12 Peacetime deaths in the camps and colonies of the Gulag were 2.6 per cent per year from figures for 1936-40 and 1946-50 given by A. I. Kokurin and N. V Petrov (eds.), GULAG (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei). 1918-1960 (Moscow: Materik, 2002), pp. 441-2. Applied to the Gulag population between 1941 and 1945, this figure yields a wartime excess of about 750,000 deaths. On deaths arising from deportations see Overy, Russia's War, p. 233. On deaths in Leningrad, John Barber and Andrei Dreniskevich (eds.), Zhizn' i smert' v blokadnom Leningrad^. Istoriko-meditsinskii aspekt (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001). On death rates across the country and in Siberia, John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), p. 88.
repression. For example, Stalin sent millions of people to labour camps where overwork and poor conditions raised mortality in peacetime well above the norm in the rest of society. Because of the war, however, food availability fell to a point where more people were sure to die. Hitler caused this situation, and in this sense he chose how many died. Stalin chose who died; he sent some of them to the Gulag and allowed the conditions there to worsen further. If Hitler had not decided on war, Stalin would not have had to select the victims. Thus, they were both responsible but in different ways.
In short, the general picture of Soviet war losses suggests a jigsaw puzzle. The general outline is clear: people died in colossal numbers in many different miserable or terrible circumstances. But the individual pieces of the puzzle still do not fit well; some overlap and others are yet to be found.
In 1945 Stalin declared that the country had passed the 'test' of war. If the war was a test, however, few citizens had passed unscathed. Of those alive when war broke out, almost one in five was dead. Ofthose still living, millions were scarred by physical and emotional trauma, by lost families and lost treasured possessions, and by the horrors they had been caught up in. Moreover, the everyday life of most people remained grindingly hard, as they laboured in the following years to cover the costs of demobilising the army and industry and rebuilding shattered communities and workplaces.[29]
The Soviet economy had lost a fifth of its human assets and a quarter to a third of its physical wealth.[30] The simultaneous destruction of physical and human assets normally brings transient losses but not lasting impoverishment. The transient losses arise because the people and assets that remain must be adapted to each other before being recombined, and this takes time. Losses of productivity and incomes only persist when the allocation system cannot cope or suffers lasting damage. In the Soviet case the allocation system was undamaged. Economic demobilisation and the reconversion of industry to peacetime production, although unexpectedly difficult, restored civilian output to pre-war levels within a single five-year plan. A more demanding yardstick for recovery would be the return of output to its extrapolated pre-war trend. In this sense recovery was more prolonged; during each post-war decade only half the remaining gap was closed, so that productivity and living standards were still somewhat depressed by the war in the 1970s.[31]
On the edge of collapse
John Keegan has pointed out that most battles are won not when the enemy is destroyed physically, but when her will to resist is destroyed.[32] For Germany, the problem was that the Soviet will to resist did not collapse. Instead, Soviet resistance proved unexpectedly resilient. At the same time, from the summer of 1941 to the victory at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/3 a Soviet collapse was not far off for much of the time.
Even before June 1941 the Wehrmacht had won an aura of invincibility. It had conquered Czechoslovakia, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Denmark, Greece and Yugoslavia. Its reputation was enhanced by the ease with which it occupied the Baltic region and Western Ukraine and the warmth of its initial reception.
In contrast, Red Army morale was low. The rank and file, mostly of peasant origin, had harsh memories of the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the famine of 1932/3. The officer corps was inexperienced and traumatised by the purges of 1937/8.[33] In the campaigns of 1939 and 1940, and particularly the 'winter war' against Finland, successes were mixed and casualties were heavy. Rather than fight, many deserted or assaulted their commanders. In the first months of the war with Germany millions of Red Army soldiers rejected orders that prohibited retreat or surrender. In captivity, with starvation the alternative, thousands chose to put on a German uniform; as a result, while civilians collaborated with the occupiers in all theatres, the Red Army was the only combat organisation in this war to find its own men fighting on the other side under the captured Red Army General Vlasov.[34] The Germans also succeeded in recruiting national 'legions' from ethnic groups in the occupied areas.
As the Germans advanced, the cities of western and central Russia became choked with refugees bearing news of catastrophic setbacks and armies falling back along a thousand-kilometre front.[35] Some Soviet citizens planned for defeat: in the countryside, anticipating the arrival ofGerman troops, peasants secretly planned to share out state grain stocks and collective livestock and fields. Some trains evacuating the Soviet defence factories of the war zones to the safety of the interior were plundered as they moved eastward in late 1941. In the Moscow 'panic' of October 1941, with the enemy close to the city, crowds rioted and looted public property.
In the urban economy widespread labour indiscipline was reflected in persistent lateness, absenteeism and illegal quitting.[36] Food crimes became endemic: people stole food from the state and from each other. Military and civilian food administrators stole rations for their own consumption and for sideline trade. Civilians forged and traded ration cards.[37] Red Army units helped themselves to civilian stocks. In besieged Leningrad's terrible winter of 1941 food crimes reached the extreme of cannibalism.[38]
In the white heat of the German advance the core of the dictatorship threatened to melt down. Stalin experienced the outbreak of war as a severe psychological blow and momentarily left the bridge; because they could not replace him, or were not brave enough to do so or believed that he was secretly testing their loyalty, his subordinates helped him to regain control by forming a war cabinet, the State Defence Committee or GKO, around him as leader.[39] At many lower levels the normal processes of the Soviet state stopped or, if they tried to carry on business as usual, became irrelevant. Economic planners, for example, went on setting quotas and allocating supplies, although the supplies had been captured by the enemy while the quotas were too modest to replace the losses, let alone accumulate the means to fight back.
Unexpected resilience
The Soviet collapse that German plans relied on never came. Instead, Stalin declared a 'great patriotic war' against the invader, deliberately echoing Russia's previous 'patriotic war' against Napoleon in 1812.
29
Don Filtzer,
31
MarkHarrison, 'Trends in Soviet Labour Productivity, 1928-1985: War, Postwar Recovery, and Slowdown',
33
On the Red Army before and during the war see, in addition to the military histories already cited, Roger R. Reese,
34
Catherine Andreyev,
37
William Moskoff,The
39
DmitriiVolkogonov,