Dragons and Democracy - VIII

Conquest begins an examination of misevaluated events of the Second World War by reminding his readers that his book “is not a work of history. It merely records events that affect our understanding of the totalitarian, and our own, development.” The essay is headed “With and Against Hitler”. Before proceeding to an analysis of issues relating to the war itself, which for the Soviet Union began in June 1941, it lists some of the actions and realities of the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact:

1) The joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
2) The Katyn massacre of 1940, when on Stalin's orders the NKVD shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel who had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 in support of the Nazis.
3) The Soviet-German military and naval cooperation, which had been developing ever since 1918.
4) The handing over to the Gestapo of German Communist refugees in Soviet exile.
5) The publication of Communist papers in Western Europe for some time after the Nazi invasions.
6) The peace movements – including the movements that advocated peace with Hitler – that compromised many on the far left in the United States as well as in Britain.

In assessing the clash that ensued between the “quondam allies”, Conquest refers to the fact that Russian losses in the war were enormous – “far greater than those of the Western powers, or of Germany”:

These are even now, sometimes, put to the credit of the regime. The soldiers fought bravely and tenaciously. The civilians died in huge numbers. But far from this giving justification to the regime, the opposite is largely true.

Conquest shows how the notion – still current in some quarters – that the industrialization implemented by Stalin saved Russia in World War II is fallacious, a) because the crash industrialization was “irrationally pursued and falsely celebrated”, with huge effort being put into grandiose projects that were either wholly or partially worthless; b) because of the irrational subjectivity that prevailed within the field of military-industrial planning, with Stalin insisting on the building of heavy cruisers, over the opposition of naval commanders who were among the first to be shot in the purges of the late 1930s; c) because of the massive loss of military equipment during the early battles of the war; and d) because of the large-scale loss to the Nazis of the industrial equipment as well as most of the important food-producing areas.

Nonetheless, historians such as Eric Hobsbawm have persisted in maintaining that the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, and that therefore the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s were somehow justified. Conquest quotes Hobsbawm, who in his book The Age of Extremes wrote:

"It turned the USSR into a major industrial economy in a few years and one capable, as Tsarist Russia had not been, of surviving and winning the war against Germany. One must add that in few other regimes could or would the people have borne the unparalleled sacrifices of this war effort.”

As the author points out, this is thoroughly misleading, because it ignores the fact that in 1914-17 the collapse of the Russian army occurred from the top down, while the disasters of 1941 and 1942 involved deep penetrations that affected the entire military apparatus. Stalin grossly mishandled the situation – having decapitated his army by executing most of its generals and leaders, he was left with a half-trained military leadership. Stalin also ignored warnings that a Nazi attack was imminent – and one result of this was that almost the entire Soviet airforce was destroyed on the ground. The Soviet military forces were defectively deployed, with the abandonment of the fortified line along the old Soviet frontier (this, to consolidate the gains of 1939) when new forts had not yet been completed – this resulted in huge losses of men and equipment, often of the highest calibre. And when Stalin ordered that Kiev be held and defended, again ignoring the advice of his military advisors, the result was the biggest defeat of the war. Relying on survivors of the purges, such as Voroshilov, Budenny, Kulik and Mekhlis, Stalin put the Soviet army into the hands of incompetents. At the same time, generals commanding at the front were shot. In October 1941 three successive heads of the Soviet airforce were executed, with further groups of officers and generals being shot throughout 1941 and 1942. Large numbers of Soviet troops, including five generals and numerous colonels, defected to the enemy. Nothing similar had happened in tsarist times.

The ruthlessness with which the desertions and defections were punished may, Conquest speculates, have been “one of the conditions for the narrow margin of victory over Hitler”. For by October 10, 1941, 661,364 soldiers had “escaped from the front” and been rounded up. Anthony Beevor notes over 10,000 military executions during the Stalingrad period.

All of this leads to the inevitable question of how far such ruthlessness was justified by the struggle against Nazism. Conquest quotes a Russian-Jewish acquaintance who told him that “the best outcome of the war would have been a German victory over the Soviet regime, followed by a Western nuclear destruction of Nazism."

”But you would have been dead.”
“Yes, there is that.”

The essay reaches the conclusion that the Soviet regime barely survived the Second World War. Its survival was largely dependent on the sacrifice made by the people of the Soviet Union and on the help it received from its allies. It was the survival of a disaster “for which it itself was largely responsible.” Nor was the disaster over. The advent of peace in 1945 merely led to a reinforcement of Stalin’s hostility towards the non-Soviet world:

The peoples of Russia and Sovietized Eastern Europe, exhausted by the war, faced ever-worsening oppression. And, even in the freer world, with lesser stresses, those concerned to face the perspectives of reality did so under constant anxiety and apprehension.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V
Dragons and Democracy - VI
Dragons and Democracy - VII

Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectation - Reality and Delusion in the Course of History is published by Norton, and can be purchased from amazon.com.