139; see also P. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster (New York, 1994), p. 170: ‘The end of the war is still vivid in my memory as a glorious event that washed away all my doubts about the wisdom of Stalin's leadership.’
50. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 423–4.
51. Werth, Russia at War, pp. 1001–3.
52. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, pp. 441–3.
53. D. Volkogonov, Stalin (Ne
w York, 1991), pp. 498–9; Berezhkov, History in the Making, p. 451.
54. Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 501.
55. C. Andrew and O. Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (London, 1990), p. 302; E. Radzinsky, Stalin (London, 1995), p. 493.
56. W. S. Churchill, The Second World War (6 vols., London, 1948–55), vi, pp. 498–9, letter from Churchill to Truman, 12 May 1945.
57. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, p. 443; G. Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York, 1990), pp. 591–2; G. F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (London, 1968), p. 258.
58. Stalin to Churchill in M. Heller and A. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: A History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (London, 1986), p. 425; on Truman and Stalin, Berezhkov, History in the Making, pp. 468–9.
59. Zhukov, Reminiscences, ii, p. 449.
60. Glantz and House, When Titans Clashed, pp. 277–82; Heller and Nekrich, Utopia, pp. 441–2.
61. Volkogonov, Stalin, p. 501; on prisoners see S. I. Kuznetsov,’ The Situation of Japanese Prisoners of War in Soviet Camps’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 8 (1995), pp. 612–13.
62. Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 499.
63. Figures on losses from Erickson, ‘Soviet Losses’, pp. 259–68. See too the estimates in E. Bacon, ‘Soviet Military Losses in World War II’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 6 (1993); B. V. Sokolov, ‘The Cost of War: Human Losses of the USSR and Germany, 1939–1945’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1996); V. E. Korol, ‘The Price of Victory: Myths and Realities’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9 (1996).
Chapter 10
Epigraph: M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, New York, 1962, p. 106.
1. W. A. Harriman and E. Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1946 (London, 1976), pp. 535–6.
2. H. S Truman, Memoirs (2 vols., New York, 1955), pp. 341–2.
3. A. Bryant, Triumph in the West: The War Diaries of Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke (London, 1959), p. 77.
4. M. Heller and A. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (London, 1986), pp. 462–3. These were official Soviet figures. They mask the damage inflicted by the Soviet scorched-earth policy in the early years of war.
5. A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (London, 1989), pp. 279, 284.
6. Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy, p. 536.
7. J. Stalin, Works (Moscow, 1955), xiii, pp. 108,122, talk with the German author, Emil Ludwig, 13 December 1931.
8. Cited in the review of E. Radzinsky, Stalin, in Europe–Asia Studies 49 (1997), p. 177.
9. Djilas, Conversations, p. 82.
10. Ibid., p. 161.
11. T. Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (London, 1993), pp. 30–3.
12. Ibid., pp. 311–13.
13. Ibid., p. 211.
14. A. Vaksberg, The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Moscow Show Trials (London, 1990), p. 259.
15. E. M. Thompson, ‘The Katyn Massacre and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Soviet–Nazi Propaganda War’, in J. Garrard and C. Garrard, eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People (London, 1993), p. 220.
16. G. C. Malcher, Blank Pages: Soviet Genocide against the Polish People (Woking, UK, 1993), p. 35; E. Radzinsky, Stalin (London, 1996), p. 483. The announcement was made in Smolensk by A. Krayushkin.
17. D. Marples, ‘Kuropaty: The Investigation of a Stalinist Historical Controversy’, Slavic Review 53 (1994), pp. 513–16.
18. I am very grateful to James Bacque for letting me see the official figures supplied to him for his work on his book, Crimes and Mercies (London, 1997). The figures are drawn from a report of the chief of the Prison Department of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs on ‘war prisoners of the former European armies for the period 1941–1945’, dated 28 April 1956. On contemporary estimates see D. Dallin and B. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour in Soviet Russia (London, 1948), pp. 277–8. On Japan, S. I. Kuznetsov, ‘The Situation of Japanese Prisoners of War in Soviet Camps’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 8 (1995).
19. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour, pp. 279–80.
20. For this quotation and much of the material used in the discussion of repatriation see N. Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War (London, 1981), Chapter 17. See too Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, pp. 450–2, for figures on the number of repatriations; N. Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia 1944–1947 (London, 1974), pp. 92–118. A less sensational version of events is in A. Cowgill et al. (eds.), The Repatriations from Austria in 1945: the Report of an Inquiry (2 vols., London, 1990).
21. Tolstoy, Secret War, pp. 314–15; Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour, pp. 290–6.
22. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour, pp. 282–93; A. Sella, The Value of Human Life in Soviet Warfare (London, 1992), pp. 100–101.
23. Tolstoy, Secret War, p. 312.
24. R. J. B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945–1990 (London, 1993), p. 154.
25. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour, pp. 284–9. The quotation is from an article entitled ‘Judge Me!’ reproduced in the Paris-based journal Free Word (Svobodnoye slovo).
26. Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, p. 452.
27. Details in Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labour, p. 284; Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, pp. 451–2; R. J. Rummell, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (London, 1990), pp. 194–5.
28. A. Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (London, 1993), p. 124.
29. A. Werth, Russia at War (London, 1964), pp. 998–9.
30. Details in R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Oxford, 1989), pp. 782–3; W. J. Spahr, Zhukov: The Rise and Fall of a Great Captain (Novato, California, 1993), pp. 199–200; Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 502–3.
31. N. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994), p. 108.
32. Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 504; Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 783.
33. Details from D. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (London, 1991), pp. 520–23; G. Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (London, 1985), pp. 313–15; Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 517–19; W. G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 122–35.
34. E. Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin's Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives (London, 1994), p. 24; Rummell, Lethal Politics, p. 198.
35. N. Levin, Paradox of Survival: The Jews of the Soviet Union since 1917 (London, 1990), i, pp. 423–4, 428–30.
36. Tumarkin, Living and Dead, pp. 120–21; Levin, Paradox, pp. 432–5.
37. A. Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews (New York, 1994), pp. 159–81; Levin, Paradox, pp. 393–4.
38. Ibid., pp. 477–9, 484.
39. Details in B. Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 142–50, 174–7; Levin, Paradox, pp. 512–24; Y. Rapoport, The Doctors' Plot: Stalin's Last Crime (London, 1991), pp. 243–8 for details on Shtern's persecution.
40. Details in Heller and Nekrich, Utopia in Power, pp. 453–6; Rummell, Lethal Politics, pp. 192–6; K. Sword, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–48 (London, 1996), pp. 164–74.
41. D. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven, 1994), pp. 264–5.
42. Ibid., p. 270.
43. R. Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986), pp. 500–502; C. Andrew and O. Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (London, 1990), pp. 254–7; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 49–57.
44. This quotation and other details from Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, Chapter 5, and Knight, Beria, pp. 132–5.
45. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 213–20.
46. Knight, Beria, p. 139.
47. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 273.
48. W. O. McCagg, Stalin Embattled, 1943–48 (Detroit,
1978), p. 217.
49. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 291; J. L. Schecter and V. V. Luchkov, eds., Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes (New York, 1990), p. 100.
50. Schecter and Luchkov, Khrushchev, pp. 100, 102.
51. Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, pp. 243–5; Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 534; Rapoport, Doctors' Plot, pp. 77–8; Pinkus, Jews of the Soviet Union, pp. 178–81.
52. This is suggested in Knight, Beria, pp. 173–5.
53. Vaksberg, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 242–3; Knight, Beria, pp. 171–2.
54. Cited in full in Rapoport, Doctors' Plot, pp. 74–5. Rapoport himself was sacked from his hospital post the day after the Tass announcement and arrested a few weeks later.
55. Vaksberg, Stalin and the Jews, pp. 258–66.
56. The first details were revealed by Volkogonov, Stalin, pp. 571–2. This initial description was based on the testimony of A. I. Rybin, one of Stalin's former guards at the dacha. See Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 449–50, for criticism of the Rybin testimony.
57. Ibid., p. 555; Knight, Beria, pp. 177–8. According to Rapoport, Doctors' Plot, pp. 151–2, his interrogators at the Lefortovo Prison began one day to ask him detailed questions about Cheyne-Stokes respiration – the condition Stalin suffered after his collapse – because all the country's leading experts were incarcerated.
58. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend (London, 1967), p. 17.
Epilogue
1. N. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994), p. 107–9.
2. R. H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (London, 1988), p. 235.
3. M. P. Gallagher, The Soviet History of World War II: Myths, Memories and Realities (New York, 1963), pp. 147–8.
4. Tumarkin, Living and Dead, pp. 113–15, 120.
5. A. Axell, Stalin's War through the Eyes of his Commanders (London, 1997), p. 50. He was told the same by Admiral Gorshkov and General Pavlovsky, interviewed later, in January 1987.
6. A. Weiner, ‘The Making of a Dominant Myth: The Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity‘, Russian Review 55 (1996), p. 659.
7. G. Lyons, ed., The Russian Version of the Second World War (London, 1976). The quotation is from a translation of a standard Soviet history for senior schoolchildren dating from 1956.
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