WORLD WAR 2 AND THE SOVIET PEOPLE SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE FOURTH WORLD CONGRESS FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES, HARROGATE, 1990 Editedfor the [memational Council for Soviet and East European Studies by Stephen White. Professor of Politics. University ofGlasgow From the same publishers: Roy Allison (editor) RADICAL REFORM IN SOVIET DEFENCE POLICY
Ben Eklof (editor) SCHOOL AND SOCIETY IN TSARIST AND SOVIET RUSSIA John Elsworth (editor) THE SILVER AGE IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE
John Garrard and Carol Garrard (editors) WORLD WAR 2 AND THE SOVIET PEOPLE
Zvi Gitelman (editor) THE POLITICS OF NATIONALITY AND THE EROSION OF THE USSR
Sheelagh Duffin Graham (editor) NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOVIET LITERATURE
Lindsey Hughes (editor) NEW PERSPECTIVES ON MUSCOVITE HISTORY
Walter Joyce (editor) SOCIAL CHANGE AND SOCIAL ISSUES IN THE FORMER USSR
Bohdan Krawchenko (editor) UKRAINIAN PAST, UKRAINIAN PRESENT
Paul G. Lewis (editor) DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN EASTERN EUROPE
Robert B. McKean (editor) NEW PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY
John Morison (editor) THE CZECH AND SLOVAK EXPERIENCE EASTERN EUROPE AND THE WEST
John O. Norman (editor) NEW PERSPECTIVES ON RUSSIAN AND SOVIET ARTISTIC CULTURE
Derek Offord (editor) THE GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
Michael E. Urban (editor) IDEOLOGY AND SYSTEM CHANGE IN THE USSR AND EAST EUROPE World War 2 and the Soviet People
Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990
Edited by John Garrard Professor ofRussian Literature University ofArizona and Carol Garrard
150th YEAR M St. Martin's Press © International Council for Soviet and East European Studies, and John and Carol Garrard 1993 General Editor'S Introduction © Stephen White 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, ar under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world This book is published in association with the International Council for Soviet and East European Studies. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-22798-3 ISBN 978-1-349-22796-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22796-9
First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-08531-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (4th: 1990: Harrogate, England) World War 2 and the Soviet people / edited by John Garrard and Carol Garrard. p. cm. "Selected papers from the Fourth Warld Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990". Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-08531-5 I. World War, 1939-1945-Soviet Union-Congresses. 2. World War, 1939-1945-Influence-Congresses. I. Garrard, John Gordon. II. Garrard, Carol. III. International Council for Soviet and East European Studies. IV. Title. V. Title: World War II and the Soviet people. VI. Title: World War Two and the Soviet people. D764.W67 1993 940.53'47-dc20 92-10827 CIP To the memory of the countless men, women and children on the Eastern Front who died in the struggle against Nazi aggression vi
I EUROPE ON 22 JUNE 1941 I
_ow • SOVIET UNION
COlmtries under German rule or r. influence by June1941 -Neutra I countries CJ CJ Great Brl181n, the only slate at warwith =lln:~~~~4~~it~~ the immedi01ely olfered oil poss;blel>elp 300 O'--...LM_;_Ies.L-....' I and alliance in the fight against Nazism
Map 1 Europe on 22 June 1941 Contents
List of Maps and Plates ix
Preface XIX
Acknowledgements xxi
General Editor's Introduction XXv
Notes on the Contributors xxvii
1 Bitter Victory 1 John and Carol Garrard 2 Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth 28 Lazar Lazarev 3 The Image of Stalin in Soviet Propaganda and Public Opinion during World War 2 38 John Barber 4 Soviet Women at War 50 John Erickson 5 The Other Veterans: Soviet Women's Poetry of World War 2 77 Katharine Hodgson 6 Images of the War in Painting 98 Musya GIants 7 Story of a War Memorial 125 Nina Tumarkin 8 World War 2 in Russian National Consciousness: Pristavkin (1981-7) and Kondratyev (1990) 147 George Gibian 9 New Information about the Deportation of Ethnic Groups in the USSR during World War 2 161 Vera Tolz
vii viii Contents
10 Anny and Party in Conflict: Soldiers and Commissars in the Prose of Vasily Grossman 180 Frank Ellis 11 Recovery of the Past and Struggle for the Future: Vasil' Bykaw's Recent War Fiction 202 Arnold McMillin 12 The Katyn Massacre and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Soviet-Nazi Propaganda War 213 Ewa M. Thompson 13 Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union, 1939--45 234 Martin Gilbert
Index 261 List of Maps and Plates
MAPS
Map 1 Europe on 22 June 1941 vi
Map 2 Soviet annexations 1939-40 xviii
Map 3 German-occupied USSR xxix
Map 4 The Soviet deportation of nationalities 1941-5 160
Map 5 Soviet industry and allied aid 1941-5 233
PLATES
Plate 1 Corpses of slave labourers, some naked and some still clad in striped prison garb, lie outside the gas chamber at the German concentration camp of Nordhausen, which was liberated by the US 7th Army on 5 April 1945. Many of the slave labourers had been Red Army POWs, who were forced to construct the V-I and V-2 rockets in the enormous tunnels dug into the Hartz Mountains. When the prisoners became too weak to work, they faced the gas chamber or the rope: weekly hangings were a feature at Nordhausen. (photo taken by Staff Sergeant James T. O'Neal, 690th Field Artillery.)
Plate 2 In October 1941 the Wehrmacht used the dead bodies of Red Army soldiers as planks as their drive to Moscow bogged down in what Russians call the rasputitsa. Two months later these corpses would have been stripped of their boots and warm clothing by frozen German soldiers, whom the overconfident Hitler had not prepared or fitted out for the cruel Russian winter.
Plate 3 Lithuanian civilians beat Jews in the summer of 1941 while German soldiers watch. On June 28, in Kaunas (called Kovno under Polish rule between the two world wars) local police joined with released convicts to search out and beat Jews to death with iron bars. On this one day several hundred were murdered.
ix x List of Maps and Plates
Plate 4 On 30 June 1941, only a week after their invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans entered Lvov. Within hours, mobs of Ukrainians began combing the city's streets and houses for Jews. Here a Jewish girl, stripped and raped, appeals to the camera for help. Other Jews were murdered in their homes, or beaten to death in the streets. The Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Catholic Church issued a proclam• ation against the killings, but to no avail.
Plate 5 In the Latvian town of Daugavpils (which had been called Dvinsk under Polish rule) the Germans trapped more than 16000 Jews by the rapidity of their advance. Here women and girls have been forced to strip naked before they are killed by an Einsatzgruppe detachment staffed by Latvian auxiliaries.
Plate 6 At Kiev, in September 1941, a million Soviet soldiers were surrounded, in part due to the ineptitude of Marshal Budyonny, one of Stalin's cronies. Budyonny himself was flown out to safety, leaving his troops to fight on until they ran out of ammunition. Over 600000 Soviet men and women were taken captive in the worst defeat in military history. Out of a given 1000, fewer than 30 would return to see their country again. Two members of a women's battalion wait disconsolately, trying to guess at what lies ahead.
Plate 7 The German Army offered some of its millions of Red Army prisoners a devil's bargain: death, whether immediate or more slow and painful in a camp - or collaboration as Hilfsfreiwilliger ('Hiwis'), that is, labourers, cooks, servants and other auxiliary jobs. An estimated 1.5 million Soviet soldiers accepted, including these three men.
Plate 8 On a Moscow street in late October 1941, NKVD troops check for 'spies, enemy agents and agitators'. Panic gripped the city and what was called the 'Great Skedaddle' had begun on 15 October, with the Party machinery and the citizenry fleeing in disorder. Once his exploratory offer of a separate peace met with silence, Stalin declared martial law on 20 October, and brought in 'special purpose' (osobogo naznacheniya) NKVD troops to restore order. Notorious for their cruelty, they shot or imprisoned citizens on the slightest pretext.
Plate 9 Greeting cards, badges, stamps and coins are the low end of the scale in Soviet iconography of the Great Patriotic War. However, their wide use indicates the Party's determination to spread its official List of Maps and Plates xi image of the war by all available means. These items were readily available in Moscow in 1991. The cover of this greeting card and the embossed envelope both feature the Spassky Tower, crowned with a ruby red star, symbol of Soviet power. The inset circle shows a forced perspective of Red Square: the Spassky Tower and the Lenin Mausoleum are not adjacent; their proximity is suggested for ideological reasons. The top inscription on the 1945 badge reads 'Our Cause is Just. Victory is Ours.' The bottom one repeats the well-known phrase, 'No One is Forgotten. Nothing is Forgotten.' A one-ruble coin - issued in 1965 as the Brezhnev regime began a major campaign to glorify the victory and particularly the Party's 'leading role' - bears an image of the official war memorial erected at Treptower Park in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The statue portrays a peaceful Red Army soldier who cradles a German child in his left arm, while an oversized sword of victory points downward, as the fighting is nowover. Ten years later, with Brezhnev still in power, the victory was also memorialised with a one-ruble coin. It bears the inscription 'Thirty Years after Victory in the Great Patriotic War.' The figure is of the gigantic statue of the Motherland, towering over Mamaev Hill at Stalingrad (renamed Volgograd under Khrushchev). Her sword is raised as she waves the troops into battle. The stamp is headed 'Congratulations on the Victory!' - the same inscription we see on the embossed envelope. The painting, entitled 'May of Forty Five', shows an idyllic scene as a Red Army soldier returns to his family. This type of Soviet pastorale was typical of the Brezhnevera, and was still used as a stamp in 1991 under Gorbachev, just prior to the botched August coup.
Plate 10 In May 1937, four experienced Arctic explorers were airlifted to an ice floe near the North Pole. Their purpose was to investigate the military use of the Arctic. The ice floe had shrunk from 1500 to 50 metres by the time they were finally rescued nine months later. The small 1938 book Radio Station 'North Pole', written by the expedition's radio operator, shows the Soviet flag, with Stalin's portrait replacing the hammer and sickle, planted on top of the world and broadcasting the dictator's greatness.
Plate 11 Stalin and Ribbentrop smile happily as Molotov signs the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939. The Pact xii List of Maps and Plates announced to a shocked world that the two former ideological foes pledged not to attack each other, but its secret protocols carved central Europe into 'spheres of influence', which each dictatorship proceeded to invade and occupy. Stalin took more than he had been allocated: within a year the Soviet empire absorbed 175000 square miles and 20 million additional subjects (see map of 'Soviet Annexations 1939-40' on p. xviii).
Plate 12 'Happy Children, 1939'. This 1990 poster by Andrei Ko1osov and Valeria Kovrigina illustrates the reaction of Russians to the first public disclosure of the secret protocols to the Molotov• Ribbentrop Pact. The satirical response exemplified here may have been provoked not simply by the shocking nature of the revelations, but also by Gorbachev's mealy-mouthed attempts to downplay the scandal and his suggestion that the Baltic States (although annexed illegally!) should remain republics in the Soviet Union. The poster was included in a 1992 exhibition 'Art as Activist: Revolutionary Posters from Central and East Europe', organised by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). The poster is reprinted from the book Art as Activist by Marta Sylvestrova and Dana Bartelt (New York: Universe, 1992) and is reproduced with the permission of the Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czechoslovakia.
Plate 13 With every able-bodied man away at the front, teenagers and old people had to turn out the shells, bullets and weapons upon which the Red Army depended for its survival. Millions of girls, some as young as 14, volunteered for such work. The discipline was ruthless, the hours long, and the working conditions appalling. Nevertheless, they per• formed an industrial miracle: by July 1943 (the great tank battle at Kursk) the Red Army would match the firepower of the Wehrmacht.
Plate 14 On 9 October 1941, with yet another enormous encirclement of the Red Army effected at Vyazma-Bryansk, Hitler announced to a delighted Reich that 'the campaign in the east has been decided'. That same day, with the approaches to Moscow now open, Pravda informed the citizens for the first time of the danger to their capital in an editorial, 'Overcoming the Spirit of Unconcern'. The Party and the military hurriedly requisitioned all trucks, and virtually all people. They were ferried, still in street clothes, to the western outskirts of the city, where they dug trenches in the cold mud. These women were List of Maps and Plates xiii among the 500 000 who worked day and night to form a defensive ring around the capital.
Plate 15 Sergei Gerasimov, The Partisan's Mother (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow). This painting was first attacked because the mother's face was rough and unattractive. Gerasimov repainted the face, and the work became a Soviet 'classic'.
Plate 16 Alexander Deineka, The Occupation (lzobrazitelnoe Iskusst• vo, Moscow).
Plate 17 Pavel Korin, Alexander Nevsky (lzobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow).
Plate 18 Alexander Deineka, The Outskirts of Moscow (lzobrazitel• noe Iskusstvo, Moscow).
Plate 19 Kukryniksy, The Fascists Flee from Novgorod (lzobrazitel• noe Iskusstvo, Moscow).
Plate 20 Grigory Shegal, Taking a Break. A Nurse (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow).
Plate 21 Alexander Laktionov, A Letter from the Front (lzobrazi• telnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow).
Plate n Gely Korzhev, Farewell (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Mos• cow).
Plate 13 Mikhail Savitsky, Partisan Madonna (lzobrazitelnoe Is• kusstvo, Moscow).
Plate 14 Yevsei Moiseyenko, Victory (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow).
Plate 25 Virtually every village has its war memorial. Here in Belozersk, in northern Russia, a simple statue without the usual grandiose inscription shows a Red Army soldier kneeling, either in homage to his dead comrades, or to accept the call of the Motherland as his duty. xiv List of Maps and Plates
Plate 26 The Memorial to the Unknown Soldier with its Eternal Flame was placed in the Alexandrov Gardens adjacent to the Kremlin Wall, and at the end of a promenade of starred granite blocks honouring the 'hero-cities' of the war. The inscription states that 'Your name is unknown, but your deeds are immortaL' The fallen standard and helmet recall the millions of Soviet husbands, brothers, fathers and sons who disappeared on the Eastern Front, and whose graves were never registered. Plate 27 One of the red granite memorials to a 'hero-city' (in this case, Leningrad) which the visitor passes on his way to the The Memorial to the Unknown Soldier. Under Brezhnev, these war monuments were brilliantly sited and designed so that the victory in war would be linked with Lenin, the Party's idol. Visitors would begin the secular pilgrimage by filing past the hero-cities, pausing by a large block to read the inscription 'To Those Who Perished for the Motherland', then coming to a full stop, in silence, before the Eternal Flame, and the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier. The funerary architecture powerfully evokes the sense of a martyr's tomb, a subliminal association that continues as the visitor proceeds through the gates, turns right and emerges on to Red Square. The pilgrimage ends with a visit to Lenin's Mausoleum, also built of red granite in the same severe, geometric style, as befits a holy sepulchre for the founder ·of the faith.
Plate 28 Skeletal design of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (open competition, 1988).
Plate 29 The destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, blown up on Stalin's orders in 1931 and replaced with a vast heated swimming pool, still offends many Russian Orthodox believers. The Cathedral itself had taken from 1839 to 1883 to build, and honoured the Russian victory over Napoleon in the 'Patriotic War' of 1812. Members of a Pamyat splinter group, Khram ('Shrine') wear this badge, showing an outline of the destroyed cathedral and the inscription, 'Pain and Memory' (the date '1880' is incorrect). They demand that the cathedral be rebuilt.
Plate 30 Museum under construction on Poklonnaya Hill, 1991. Within a circular Hall of Glory, a glass case will display what Soviets called the 'holy of holies', i.e. the original flag hoisted on the Berlin Reichstag on 30 April 1945. List of Maps and Plates xv
Plate 31
Is All Forgiven?
Victory, and much is forgiven.
Victory, and the victims are justified: millions, and among them (today we remember them especially) hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed on the eve of the Victory Day, which we are celebrating now, by one military commander simply in order to capture the destroyed city of Berlin before a second commander and report this triumph to a third [i.e., Zhukov sacrificed 200000-300000 troops because he wanted to capture Berlin before his rival Konev and report to Stalin]. Victory justified also both the lies and cruelty of a regime that destroyed what was human in human beings, that sowed hatred everywhere, and trampled underfoot conscience and self-respect. So does that mean that all accounts were settled once 1945 came around? Unfortunately, not for those who did not live to see 1945, who perished 'in the name of [the victory],. I bow to the ground before the soldiers, the widows and the orphans. I bend my knee to the memory of those who fell and those who are forgotten. I feel ashamed for those who stole the Victory, who organised grandiose parades instead of building houses, who handed out crumbs instead of real food, who offered flashy awards instead of creating a normal life - instead of a normal life worthy of human beings. The man in the photo raised his hand as if to stop me taking his photo. The only award he had from the war was a wooden leg. 'Don't take my photo,' he said sternly. 'We won the war, but we did not free ourselves or you. Or is that why you want to take my photo - just because we did not free you? Still I took his photo. (Yu. Rost, Literaturnaya gazeta, 9 May 1990).
Plate 32 The pathetic bodies of Red Army infantrymen lie stacked like cordwood outside Leningrad after a headlong, suicidal charge during the winter of 1941-2. Some corpses have already been stripped of their ¥alenlci (felt boots), which provided excellent protection against the snow and freezing temperatures, and all are missing their winter xvi List of Maps and Plates hats. The Wehrmacht had not been issued winter clothing, so they stripped not only dead but also live Red Army soldiers of this equipment. In temperatures that sunk to -40 Fahrenheit, this was a death sentence for their prisoners.
Plate 33 Vasily Grossman and IIya Ehrenburg, pictured together at the front in 1944, were the most famous Soviet correspondents of the war. Both had bylines in Krasnaya zvezda, the daily paper of the Soviet military. Ehrenburg's columns and biting anti-German satires were said by Stalin to be 'worth two divisions'. Grossman displayed remarkable courage at the front, most notably at the Battle of Stalingrad, which he described in a series of famous reports and stories. Both men were members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Commit• tee, and they co-edited The Black Book, documenting the Holocaust on Soviet soil. After the war, Stalin ordered the book destroyed and all leading members of the Committee arrested and eventually shot. Only Ehrenburg and Grossman survived, perhaps because of their wartime exploits and Stalin's demise on 5 March 1953.
Plate 34 Two teenagers and a man, paraded through the streets of Minsk, capital of Belorussia, on their way to be hanged. The girl has been identified as Masha Bruskina, a 17-year-old Jew from the Minsk ghetto who was active in the partisan movement, but Soviet officials refused to acknowledge this and continued to refer to her as 'unknown'. The sign says in German and Russian: 'We are partisans and have shot at German soldiers.' The three partisans were hanged on 26 October 1941 - apparently the first partisans to be hanged in public by the Germans.
Plate 35 Jewish partisan detachment near Minsk, a city located on a tragic slice of ground. It was ceded by the Bolshevik government to Poland in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (l918). It was assigned back to the Soviet Union by a secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet Non• Aggression Pact in August of 1939. The Wehrmacht took it within the first weeks of 'Barbarossa'. By August 1941, Einsatzgruppen, aided by local volunteers, were liquidating Jewish neighbourhoods. Some young Jews, taking advantage of the cover provided by the Pripet Marshes, were able to escape to the dense forests. There they formed partisan units which eluded capture until the return of the Red Army in the summer of 1944. List of Maps and Plates xvii
Plate 36 The exhumation of bodies at the Katyn massacre site, spring of 1943. The official report of the twelve doctors who oversaw the exhumation and dissection of over 4000 corpses of Polish officers was issued on 30 April 1943. It stated that they had all been shot in the nape of the neck and had their hands bound behind their backs. It also mentions a little-quoted fact: there were as well 'Russian civilians who were also exhumed in Katyn Forest and had been buried much earlier'. Each of these bodies, too, had a bullet hole in the back of the neck and the hands tied behind the back. The inference is clear: the NK.VD had used the Katyn Forest as an execution site during the 1930s. The NKVD was thus already familiar with the forest as a killing ground when it decided to murder the Poles in 1940.
Plate 37 The ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto after the April 1943 uprising (photograph taken in January 1945). On April 19, the day after the night of the Passover in 1943, over 2000 heavily armed troops, including SS units and Ukrainian auxiliaries, mounted their assault on the Warsaw Ghetto with machine guns, heavy artillery and flame• throwers. They razed each block, shooting the inhabitants or setting them on fire. The outnumbered and outgunned Jewish resistance put up a heroic but hopeless defence. Over 7000 Jews were killed in the fighting, and 30000 were deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka. XVll1
The eastward advance of Nazi rule and influence led to a westward advance of Russian control. By .kJne1940 the Russians had set up what they hoped would be a barrier against further German i1~ance.But this barrier pro..e RUSSIA Under German political control or influence by December 1940 Map 2 Soviet annexations 193~O Preface World War 2 and the Soviet People is designed to serve as a guide for the Western reader to the Second World War as it was fought on the Eastern Front, a physical and mental landscape so different from war in the West that it seems like another planet, as mysterious and threatening as Hamlet's 'undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns'. Everything is on a much larger scale and governed by alien laws and standards of conduct. We need to learn a new vocabulary - special words and phrases coined by both Germans and Russians alike to describe a war like no other ever recorded. We must adjust to terrain which resembles those medieval maps where carto• graphers left vast spaces blank except for basilisks drawn from bestiaries and the warning: 'Here be monsters.' The Eastern Front contains its own monsters-as horrifying and difficult for us to imagine as those mysterious creatures and unknown worlds were for our medieval ancestors. We are among the first ever to embark upon this voyage of discovery with adequate charts. Glasnost and perestroika have led to the opening of Soviet archives and the pUblication of suppressed data. In spite of the enormous number of Soviet books and articles about what is officially called 'The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union,' the nature and fundamental characteristics of the war on the Eastern Front have been deliberately obscured for almost half a century. Soviet accounts were tainted by omissions, distortions and half-truths. The new facts, set in their proper context, allow a quite different topography of the Eastern Front to be drawn. The former Soviet peoples are themselves hearing new information about topics such as the role of the NK.VD (as the secret police was then titled),· penal (punishment) battalions, the unique part played by women in the Soviet war effort, the callous disregard for their own soldiers by Stavka (the Soviet high command), the deportation of whole nations during and after the war, the contribution to the Soviet Union's survival of Allied aid and signals intelligence, and the complex and painful subject of local collaboration with the Nazis both in the killing of Jews on • Narodny komialarwt vnutr-odt del, People's Commissariat for Internal AtTain, WIll the title of the Soviet secret police from 1934 to 19<66. xix xx Preface Soviet soil and in forming large military units that fought with the Germans against the Soviet Union. Basic questions, such as the total military and civilian losses suffered by the country, and the number of Soviet POWs who died in German captivity, may now be answered. Until now, Soviet historians and writers have had to rely on German records rather than their own to calculate these fundamental statistics. In the 1990s, when the veterans and survivors are in the winter of their lives, time and opportunity have been granted to explore the Eastern Front at the very moment it would have seemed time had run out. A new map of 'The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union', as yet incomplete in its terrain and boundaries, has begun to replace the basilisks and blank spaces Stalin and his successors left for two generations. Our guides to the 'undiscovered country' are all distinguished specialists in culture, history, literature and political science. They chart the Soviet landscape, not the German, using evidence now being revealed. The reader can explore the Eastern Front by reading this volume through as a narrative, but he may wish to dip into it as a guidebook, preferring to examine one region before another. Our introductory paper 'Bitter Victory' outlines and comments on each paper. We have also provided each paper with editors' notes to suggest where the reader might wish to turn to obtain more details on a related topic or issue. Acknowledgements Some of the papers in this book were originally delivered in two panels, organised by John Garrard and entitled 'World War II in Soviet Memory' for the Fourth World Congress on Soviet and East European Studies, held in Harrogate, England, in July 1990. Addi• tional papers were solicited to address important areas. We express our gratitude to all the contributors. The invitation to edit one of the Harrogate volumes enabled us to focus on a subject that had engaged our attention since the mid-1980s, when John Garrard spent a year at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. We are both grateful to the Center (and its Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies) for the opportunity to do fundamental background reading and research on the Eastern Front - a topic of central importance in our forth• coming book on Vasily Grossman, the leading Russian frontline correspondent and novelist in World War 2. We were able to continue our tesearch while in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center at Lake Como, Italy, in 1988. John Garrard wishes to thank the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, for a Visiting Research Fellowship in 1991, the Earhart Foundation for a research fellowship and the University of Arizona for a sabbatical leave and travel grant for the 1990-1 academic year. He also gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Carol Garrard thanks the American Philosophical Society for a grant awarded to her in 1991. Research on this book was supported in part by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board (I REX) , with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the US Department of State, which administers the Soviet and East European Training Act of 1983 (Title VIII). None of these organis,ations is responsible for the views expressed. The same is true of the other foundations and institutions which so generously assisted in the preparation of this volume. We would both like to express our thanks to Dr David N. Dilks (now Vice Chancellor of the University of Hull) for an invitation to attend the June 1991 conference 'Barbarossa: The USSR, Germany, and the War,' organised by the Institute for International Studies at the University of xxi xxii Acknowledgements Leeds in conjunction with the British National Committee for the Second World War. In addition to distinguished historians from several countries, the conference was attended by British, German and Soviet veterans of the war. Our own voyage of discovery was immeasurably enhanced by meeting and learning from these remarkable men. Stephen White, overall editor of the Harrogate series, and John D. Morison, President of ICEES, were efficient and helpful colleagues. Clare Wace, editor, and Nancy Williams, picture researcher, offered both encouragement and support whenever needed. J. S. G. Simmons, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, was as always generous with his time and encyclopedic knowledge. Christo• pher Johnson at the University of Arizona guided us through the computer maze. Our thanks to them all. Finally, a special debt of gratitude and love is extended to Ella Garrard, John's mother, who kept the home fires burning while we were off exploring the 'undiscovered country'. ILLUSTRATIONS We would like to thank the following organisations and individuals for permission to reproduce photos and maps: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Germany; Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel; John Erickson; Nina Tumarkin; Martin Gilbert (four maps); James T. O'Neal; Presidio Press, Novato, CA; Harry Shukman; Irina Ehrenburg; The Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Interpress Publishers, War• saw; Izobrazitelnoe Iskussvo Publishers, Moscow; Arkady Udaltsov, chief editor, Literaturnaya gazeta, Moscow; Marta Sylvestrovli; Dana Bartelt; Universe Publishing, NYC; SITES, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. List of Maps and Plates (with credits) and [page references) Map 1 Europe on 22 June 1941 (Martin Gilbert) [po vi] Map 2 Soviet annexations 1939-40 (Martin Gilbert) [po xviii] Map 3 German-occupied USSR (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) [po xxix] Map 4 The Soviet deportation of nationalities 1941-5 (Martin Gilbert) [po 160] Map 5 Soviet industry and allied aid 1941-5 (Martin Gilbert) [po 233] Acknowledgements xxiii Plate I Nordhausen Concentration Camp (James To O'Neal) [po 3] Plate 2 Fallen Soviet soldiers used as planks (Presidio Press) [po 3] Plate 3 Lithuanian civilians beating Jews (Yad Vashem) [po 5] Plate 4 Jewish girl terrorised by Ukrainian mob (Yad Vashem) [po 5] Plate 5 Naked women and girls await execution by Einsatzgruppe near Dvinsk (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) [po 5] Plate 6 Soviet women soldiers captured at Kiev, 1941 (Presidio Press) [po 16] Plate 7 Soviet volunteers (Hiwis) helping German Army (Presidio Press) [po 16] Plate 8 NKVD troops check Muscovites' papers, October 1941 (Presidio Press) (po 17] Plate 9 'Ring Out, Victorious Thunder!' (John Garrard) [po 33] Plate 10 Stalin on top of the world (John Garrard) [po 38] Plate 11 Signing of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939 (Harry Shukman) [po 38] Plate 12 Happy Children, 1939 (Marta Sylvestrova and Dana Bartelt) [po 38] Plate 13 Girls working in small-arms factory (John Erickson) [po 50] Plate 14 Women digging tank ditches outside Moscow, 1941 (John Erickson) (po 51] Plate 15 Sergei Gerasimov, The Partisan's Mother (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) (po 104] Plate 16 Alexander Deineka, The Occupation (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusst• vo, Moscow) [po 104] Plate 17 Pavel Korin, Alexander Nevsky (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) (po 105] Plate 18 Alexander Deineka, The Outskirts of Moscow (Izobrazi• telnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) [p.107] Plate 19 Kukriniksy, The Fascists Fleefrom Novgorod(Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) (po 107] Plate 20 Grigory Shegal, Taking a Break, A Nurse (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) [po 109] Plate 21 Alexander Laktionov, A Letter from the Front (Izobrazi• telnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) [po 111] Plate 22 Gely Korzhev, Farewell (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) [po 113] Plate 23 Mikhail Savitsky, Partisan Madonna (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusst• vo, Moscow) [po 114] Plate 24 Yevsei Moiseyenko, Victory (Izobrazitelnoe Iskusstvo, Moscow) (po 115] xxiv Acknowledgements Plate 25 War memorial in Belozersk, northern Russia (John Garrard) [po 125] Plate 26 Memorial to the Unknown Soldier, Moscow (John Garrard) [po 126] Plate 27 Red granite memorial to the 'Hero-City' Leningrad (John Garrard) [po 127] Plate 28 Design for 1988 Open Contest: skeletal model of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Nina Tumarkin) [po 133] Plate 29 'Pain and Memory': Badge of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (John Garrard) [po 133] Plate 30 Museum under construction on Poklonnaya Hill, 1991 (Nina Tumarkin) [po 140] Plate 31 'Is All Forgiven?' A wounded veteran (Yury Rost, Litera• turnaya gazeta) [po 152] Plate 32 Dead Soviet soldiers, 1942 (Bundesarchiv, Germany) [po 153] Plate 33 Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman at the Front, 1944 (Irina Ehrenburg) [po 181] Plate 34 Young Belorussian Partisans paraded before being hanged, 1941 (Bundesarchiv, Germany) [po 205] Plate 35 Jewish Partisan Detachment in Belorussia (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) [po 205] Plate 36 Exhumation of bodies at the Katyn Massacre site, Spring 1943 (Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University) [p.213] Plate 37 Ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto after the April 1943 Uprising (photo taken in January 1945) (Interpress Publishers, Warsaw) [po 213] General Editor's Introduction The Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies took place in Harrogate, Yorkshire, in July 1990. It was an unusual congress in many ways. It was the first of its kind to take place in Britain, and the first to take place since the launching of Gorbachev's programme of perestroika and the revolutions in Eastern Europe (indeed so rapid was the pace of change in the countries with which we were concerned that the final programme had to incorporate over 600 amendments). It was the largest and most complex congress of Soviet and East European studies that has taken place, with twenty• seven panels spread over fourteen sessions on six days. It was also the most representative congress of its kind, with over 2000 participants including - for the first time - about 300 from what was then the USSR and Eastern Europe. Most were scholars, some were activists, and a few were the new kind of academic turned part-time deputy: whatever their status, it was probably this Soviet and East European presence that contributed most directly to making this a very different congress from the ones that had preceded it in the 1970s and 1980s. No series of volumes, however numerous, could hope to convey the full flavour of this extraordinary occasion. The formal panels alone incorporate almost a thousand papers. There were three further plenary sessions; there were many more unattached papers; and the subjects that were treated ranged from medieval Novgorod to computational linguistics, from the problems of the handicapped in the USSR to Serbian art at the time of the battle of Kosovo. Nor, it was decided at an early stage, would it even be desirable to attempt a fully comprehensive 'congress proceedings', including all the papers in their original form. My aim as General Editor, with the strong support of the International Council for Soviet and East European Studies (who cosponsored the congress with the British Association for Soviet, Slavonic and East European Studies), has rather been to generate a series of volumes which will have some thematic coherence, and to bring them out as quickly as possible while their (often topical) contents are still current. A strategy of this kind imposes a cost, in that many authors have had to find other outlets for what would in different circumstances have been very publishable papers. The gain, however, seems much greater: xxv xxvi General Editor's Introduction a series of real books on properly defined subjects, edited by scholars of experience and standing in their respective fields, and placed promptly before the academic community. These, I am glad to say, were the same as the objectives of the publishers who expressed an interest in various aspects ofthe congress proceedings, and it has led to a series of volumes as well as special issues of journals covering a wide range of interests. These are volumes on art and architecture, on history and literature, on law and economics, on society and education. There are further volumes on nationality issues and the Ukraine, on the environment, on international relations and on defence. There are Soviet volumes, and others that deal more specifically with Eastern (or, perhaps more properly, East Central) Europe. There are interdisciplinary volumes on women in Russia and the USSR, the Soviet experience in the Second World War, and ideology and system change. There are special issues of some of the journals that publish in our field, dealing with religion and Slovene studies, emigres and East European economics, publishing and politics, linguistics and the Russian revolution. Altogether nearly forty separate publications will stem from the Harrogate congress: more than twice as many as from any previous congress of its kind, and a rich and enduring record of its deliberations. Most of these volumes will be published in the United Kingdom by Macmillan. It is my pleasant duty to acknowledge Macmillan's early interest in the scholarly output of the congress, and the swift and professional attention that has been given to all of these volumes since their inception. A full list of the Harrogate series appears in the Macmillan edition of this volume; it can only give an impression of the commitment and support I have enjoyed from Tim Farmiloe, Clare Wace and others at all stages of our proceedings. I should also take this opportunity to thank John Morison and his colleagues on the International Council for Soviet and East European Studies for entrusting me with this responsible task in the first place, and the various sponsors - the Erasmus Prize Fund of Amsterdam, the Ford Foundation in New York, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, the Stefan Batory Trust and others - whose generous support helped to make the congress a reality. The next congress will be held in 1995, and (it is hoped) at a location in Eastern Europe. Its proceedings can hardly hope to improve upon the vigour and imagination that is so abundantly displayed on the pages of these splendid volumes. University of Glasgow STEPHEN WHITE Notes on the Contributors John Barber is a Fellow and Lecturer in Politics at King's College, Cambridge. He is the author of Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928-1932 and The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (with Mark Harrison). He is currently working on a study of Moscow during the battle for Moscow in October to December 1941. Frank Ellis is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of Leeds in England. He is the author of a number of articles on Soviet war literature and has recently completed a book on Vasily Grossman. John Erickson is director of Defence Studies at Edinburgh University. He is the author of The Soviet High Command, Soviet Military Power and Performance (ed.) and a two-volume history of the war on the Eastern Front, The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin. He is completing a book entitled Blood, Bread and Steel: Soviet Society at War for Yale University Press. George Gibian is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His books include Tolstoy and Shakespeare, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Russian Litera• ture during the Thaw, and The Man in the Black Coat: Russian Literature of the Absurd. He is currently working on Nineteenth Century Russian Literature for Viking. Martin Gilbert is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford and the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill. His most recent book is the one volume Churchill: A Life. He has also published two general histories, The Holocaust and The Second World War, as well as a series of twelve historical atlases. He is currently editing Churchill's wartime papers. Musya Giants received her doctorate at Leningrad University and is now a Fellow of the Russian Research Center, Harvard University. She is the author of a number of articles on Russian and Soviet art, including 'National Themes in Contemporary Soviet Art'. She is currently writing a book on the nineteenth century Russian-Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolsky. xxvii xxviii Notes on the Contributors Katharine Hodgson is a Lecturer in Russian at the University College of North Wales in Bangor. She recently completed a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University on Soviet poetry of the Second World War. She is completing a study of the poetry of Olga Berggolts. Lazar LazareT, a veteran of the German-Soviet war, received his doctorate at Moscow University. He is Chief Editor of the Moscow journal Voprosy literatury. His books include Poeziya voennogo poko/eniya; Eto nasha sudba: Zametki 0 literature, posvyashchyonnoi Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine; Voennaya proza Konstantina Simonova and Vasil Bykov: Ocherk tvorchestva. Arnold McMillin is Professor of Russian Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. He is the author of books and articles on Russian and Belorussian literature and has begun work on a history of Belorussian literature from the death of Stalin to national independence. Ell'a M. Thompson is Professor of Slavic Studies at Rice University. Her books include Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study, Witold Gombrowicz, Understanding Russia: the Holy Fool in Russian Culture and The Search for Self• Defmition in Russian Literature (ed.). She is currently working on a study of the origins of Russian nationalism. Vera Tolz is senior research analyst at the Radio Liberty Research Institute (Munich). She is also a PhD candidate at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham (England). She is the author of The USSR's Emerging Multiparty System (praeger, 1990). Nina Tumarkin is Professor of History at Wellesley College. She is the author of Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia and is currently working on a book titled Russia Remembers the War. o 100 mil.. 200 300 I ' , I o ki lammers 480 Greater Germanv 1939 German USSR ~ Occupied USSR GREATER !N GERMANY L6df. ... HUNGARY I \ , \ __ " --'''' " J - ' ..-( ...... ROMANIA YUGOSLAVIA \ ~, Map 3 German-occupied USSR ~