How was Soviet resistance maintained? The main features of the Soviet system of government on the outbreak of war were Stalin's personal dictatorship, a centralised bureaucracy with overlapping party and state apparatuses, and a secret police with extensive powers to intervene in political, economic and military affairs. This regime organised the Soviet war effort and mobilised its human and material resources. There were some adjustments to the system but continuity was more evident than change.
In the short term, however, this regimented society and its planned economy were mobilised not on lines laid down in carefully co-ordinated plans and approved procedures but by improvised emergency measures. From the Kremlin to the front line and the remote interior, individual political and military leaders on the spot took the initiatives that enabled survival and resistance.
The resilience was not just military; the war efforts on the home front and the fighting front are a single story. Patriotic feeling is part of this story, but Soviet resistance cannot be explained by patriotic feeling alone, no matter how widespread. This is because war requires collective action, but nations and armies consist of individuals. War presents each person with a choice: on the battlefield each must choose to fight or flee and, on the home front, to work or shirk. If others do their duty, then each individual's small contribution can make little difference; if others abandon their posts, one person's resistance is futile. Regardless of personal interest in the common struggle, each must be tempted to flee or shirk. The moment that this logic takes hold on one side is the turning point.
The main task of each side on the eastern front was not to kill and be killed. Rather, it was to organise their own forces of the front and rear in such a way that each person could feel the value of their own contribution, and feel confident in the collective efforts of their comrades, while closing off the opportunities for each to desert the struggle; and at the same time to disorganise the enemy by persuading its forces individually to abandon resistance and to defect.
A feature of the eastern front, which contributed to the astonishingly high levels of killing on both sides, was that both the Soviet Union and Germany proved adept at solving their own problems of organisation and morale as they arose; but each was unable to disrupt the other's efforts, for example by making surrender attractive to enemy soldiers. One factor was the German forces' dreadful treatment of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war: this soon made clear that no one on the Soviet side could expect to gain from surrender. Less obviously, it also ensured that no German soldier could expect much better if Germany lost. Thus it committed both sides to war to the death.
In short, three factors held the Soviet war effort together and sustained resistance. First, for each citizen who expected or hoped for German victory there were several others who wanted patriotic resistance to succeed. These were the ones who tightened their belts and shouldered new burdens without complaint. In farms, factories and offices they worked overtime, ploughed and harvested by hand, rationalised production, saved metal and power and boosted output. At the front they dug in and fought although injured, leaderless and cut off. To the Nazi ideologues they were ignorant Slavs who carried on killing pointlessly because they were too stupid to know when they were beaten. To their own people they were heroes.
Second, the authorities supported this patriotic feeling by promoting resistance and punishing defeatism. They suppressed information about Red Army setbacks and casualties. They executed many for spreading 'defeatism' by telling the truth about events on the front line. In the autumn of 1941 Moscow and Leningrad were closed to refugees from the occupied areas to prevent the spread of information about Soviet defeats. The evacuation of civilians from both Leningrad and Stalingrad was delayed to hide the real military situation.
Stalin imposed severe penalties on defeatism in the army. His Order no. 270 of 16 August 1941 stigmatised the behaviour of Soviet soldiers who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner as 'betrayal of the Motherland' and imposed social and financial penalties on prisoners' families. Following a military panic at Rostov-on-Don, his Order no. 227 of 28 July 1942 ('Not a Step Back') ordered the deployment of 'blocking detachments' behind the lines to shoot men retreating without orders and officers who allowed their units to disintegrate; the order was rescinded, however, four months later. The barbarity of these orders should be measured against the desperation of the situation. Although their burden was severe and unjust, it was still in the interest of each individual soldier to maintain the discipline of all.
The authorities doggedly pursued 'deserters' from war work on the industrial front and sentenced hundreds ofthousands to terms in prisons and labour camps while the war continued. They punished food crimes harshly, not infrequently by shooting. The secret police remained a powerful and ubiquitous instrument for repressing discontent. This role was heightened by the severe hardships and military setbacks and the questioning of authority that resulted. Civilians and soldiers suspected of disloyalty risked summary arrest and punishment.
Third, although German intentions were not advertised, the realities of German occupation and captivity soon destroyed the illusion of an alternative to resistance.[40] For civilians under occupation, the gains from collaboration were pitiful; Hitler did not offer the one thing that many Russian and Ukrainian peasants hoped for, the dissolution ofthe collective farms. This was because he wanted to use the collective farms to get more grain for Germany and eventually to pass them on to German settlers, not back to indigenous peasants. On the other hand, the occupation authorities did permit some de-collectivisation in the North Caucasus and this was effective in stimulating local collaboration.
People living in the Russian and Ukrainian zones of German conquest were treated brutally, with results that we have already mentioned. Systematic brutality resulted from German war aims, one of which was to loot food and materials so that famine spread through the zone of occupation. Another aim was to exterminate the Jews, so that the German advance was followed immediately by mass killings. The occupation authorities answered resistance with hostage-taking and merciless reprisals. Later in the war the growing pressure led to a labour shortage in Germany, and many Soviet civilians were deported to Germany as slave labourers. In this setting, random brutality towards civilians was also commonplace: German policy permitted soldiers and officials to kill, rape, burn and loot for private ends. Finally, Soviet soldiers taken prisoner fared no better; many were starved or worked to death. Of the survivors, many were shipped to Germany as slave labourers. Red Army political officers faced summary execution at the front.
It may be asked why Hitler did not try to win over the Russians and Ukrainians and to make surrender more inviting for Soviet soldiers. He wanted to uphold racial distinctions and expected to win the war quickly without having to induce a Soviet surrender. While this was not the case, his policy delivered one unexpected benefit. When Germany began to lose the war, it stiffened military morale that German troops understood they could expect no better treatment from the other side. Thus Hitler's policy was counter-productive while the German army was on the offensive, but it paid off in retreat by diminishing the value to German soldiers of the option to surrender.
As a result, the outcome of the war was decided not by morale but by military mass. Since both sides proved equally determined to make a fight of it, and neither could be persuaded to surrender, it became a matter of kill-and- be-killed after all, so victory went to the army that was bigger, better equipped and more able to kill and stand being killed. Although the Red Army suffered much higher casualties than the Wehrmacht, it proved able to return from such losses, regain the initiative and eventually acquire a decisive quantitative superiority.
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Alexander Dallin's